Behaviorism: history, concepts and main authors.

Summary of the history and main authors of this current of psychology.

Psychology currently includes a great variety of theoretical orientations. Comparable in some ways to political ideologies or religious beliefs, psychological paradigms are behavioral guidelines that induce us to practice the that induce us to practice professionally in different ways.

Behaviorism is one of the most common orientations among psychologists, although today among psychologists, although nowadays it is more commonly practiced in its cognitive-behavioral aspect. Below we review the history of behaviorism and its main characteristics.

What is behaviorism?

Behaviorism is a current of psychology that focuses on the study of the common laws that determine human and animal behavior. At its origin, traditional behaviorism leaves aside the intrapsychic to focus on observable behavior, i.e., it prioritizes the objective over the subjective.that is, it prioritizes the objective over the subjective. This opposes behaviorism to previous approaches such as psychodynamic and phenomenological ones. In fact, from the behaviorist perspective, what we usually understand as "mind" or "mental life" is only an abstraction of what psychology should really study: the links between stimuli and response in given contexts.

Behaviorists tend to conceive of living beings as "tabulae rasas" whose behavior is determined by reinforcement and behavior is determined by the reinforcements and punishments they receive rather than by internal predispositions. Behavior, therefore, does not depend primarily on internal phenomena, such as instincts or thoughts (which are, on the other hand, covert behaviors) but rather on the environment, and we cannot separate neither behavior nor learning from the context in which they take place.

In fact, those processes that occur in the nervous system and that for many other psychologists are the cause of how we act, for behaviorists are nothing more than other types of reactions generated through our interaction with the environment.

The concept of "mental illness" as seen by behaviorists

Behaviorists have often been linked to the world of psychiatry because of their use of the experimental method to gain knowledge about mental illness. their use of the experimental method to gain knowledge, but this association is not accurate.However, this association is not accurate, since in many respects, behaviorists clearly differ from psychiatrists. One of these differences is the opposition of behaviorism to the concept of mental illness.

From this philosophy applied to psychology, there can be no pathological behaviorssince these are always judged according to their appropriateness to a context. While diseases must have relatively well isolated and known Biological causes, behaviorists point out that there is insufficient evidence in favor of the existence of such biomarkers in the case of mental disorders. Consequently, they oppose the idea that treatment of problems such as phobias or OCD should focus on psychopharmaceuticals.

Basic concepts of behaviorism

Below we define the main terms of behaviorist theory.

1. Stimulus

This term refers to any signal, information or event that produces a reaction (response). produces a reaction (response) of an organism.

Response

Any behavior of an organism that arises as a reaction to a stimulus.

3. Conditioning

Conditioning is a type of learning learning derived from the association between stimuli and responses.

4. Reinforcement

A reinforcement is any consequence of a behavior that increases the probability that the behavior will occur again.

5. Punishment

Opposite of reinforcement: a consequence of a behavior that decreases the probability of its recurrence.

Wundt: the birth of Experimental Psychology

Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920), considered by many as "the father of psychology", laid the foundations of what would become behaviorism. He created the first laboratory of scientific psychology and systematically used statistics and the experimental method to extract general rules about the functioning of mental processes and the nature of consciousness.

Wundt's methods depended to a large extent on introspection. or self-observation, a technique in which experimental subjects provide data on their own experience.

Watson: Psychology as seen from behaviorism

John Broadus Watson (1878-1958) criticized the use of the introspective methodology of Wundt and his followers. In a lecture in 1913 that is considered the birth of behaviorism, Watson asserted that to be truly scientific psychology had to focus on overt behavior rather than mental states. rather than on mental states and concepts such as "consciousness" or "mind," which could not be analyzed objectively.

Watson also rejected the dualistic conception that separated body and mind (or soul) and argued that the behavior of people and that of animals should be studied in the same way since, if the introspective method was left aside, there was no real difference between the two.

In a well known and controversial experiment Watson and his assistant Rosalie Rayner succeeded in provoking a phobia of rats in a nine-month-old baby ("little Albert"). nine-month-old baby ("little Albert"). To do this they paired the rat's presence with loud sounds. The case of little Albert demonstrated that human behavior is not only predictable but also modifiable.

The black box

For Watson, living beings are "black boxes" whose interior is not observable. whose interior is not observable. When external stimuli come to us we give responses accordingly. From the point of view of the early behaviorists, although there are intermediate processes within the organism, being unobservable they must be ignored when analyzing behavior.

However, in the mid-twentieth century, behaviorists qualified this and, without disdaining the importance of the non directly observable processes that occur inside the body, pointed out that psychology does not need to account for them in order to provide explanations of the logics that govern behavior. B. F. Skinner, for example, characterized himself by giving mental processes exactly the same status as observable behavior, and by conceiving thought as verbal behavior. This author will be discussed later.

Some neobehaviourists such as Clark Hull and Edward Tolman did include intermediate processes (or intervening variables) in their models. Hull included internal drive or motivation and habit, while Tolman claimed that we construct mental representations of space (cognitive maps).

Watson and behaviorism in general were influenced in a key way by two authors: Ivan Pavlov and Edward Thorndike.

