Scientific Credibility- By emphasising the importance of scientific processes such as objectivity and replication, behaviourism was influential in the development of psychology as a scientific discipline, giving it greater credibility and status.

Real-life Application- The principles of conditioning have been applied to a broad range of real-world behaviours and problems. For instance, operant conditioning is the basis of token economy systems that have been used successfully in institutions, such as prisons and psychiatric wards. These work by rewarding appropriate behaviour with tokens that can then be exchanged for privileges.

Mechanist View of Behaviour- From a behaviourist perspective, animals (including humans) are seen as passive and machine-like responses to the environment, with little or no conscious insight into their behaviour. Other approaches in psychology such as the social learning theory and the cognitive approach have emphasised the importance of mental events while learning. These processes, which mediate between stimulus and response, suggest that people may play a much more active role in their own learning. This means that learning theory may apply less to human behaviour than to animal behaviour.

Environmental Determinism- The behaviourist approach sees all behaviour as determined by past experiences that have been conditioned. Skinner suggested that any sense of free will is simply an illusion. When something happens we impose a sense of having made the decision but, according to Skinner, our past conditioning history determined the outcome.

Ethical and Practical Issues in Animal Experiments- Although experimental procedures such as the ‘Skinner Box’ enabled behaviourists to maintain a high degree of control over their experimental ‘subjects’, many critics have questioned the ethics of conducting such investigations. The animals involved were exposed to stressful and aversive conditions, which may also have impacted how they reacted to the experimental situation.