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Unit V (5) Essay
John B. Watson is responsible for what we often call “The Behaviorist Manifesto.” He was a pioneer in psychology who contributed a significant part in developing behaviorism. John B. Watson believed that psychology ought to be scientific observable behavior mainly. According to him, behaviorism was the science of recognizable behavior in a way that merely the manners that could be perceived, recorded, and assessed as of the actual worth for the study of humans or animals. Watson argued in 1924 that behavior is a utility of environment variables; the environs is the critical variable that makes individuals not the same, as well as those termed bad and those termed as good (Moore, 2017). That behaviorism is the greatest approach to engineer the environmental change required to deal with a social problem. Among the principle of behaviorism is the impression that all behaviors are gotten through conditioning. This happens by the contact with the environs. According to this, our response to environmental stimuli shapes our behaviors. Watson’s manifesto behavior perceived psychology as an appreciation of environment as a determinant of behavior, a natural science with the objective of control and prediction of behavior, prediction, control of behavior, and the best possibility to better society empirically-derived values of behavior.
Behaviorism centers on the impression that an individual learns all behaviors through interaction with the environment. This learning model asserts that behaviors are acquired from the environment and claims that inherited or innate factors have minimal impact on behavior. According to the school of thought, it is possible to study behavior in an observable and systematic way without any consideration of internal psychological states. It proposes observable behaviors are the only ones that should be studied because states such as emotions, cognitions, and moods are too subjective (Moore, 2017). Watson’s assertions suggest that authoritarian behaviorists assumed that any individual could be taught to do any task, irrespective of things that internal thoughts, personal traits, and genetic backgrounds. All it requires is the correct conditioning. When well defined, conditioning signifies the process of stimulus substitution. It implies that the conditioned stimuli turn to be a substitute that will call out the response when it stimulates the subject. One objective of behaviorism was to comprehend how behaviors develop as a result of conditioning to external stimuli. It asserts that a particular individual’s decisions and physical actions in response to stimuli are the true representatives of personality. According to the principles of behaviorism, the behavior is weakened or strengthened by its consequences. It is largely a product of its immediate environment. It, in the end, reacts better to positive than to negative.
Watson studied how emotions affect behavior and how they determine sour actions. The behaviorism approach centers on the environmental factors’ role in impacting behavior, to the nearby exclusion of inherited or innate factors. All of these essential to focus on learning. People learn new behavior through operant or classical conditioning. Emotions can be conditioned responses whereby learning takes place when a conditioned stimulus is connected to an unconditioned stimulus (Brau et al., 2020). One of the highest strong points of behavioral psychology is the capacity to perceive and assess behaviors evidently. Behaviorism is grounded on noticeable behaviors, so it is from time to time easier to measure and bring together data when doing research. It is evident that our reactions to environmental stimuli shape our behaviors.
Reference
Moore, J. (2017). John B. Watson’s classical S–R behaviorism. The Journal of Mind and Behavior, 1-34.
Brau, B., Fox, N., & Robinson, E. (2020). Behaviorism. The Students’ Guide to Learning Design and Research.
