What makes us behave the way that we do? Is it the way were raised and the environment in wish we grow up that shape us to be who we are? Do we tend to follow our parent’s footstep and copy what they do? Or are behaviors totally out of our control because it’s in our genetic genies. These are questions that scientist have been trying to answer for years. It wasn’t until the early 1920’s when John Broadus Watson who receive his doctoral degree from Chicago in 1903, defines behaviorism as, “the scientific study of behavior, not of behavior and mental processes”.
Behaviorism is one of the studies of psychology. As stated in the text book, Exploring Psychology written by David G. Myers, “Psychology is the science of behavior and mental process, and it seek to describe, explain, predict, and control behavior and mental processes”. Watson who is the American founder of behaviorism agrees with the notion of inner experience or feeling by subjective introspective methods. However, he also believes that because these experiences are not observable, they should not be studied as a scientific method. The public behaviors are pressing a lever, eating and mating, blood pressure, etc. In other words, we should only study physical, observable behaviors of individuals interacting with their environment.
B.F. Skinner a psychologist from the University of Harvard developed the method of radical behaviorism. Although, he believes in Watson theory of observable behaviors, he also agrees with the notion of studying inner processes, such as feeling, as a scientific method. He claims that emphasis on controlled experiments using individual animals and humans is crucial to behaviorism. Skinner also introduces the concept of reinforcement to behaviorism. Reinforcement is a stimulus that follows a response and increases the frequency of the response. He proves that using reinforcement will make laboratory animals’ change on undesired behavior to another desirable...