Behaviourist Cognitive

Overall comparison

There are many similarities and differences between the behaviorist and cognitive approaches. The first similarity is that both of these approaches are reductionist. If an approach is reductionist it means it takes information from a large group of people and applies that to only one person. The behaviorist approach uses a stimulus-response relationship to seek treatment of undesirable behaviour, such as fear, in systematic desensitization. The cognitive approach is also a reductionist approach as it uses experiences of many people and narrows it down to try and treat the behaviour of just one person, as seen in rational emotive therapy. The second similarity is that both approaches are determinist. This means that it is believed all behaviour is due to genes and we have no free will. Behaviourists believe that behaviour is influenced by associations we make between environmental stimuli (operant conditioning) and reward/puishment reinfocement (operant conditioning) The behaviourist approach does not consider the thought processes we have before we behave in a certain way. Cognitive believe that people acquire schemas through direct experiences. Piaget suggested that cognitive development is essentially the development of schemas.The first difference of these approaches is the application. Although both sucessful applications, They both have different aims. Behaviourist aims to treat people by operant conditioning (so a person will reproduce a action when they are rewarded and will not when punished). However, the cognitive approach applies this by using the attribution theory to demonstrate that we observe behaviours and from these draw conclusions about a persons attributes, such as kindness or rudeness.The second difference is that the behaviourist approach is on the side of the nuture debate, whereas the cognitive is on the side of neither. The behaviourist approach focusses only on the surrounding environment as a means of shaping behaviour, therefore the role of nature is ignored. The cognitive approach focusses on both, however fails to consider important details about both the nature and nurture sides of the debate, for example the role of genes in in human cognition is ignored, yet research into intellegence consistently looking the influence of genes.