The Collaborative International Dictionary
behaviorism \behaviorism\ n. an approach to psychology that emphasizes observable measurable behavior.
Syn: behaviourism, behavioristic psychology, behaviouristic psychology.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
Wiktionary
n. (label en American spelling) an approach to psychology focusing on behavior, denying any independent significance for mind and assuming that behavior is determined by the environment
WordNet
n. an approach to psychology that emphasizes observable measurable behavior [syn: behaviourism, behavioristic psychology, behaviouristic psychology]
Wikipedia
Behaviorism (or behaviourism) is a systematic approach to the understanding of human and animal behavior. It assumes that all behavior are either reflexes produced by a response to certain stimuli in the environment, or a consequence of that individual's history, including especially reinforcement and punishment, together with the individual's current motivational state and controlling stimuli. Thus, although behaviorists generally accept the important role of inheritance in determining behavior, they focus primarily on environmental factors.
Behaviorism combines elements of philosophy, methodology, and psychological theory. It emerged in the late nineteenth century as a reaction to depth psychology and other traditional forms of psychology, which often had difficulty making predictions that could be tested experimentally. The earliest derviatives of Behaviorism can be traced back to the late 1800s where Edward Thorndike pioneered the law of effect (a process that involved strengthening behavior through the use of reinforcement).
During the first half of the twentieth century, John B. Watson devised methodological behaviorism, which rejected introspective methods and sought to understand behavior by only measuring observable behaviors and events. It was not until the 1930s that B. F. Skinner suggested that private events—including thoughts and feelings—are to be subjected to the same controlling variables as observable behavior which became the basis for his philosophy called radical behaviorism. While Watson and Ivan Pavlov investigated the stimulus-response procedures of classical conditioning, Skinner assessed the controlling nature of consequences and the antecedents (or discriminative stimuli) that signal it to strengthen or weaken a given behavior; the technique became known as operant conditioning.
The application of radical behaviorism—known as applied behavior analysis—is used in a variety of settings, including, for example, organizational behavior management, to the treatment of such mental disorders as autism and substance abuse. In addition, while behaviorism and cognitive schools of psychological thought may not agree theoretically, they have complemented each other—particularly in cognitive behavior therapies, which have demonstrated utility in treating certain pathologies, including simple phobias, PTSD, and mood disorders.
Usage examples of "behaviorism".
Upon the demise of the introspectionist movement in modern psychology in the early years of the twentieth century, behaviorism also adopted the principle of reductionism by studying the behavior of animals as a means to understanding human behavior.
By the 19605, when the limitations of behaviorism became increasingly apparent in terms of understanding the mind, much of the emphasis shifted to neuroscientific research, which also laterally reduces subjective mental events to objective brain activity.
In the latter half of the twentieth century, behaviorism was supplanted by neuroscientific methods of investigating the mind.
Indeed, after behaviorism, mainstream theoretical psychology and philosophy have had little to say about the nature of introspection.
A great irony regarding the violation of objectivism is that the academic psychologists who rejected introspectionism in favor of behaviorism were of the same generation as the pioneers of quantum mechanics.
We have to distinguish between Behaviorism as a psychological theory, to which I am profoundly opposed, and Behavior therapy as a set of techniques, some of which are very useful.
The article was well written, the author well versed on the subject, and I agree with much of what was said regarding Skinnerian behaviorism.
In other words, behaviorism, like all Right-Hand paths, is fundamentally concerned with propositional truth.
Behaviorism, of course, wants nothing to do with any of this "black box" of interior meaning, and consigns the lot of it, at best, to "intervening variables" lying in that terra incognita between observable stimuli and observable response, internal variables that are defined merely as "tendencies to behavior," because Behaviorism, being a Right-Hand path, does not trust anything it cannot see and monologically tinker with or reinforce.