Behaviourism is mainly a twentieth-century orientation within the discipline of psychology in the USA. The behavioural approach emphasizes the objective study of the relationships between environmental manipulations and human and animal behaviour change, usually in laboratory or relatively controlled institutional settings. Emerging as a discrete movement just prior to the First World War, behaviourism represented a vigorous rejection of psychology defined as the introspective study of the human mind and consciousness. Early behaviourists eschewed the structuralism of Wundt and Titchener, the functional mentalism of James, Dewey, Angell and Carr, and the relativism and phenomenology of Gestalt psychology.
John B.Watson is credited with declaring behaviourism a new movement in 1913, but the foundations of the development extend back to the ancient Greeks and include empiricism, elementism, associationism, objectivism and naturalism. The direct antecedents of behaviourism during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were the studies of animal behaviour and the functional orientation inspired by Darwin’s theory of evolution; the conditioning research of Russian physiologists Ivan Pavlov and Vladimir Bekhterev emphasizing stimulus substitution in the context of reflexive behaviour; and the puzzle box studies of US psychologist Edward Thorndike concerned with the effects of the consequences of behaviour on response frequency. The two predominant and often competing theoretical-procedural models of conditioning research have been classical conditioning derived from the work of Pavlov and Bekhterev, and Skinner’s operant conditioning.
While it is generally claimed that behaviourism as a distinct school ceased to exist by the 1950s, behaviourism as a general orientation has gone through the following overlapping periods: classical behaviourism (1900–25), represented by the work of Thorndike and Watson; neo-behaviourism (1920s–40s), an exciting time when the theories of Clark Hull, Edward Tolman, Edwin Guthrie and Burrhus F.Skinner competed for pre-eminence; Hullian behaviourism (1940–50s), when Hull’s complex hypothetico-deductive behaviour theory appeared most promising; Skinnerian behaviourism (1960s-mid–1970s), during which time operant conditioning techniques, emphasizing the control of behaviour implicit in the consequences of behaviour, afforded the most powerful methodologies; and, finally, cognitive behaviourism (1975-present) when the limits of a purely Skinnerian approach to behaviour change became increasingly apparent, and cognitive perspectives, such as social learning theories, seemed necessary to account for behaviour change.
A behavioural orientation has been central to twentieth-century psychology in the USA primarily because of a strong faith in laboratory research and experimental methodologies; an interest in studying the process of learning; a preference for quantitative information; the elimination from the discipline of ambiguous concepts and investigations of complex and therefore difficult to describe private (subjective) experiences; and, since the late 1950s, a very conservative approach to theory building.
While each of the major behavioural programmes from Thorndike’s to Skinner’s failed to provide a comprehensive account of behaviour change, the behavioural orientation has led to the development of behaviour-control methodologies with useful application in most areas of psychology. In addition, the movement has inspired precision and accountability in psychological enquiry.
Behavioural methodologies have, of course, been employed by psychologists in countries other than the USA, particularly those with strong scientific traditions such as Britain and Japan. Behavioural assumptions have also influenced other social sciences, especially sociology and political science. But because laboratory animal research is central to the behavioural orientation, behaviourism as a major movement developed only in psychology.
Albert R.Gilgen
University of Northern Iowa
Further reading
Marx, M.H. and Hillix, W.A. (1979) Systems and Theories in Psychology, New York.
