behaviorist approach assumptions

Description:

 All behaviours are determined by past events

Comment:

 All human behaviour is controlled by external events; this means sthat free will doesn not exist.

Description:

Only that which can be observed, measured and recorded should be scientific psychology.

Comment:

Consciousness and mental processes cannot be observed, so cannor be part of the subject matter of psychology.

Description:

Complex human behaiour can be reduced to simple, component parts

Comment:

people are not like machines; people cannot be reduced to components without losing the sense of a person

Description:

Extreme view that all learning comes from experience and that heredity has no role to play

Comment:

Even radical behaviourists had to admit three innate emtionans and certain reflexes occur as a result of heredity. 

Behaviourism as a method, has been and continues to be higly influential in present-day psychology.

Behaviourism as a theory, has had to modify its early, extreme, envrionmentalist and determinist position, to takeaccount of consciousness  and montal processes.