Evaluation of Behaviourism

A strength is that the behaviourist approach focused on the careful measurement of observable behaviour within a controlled lab setting.

Bahviourists emphasised the importance of scientific processes such as objectivity and replication.

This is a strength because it brought the language and methods of the natural sciences into psychology thus giving the subject greater credibility and status.

The laws of learning that were developed by behaviourists have real-life application.

This is a strength as the principles of learnign have been applied to a broad range of real-world behavious and problems.

Token economy for example:

It is based on operant conditioning which is a reward appropriate behaviour with tokens that are exchanced for privilages.
This system has been successfully used in prisons and psychiatric wards as well as in schools.

Treatments like this are suitable for patients who lack 'insight' into their condition and are not capable of talking about their problems.

The approach sees all behavious determined by past experiences that have been conditioned and ignores any influence that free will my have on behaviour.

Skinner suggested that was an illusion and when soemthing happens we impose a sense of having made the decision but our past conditioning determines the outcome.

This is a weakness because it is an extremeposition and it ignores the influence of conscious decision making processes on behaviour (as some other approaches suggest such as the cognitive approach).

Although many experimental procedures such as the Skinner box have allowed behaviourists to maintain a high level of control over their research subjects, some critics have drawn attention to the fact that there are ethical issues involved.

The animals involved in the studies were exposed to stressful and aversive conditions which may have affected how they reacted to the experimental situation.

This is a limitation because it means that the validity of the findings from these studies might be questioned because the observed behaviour was not 'normal' behaviour that the animals may show.