Behaviorism Paper
Behaviorism Paper
Behaviorism has been a key part of understanding the human brain and how it works since the beginning history of psychology. Throughout time there have been great strides in behaviorism, these advances can be credited in part to Ivan Pavlov and John B. Watson. Without their contributions to the field of psychology, behaviorism may not be what it is today.
Ivan Petrovich Pavlov discovered classical conditioning, accidentally when he was feeding his dogs noticing that they would salivate whenever he brought them food. He found that bringing the food to the dogs was a conditioned response. This meant that whenever the dogs had seen him they were conditioned into thinking that they were going to get fed. He started to experiment with these behaviors on dogs with the terms of unconditioned responses and stimulus as well as conditioned responses and stimulus. The dogs were given a stimulus of food which made them salivate, and that was the conditioned response that they learned. When he added a bell with meal time the dogged learned that when the bell rang it was meal time. Pavlov discovers that in classical conditioning behaviors are learned and then become the norm when presented to normal stimuli.
John Watson's theory on behavior involved the conditioned response and used a nine-month-old baby in the Little Albert experiment. This experiment was used to prove that the baby could be conditioned to fear a little white rat; he would make a banging sound in front of the baby when the rat was presented in front of him in order to get the response of fear. He proved that behaviors can be learned through physical responses. This experiment would be considered to unethical in the present day. He later wrote a book that stated that if you were to treat a child like an adult that they could mature faster and be better prepared when they are actually an adult. His contributions were to teach the behaviors and to condition a...