Behavioural Approach

Humans are Born Like a Blank Slate

Latin - Tabula rasa

Behaviourists believe that humans are born without in-built mental content, internal events such as thinking. They believe that we are not driven by out emotions. Futhermore, we learn how to behave through interactions, which we do not think about and that we respond passively to environmental stimuli.

They prioritise nurture over nature. Behaviourists belive that we learn from social and environmental factors, within extreme behaviourists believing that genes, phyisology and evolution play no part in our behaviour. 

Our behaviour is determined by our environment, environmental determinism, in which we make associations in early life that pre-determine how we will behave later on in our life. An example of this is if someone has a painful experience at the dentist they will associate the dentist with pain, thus they may not go to the dentist when they are older.

Behaviour is Learned Through Conditioning

There are two types of conditioning:

Classical Conditioning

This suggests that we learn through associations we make. An easy way to remember this is clASS = ASSociation.

Ivan Pavlov was the first psychologist to experiment with this theory after relising that the dogs he kept would salivate when they knew they were getting food. He began this reasearch in 1904.

Before Conditioning

Food was an unconditioned stimulus (UCS)

Salviation was an uncontioned response (UCR)

During Conditioning

Bell was a neutral stimulus (NS)

The bell would be rung every time the dogs were being fed.

After Conditioning

Bell became the conditioned stimulus (CS)

Salivation became the conditioned response (CR)

This means that the dogs came to associate the bell with food, therefore they would salivate. This occurred even when Pavlov rung the bell and the dogs did not get food, due to the association they had made between the bell and food.

Operant Conditioning

This suggests that we learn to behave through reinforcements.

The psychologist B.F. Skinner, tested this out with rats in 1938, when he created the Skinner box. This was a box, in which the rats were placed, which had a switch that would produce food when it was hit. To begin with the rat would accidently hit the switch which would produce food, but after a while they learnt that they would be rewarded (food) if they hit the switch, meaning they would hit the switch reguarly, as the behaviour had been reinforced.

A reinforcement refers to a reward.

This is a form of positive reinforcemet in which the person or rat is given something as a reward increasing the likelihood that they will repeat the behaviour. However, a negative reinforcement strengthens the behaviour as this means they will avoid something unpleasant, such as doing your homework to avoid detention. A punishmennt will weaken behaviour as it decreases the likelihood of it being repeated, Skinner changed his experiment by shocking the rars when they pressed the switch rather than giving them food.

Humans and Animals Learn in Similar Ways

This suggests that the laws…