What were Behaviourism's Main Claims about Psychology - Essay Example

Stimulus and response were the main ingredients of behaviorism. The aim of behaviorists was to make the field of psychology very objective scientifically. They moved the psychologists away from introspection while studying mind, claiming that introspection is an unscientific means of judging behavior. Arkin (1998:45) quotes the biggest proponent of behaviorism, John B. Watson, in his book who had stated that the main claim of behaviorism was that “there is a response to every effective stimulus and that response is immediate.

” This claim, with the passage of time, made the field of psychology less philosophical and based the results merely upon empirical data without any judgment and reasoning. Watson’s claim was that psychology is something different than the study of mind and conscious behavior. He claimed that he could study the behavior without asking the subject any questions or studying his mind (Coon & Mitterer 2008:23). His main focal point was the relationship between stimulus (events occurring in the surroundings of an animal) and response to that stimulus (any muscular or glandular activity).

Watson applied the same objectivity to humans to study behavior without connecting introspection to subjective experience. Why did these claims arise? The claims of behaviorism have historical foundation. Before behaviorism, psychology was merely a study of mind with the core phenomenon of consciousness that was studied only through introspection by a skilled observer under controlled conditions. However, the field of psychology took a dramatic turn with the rise of claims presented by behaviorists in the early twentieth century.

They rejected the concepts of conscious and unconscious mind and emphasized merely on the observable behavior. The claims about behaviorism rose with the work of Ivan Pavlov, the Russian psychologist, who studied classical conditioning by experimenting on dogs. His experiments raised the claim that behaviors form as a result of conditioned processes. John B. Watson, the American psychologist and behaviorist, and B.F. Skinner, with his concept of operant conditioning, further outlined the basic principles of behaviorism.

Their principles and claims were so strong that behaviorism ruled for another 50 years, according to Cherry (2012). The mainstream psychology was not the study of mind anymore. It became the study of behavior with the core phenomena of learning and memory interpreted through “objective observations of behavioral data varying as a function of the experimental manipulation of stimulus conditions” (Wozniak & College 1997). Hence, we can say that the claims about behaviorism arose because the behaviorists wanted to introduce a new concept which revolved not around the conscious and unconscious mind, but around the animal’s behavior under controlled conditions.

Although the claims were opposed, they are still a significant part of the field of psychology which cannot be discarded. Why did behaviorism fail? Behaviorism failed because the behaviorists never succeeded in defining the difference or relationship between physiology and behaviorism. Physiology explains the working of human parts of the body in certain circumstances; whereas, behaviorism, although is interested in this context as well, explains more what an animal is going to do under certain circumstances.

Resistance to high temperature or infection, or aging of a person cannot be related to his behavior, writes Mises (2010). He states that “if one wants to call such a gesture as the movement of an arm (either to strike or to caress) behavior of the whole human animal, the idea can only be that such a