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The behaviourist perspective focuses solely on observing human behaviour; behaviourist psychologists believe that new born babies are born with a ‘clean slate’ – that we adopt our means for behaviour by learning.
Pavlov was a behavioural psychologist and he was conducting an experiment on how the production of saliva helps dogs to digest food. However, Pavlov found that his dog would sometimes salivate before his food arrived. This lead him to realise that the dog had learnt to associate his food with other stimulus; for example reaching for the dog food or picking up his bowl.
Pavlov then began to ring a bell whenever the dog would receive food, and eventually found that the dog would produce saliva whenever the bell was rung.
This is known as classical conditioning, which Pavlov applied to humans. This is when a stimulus creates a new response which is learned by association. To begin with, Pavlov’s dog innately reacted to receiving food by producing saliva; here, the food is an unconditioned stimuli and the saliva produced is an unconditioned response. However, when another stimulus (the neutral stimuli) such as the bell, is added to the unconditioned stimuli, this also creates the unconditioned response. With consistency the new stimulus will create the conditioned response; therefore producing saliva when the bell is rung. Here, the bell has become a conditioned stimuli and the salivating has become a conditioned response.
American psychologist Watson conducted an experiment to prove that this type of learned human behaviour is true to human’s also. He presented a baby with a series of white animals, which the baby was not scared of; the baby was however scared of loud noises, whenever there was a loud noise, the baby would cry. Watson then made a loud noise whenever showing the baby a white toy; eventually, after consistency, the baby would cry whenever