essay plans for all approaches < 3 AO1 + AO3

behaviourist approach 16 marks

AO1:

·       Psychology should be scientific and objective.

·       Wee can generalise animal behaviour to humans

·       Humans are born blank slates

·       Operant conditioning, positive and negative reinforcement, punishment

·       Classical conditioning,

AO3:

·       P - Strength - Scientifically credible.

·       E - Focusing on the measurement of observable behaviour within highly controlled lab settings.

·       E - By emphasising the importance of scientific processes such as objectivity and replication, behaviourism was influential in the development of psychology as a scientific discipline, giving it greater credibility and status.

·       L - This is a strength as it increases the validity of this explanation as having the highly controlled scientific lab settings means that the findings are protected from the impact of extraneous variables

·       P - Strength - real-life application.

·       E - Operant conditioning is the basis of token economy systems that have been used successfully in institutions, such as prisons and psychiatric wards. These work by rewarding appropriate behaviour with tokens that can be exchanged for privileges.

·       E - For an example of how classical conditioning has been applied to the treatment of phobias. Treatments such as these have the advantage of requiring less effort from a patient because the patient doesn't have to think about their problem (as talking therapies do) such therapies are also suitable for patients who lack insight.

·       L - This is a strength as it increases the overall validity of the explanation as it can be applied to a wide range of different real-life situations

·       P - Limitation - mechanistic view of behaviour.

·       E – Suggests that animals and humans are passive and machine-like responders to the environment, with little or no conscious insight into their behaviour.

·       E - Other approaches in psychology such as the social learning theory and the cognitive approach, have emphasised the importance of mental events during learning. These processes which mediate between stimulus and response, suggest that people may play a much more active role in their own learning.

·       L - This means that this learning theory may be less applicable to human behaviour than it is to animal behaviour.

·       P - limitation - environmentally deterministic.

·       E - Behaviour as determined by past experiences that have been conditioned. Skinner suggested that everything we do is the sum total of our reinforcement history.

·       E - This Ignores any possible influence that free will may have on behaviour. Skinner famously suggested that free will is an illusion. Even behaviour that we appear to have freely chosen is not the result of choice strictly speaking but is a result of the fact that we have been subtly coerced and manoeuvred by the reinforcement history we have experienced.

·       L - there are other important determinants of behaviour, including our inherited genetic potential…