Chapter 9

Hans the Wonder Horse-Math Genius?

  • Hans was a celebrity in Germany

    • Achievements inspired songs, magazine articles, and books

    • Was used for advertisements

  • Han’s talents

    • Add and subtract; use fractions and decimals

    • Read; identify coins; play card games; spell

    • Recognize a variety of objects

    • Perform astonishing feats of memory

Toward a Science of Behavior

  • Watson promotes another change: the philosophical tradition of objectivism and mechanism, animal psychology, and functional psychology

  • Zeitgeist dominated by positivism and the objectivistic, mechanistic, and materialistic influences

  • New psychology: focused on only what could be seen, heard, or touched

The Influence of Animal Psychology on Behaviorism

  • Animal Psychology: antecedent to Watson’s psychology

  • Jacques Loeb (1859-1924): German physiologist and zoologist

    • Tropism: Leob’s theory of animal behavior based on an involuntary forced movement

    • Argued that animal consciousness was revealed by associative memory

      • Animals had learned to react to certain stimuli in a desirable way

Rats, Ants, and the Animal Mind

  • 1900: the rat maze is introduced as a standard method for the study of learning (Wilard Small)

  • Charles Henry Turner begins using the word “behavior”

    • Watson later adopted the term

  • 1910: eight comparative psychology laboratories had been established

  • the animal mind analogous to the human mind

On Becoming an Animal Psychologist

  • Animal psychology was a difficult profession

    • Not well respected in academia

    • Always concerned with funding

    • Poor career prospects

Was Hans really clever?

  • Not receiving intentional signals from owner

  • No fraud; no deceit

  • Horse used subtle cues drawn from the audience and from his keeper

  • Showed animals are capable of learning

Edward Lee Thorndike (1874-1949)

  • Created a mechanistic, objective learning theory that focused on overt behavior

  • Believed that psychology must study behavior, not mental elements or conscious experiences

  • Connectionism: Thorndike’s approach to learning that was based on connections between situations and responses

    • Argued that behavior must be reduced to it simplest elements: the stimulus-response units

The Puzzle box

  • Thorndike built crude puzzle boxes out of crates and sticks to use on animals

    • Ex. He placed a food-deprived cat in a box to test how long it would take for the cat to activate the lever to be fed

    • Responses were random at first

    • On subsequent trials, random behaviors were less frequent until learning was complete

  • Trial-and-error learning- learning based on the repetition of response tendencies that lead to success

Laws of Learning

  • Law of effect- acts that produce satisfaction in a given situation become associated with that situation; when the situation recurs, the act is likely to recur

  • Law of exercise- the more an act or response is used in a given situation, the more strongly the act becomes associated with that situation

Ivan Petrovitch Pavlov (1849-1936)

  • Worked on learning

  • Helped shift associationism from its emphasis on subjective speculation to objective and quantifiable physiological events

    • Ex. glandular secretions and muscular movements

  • Provided Watson with a method for studying behavior and for attempting to control and modify it

Conditioned Reflexes

  • Worked on three major problems:

    1. Function of the nerves of the heart

    2. Primary Digestive glands

    3. Conditioned reflexes: reflexes that are conditional or dependent on the formation of an association or connection between stimulus and response

      • Required S-R connection and

      • Reinforcement- something that increases the liklihood of a response

  • E.B. Twitmyer (1873-1943)- an example of simultaneous discovery with Pavlov

Pavlov’s Experiments

  • Very rigorous

  • Unconditioned stimulus:

    • the object that produced the response intrinsically

  • Unconditioned response

    • The response to the unconditioned stimulus

  • Conditioned stimulus:

    • The unnatural stimulus that eventually produced the response

  • Conditioned response

    • The response after it had been paired with the conditioned stimulus

Vladimir M. Bekhterev (1857-1927)

  • Lead the field away from subjective ideas toward objectively observed overt behavior

  • Russian physiologist, neurologist, and psychiatrist was a pioneer in several research areas

  • Interest in motor responses

    • Associated Reflexes- reflexes that can be elicited not only by unconditioned stimuli but also by stimuli that have become associated with the unconditioned stimuli

The Influence of Functional Psychology on Behaviorism

  • Before Watson: functional psychologists moved away from Wundt’s and Titchener’s pure psychology of conscious experience

    • Need for an objective psychology that would focus on behavior instead of consciousness

  • Zeitgeist- overall movement of American psychology was in a behavioristic direction

    • Missing link: the agent of a revolution whose inevitability and success were assured (Watson)