The behaviourist approach: the basics
What assumptions do behaviourists make?
Behaviourists regard all behaviour as a response to a stimulus. They assume that what we do is determined by the environment we are in, which provides stimuli to which we respond, and the environments we have been in in the past, which caused us to learn to respond to stimuli in particular ways. Behaviourists are unique amongst psychologists in believing that it is unnecessary to speculate about internal mental processes when explaining behaviour: it is enough to know which stimuli elicit which responses. Behaviourists also believe that people are born with only a handful of innate reflexes (stimulus-response units that do not need to be learned) and that all of a person’s complex behaviours are the result of learning through interaction with the environment.
They also assume that the processes of learning are common to all species and so humans learn in the same way as other animals.
How do behaviourists explain human behaviour?
Behaviourists explain behaviour in terms of (1) the stimuli that elicit it and (2) the events that caused the person to learn to respond to the stimulus that way. Behaviourists use two processes to explain how people learn: classical conditioning and operant conditioning. In classical conditioning, people learn to associate two stimuli when they occur together, such that the response originally elicited by one stimulus is transferred to another. The person learns to produce an existing response to a new stimulus. For example, Watson & Rayner (1920) conditioned a young boy (‘Little
Albert’) to respond with anxiety to the stimulus of a white rat. They achieved this by pairing the rat with a loud noise that already made Albert anxious. The anxiety response was transferred to the rat because it was presented together with the