Classical conditioning: Pavlov's dogs

Ivan Petrovich Pavlov (1849-1936) was a Russian physiologist who noticed, while conducting experiments on saliva secretion in dogs, that the animals salivate in anticipation when they saw or smelled food, and even simply when their feeders approached. Subsequently, he got them to salivate at the sound of a metronome, a bell, a bell or a light by associating these stimuli with the presence of food.

From these studies Pavlov described classical conditioning, a fundamental concept in behaviorism, thanks to which the first interventions based on behavior modification techniques in human beings were developed. However, to understand how classical conditioning works, one must first know which stimuli are involved.

An unconditioned stimulus (i.e., one that does not require learning to elicit a response) elicits an unconditioned response; in the case of dogs, food spontaneously causes salivation. If the unconditioned stimulus (food) is repeatedly paired with a neutral stimulus (e.g. the bell), the neutral stimulus will eventually produce the unconditioned response (salivation) without (salivating) without the need for the unconditioned stimulus to be present as well.

For Pavlov the concept of mind is not necessary since he conceptualizes responses as reflexes. conceptualizes responses as reflexes that occur after the appearance of external stimuli.

Watson and Rayner's Little Albert experiment is another example of classical conditioning. In this case the rat is a neutral stimulus that becomes a conditioned stimulus that elicits the fear response by association with the loud noise (unconditioned stimulus).

Animals in behaviorism

Classical behaviorists frequently employed animals in their studies. Animals are considered equivalent to people in terms of their behavior, and the principles of learning and the principles of learning extracted from these studies are extrapolated in many cases to human beings; however, always taking care to respect a series of epistemological presuppositions that justify this extrapolation. It should not be forgotten that there are many aspects of behavior that vary between species.

The systematic observation of animal behavior would give way to ethology and comparative psychology. Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen are two of the most important representatives of these currents.

Instrumental conditioning: Thorndike's cats

Edward Lee Thorndike (1874-1949), a contemporary of Pavlov, conducted several experiments with animals to study learning. He introduced cats into "problem-boxes" to observe to observe whether and how they managed to escape from them.

In the boxes there were several elements with which the cats could interact, such as a button or a ring, and only contact with one of these objects could cause the door of the box to open. At first the cats managed to get out of the box by trial and error, but as the attempts were repeated they escaped more and more easily.

From these results Thorndike formulated the law of effect, which states that if a behavior has a satisfactory result, it is more likely to be repeated, and if the result is unsatisfactory, it is more likely to be repeated.If the result is unsatisfactory, this probability decreases. Later he would formulate the law of exercise, according to which learning and habits that are repeated are reinforced and those that are not repeated are weakened.

Thorndike's studies and works introduced instrumental conditioning. According to this model, learning is a consequence of the reinforcement or weakening of the association between a behavior and its consequences. This served as a basis for formulating proposals later in the emergence of true behaviorism, as we shall see.

Skinner's radical behaviorism

Thorndike's proposals were the antecedent of what we know as operant conditioning, but this paradigm was not fully developed until the appearance of the works of Burrhus Frederic Skinner (1904-1990).

Skinner introduced the concepts of positive and negative reinforcement. Positive reinforcement is the act of rewarding a behavior by giving something, while negative reinforcement consists of the withdrawal or avoidance of an unpleasant event. In both cases, the intention is to increase the frequency and intensity of occurrence of a given behavior.

Skinner defended radical behaviorism, which holds that all behavior is the result of learned associations between stimuli and responses. between stimuli and responses. The theoretical and methodological approach developed by Skinner is known as experimental behavior analysis and has been especially effective in the education of children with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

Development of behaviorism: the cognitive revolution

Behaviorism went into decline from the 1950s, coinciding with the rise of cognitive psychology. Cognitivism is a theoretical model that emerged as a reaction to behaviorism's radical emphasis on overt behavior, leaving aside cognition. as a reaction to behaviorism's radical emphasis on overt behavior, leaving cognition aside. The progressive inclusion of intervening variables in behaviorist models greatly favored this paradigm shift, known as the "cognitive revolution".

In psychosocial practice, the contributions and principles of behaviorism and cognitivism would eventually converge in what we know as cognitive-behavioral therapy, which focuses on finding the treatment programs most supported by scientific evidence.

The third generation therapies developed in recent years recover part of the principles of radical behaviorism, reducing the influence of cognitivism. Some examples are Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Behavioral Activation Therapy for depression or Dialectical Behavior Therapy for borderline personality disorder.

Bibliographical references:

• Baum, W.M. (2005) Understanding behaviorism: Behavior, Culture and Evolution. Blackwell.
• Kantor, J. (1963/1991). La evolución científica de la psicología. Mexico: Trillas.
• Mills, J. A. (2000). Control: A History of Behavioral Psychology.. New York University Press.
• Rachlin, H. (1991) Introduction to modern behaviorism. (3rd edition.) New York: Freeman.
• Skinner, B. F. (1976). About Behaviorism. New York: Random House, Inc.
• Watson, J. B. (1913). Psychology as the behaviorist views it. Psychological Review, 20, 158-177.