Evaluating behaviourism

Scientific credibility

Falsifiable

Objective

Replicable

Empirical methods

Behaviour is explained through casual stimulus-response relationships - increases scientific validity.

Counter: Environmental reductionism

Controlled environment - extraneous variables controlled - cause-effect relationship established

Nurture

Behaviourism claims that all behaviours are learnt and ignores any biological factors that may influence behaviour and the role of free will in repeating behaviour.

This is with the exception of reflexive actions.

Use of animals

• Assume that humans and animals learn behaviour in very similar ways - does not account for humans’ unique senses of emotion, consciousness, and self-consciousness

• This makes it harder to generalise research on to the human population

• Counter: Watson and Raynor’s study on little Albert provided support for classical conditioning and it was done on a human

• The benefit of using animals is that it reduces demand characteristics as they are typically not aware of the fact that they are being observed - more validity

• Animals are also somewhat less unique, meaning that individual differences are less of a problem in this kind of research - more validity

Real life application 1

Systematic desensitisation

• Gradually exposed to the fear while doing a relaxing activity

• Leads to associating the fear with a more pleasant stimulus

• Counteracts the original fear response

Real life application 2

Token economies are used in schools and prisons to condition behaviour.

• It's a form of operant conditioning

• Provide positive reinforcement through awarding special rewards for target behaviour

• Negative punishment discourages bad behaviour by threatening to take away a reward.

Environmental determinism

• All behaviour is a result of external forces and we have no free will to choose our behaviour

• This presents a problem as it doesn't acknowledge the role we have in learning behaviours. This is due to behaviourism’s focus on stimulus-response relationships and oversimplification by ignoring internal mental processes.

• This also removes the responsibilities of people's actions/crimes because they arguably cannot be held responsible if they have no control over their behaviour.