Concept and What is: Behaviorism | Psychology

There are several psychological theories about human behavior. The ' internalismo ' posits that the causes of behavior are headquartered in the interior of man, whether in your body or in your mind – in the memories or emotions. Skinner, to propose the radical Behaviorism, opposes this view, blaming the environment for human conduct, treading that path similar to that of Cybernetics.

Behaviorism – the English term behaviour or the American behavior, meaning conduct, behavior-is a widespread concept that encompasses the most paradoxical theories about the behavior, within psychology. These lines of thought have in common the interest in this subject and the certainty that it is possible to create a science that the study because their are the most divergent conceptions, including as regards the meaning of the word ' behavior '. The main branches of this theory are the Methodological Behaviorism and Radical Behaviorism.

This theory began in 1913, with a manifest created by John b. Watson-"psychology as a comportamentista to see". In it the author argues that psychology should study internal processes of the mind, but rather the behavior, as this is visible and, therefore, subject to observation by a positivist science. This time applied the behaviorist model of S-R, i.e. response to a stimulus, engine generator of human behavior. Watson is known as the father of Methodological Behaviorism or classic, which thinks it might just be possible to predict and control all human conduct, based on the study of the environment in which the individual lives and on the theories of the Russian Ivan Pavlov conditioning – the known experience with dog, that saliva to see food, but also the minimum signal, sound or gesture to remember the arrival of your meal.

Thus, any organic modification resulting from an environmental stimulus can provoke behavioral manifestations, especially changes in the glandular system and also on the engine. But not every individual conduct can be detected following this theoretical model, hence generating other theses. Edward c. Tolman proposes the Neobehaviorismo Mediacional to publish, in 1932, his work Purposive behavior in animals and men. In his theory, the body works as a mediator between the stimulus and response, that is, it goes through steps that Tolman called connective links actors variables between stimuli and responses-these Yes considered internal actions, known as gestalt signs.

This line of thought leads to a thesis about the learning system, based on cognitive maps – interactions stimulus-stimulus-generated brain mechanisms. Thus, for each group of individual stimuli produces a different behavior and, to some extent, predictable. Tolman, unlike Watson, vale yourself of mental processes in their research, restructuring the Mentalist line through behavioral symbology. He saw also a behaviour intention, a goal to be achieved, with traces of intense persistence in pursuit of this goal. For these features present in your theory, this author is considered therefore a forerunner of cognitive psychology.

Skinner has created, in the 40, Radical Behaviorism, as a philosophical proposition about the behavior of man. He was radically opposed to internal causes, namely, mental, to explain human conduct and denied the reality and the performance of cognitive elements, opposing the idea of Watson, who not only extended his studies to mental phenomena by the limitations of the methodology, not because they were unrealistic. Skinner also refuses to believe in the existence of mediacionais variables of Tolman. In short, he believes that the individual is a unique, homogeneous, not a whole consisting of body and mind.

Behaviorism is a philosophical theory that worries about the direction of thoughts and conceptions, based on the idea that mental state and behavior trends are equivalent, or better, the exhibitions of the ways of being of the human mind is similar to descriptions of behavioral patterns. This theoretical line analyzes the intentional conditions of mind, following the principles of Ryle and Wittgenstein. Behaviorism no longer occupying a predominant space in psychology, although it is still somewhat influential in this sphere. The development of Neurosciences, which helps to better understand, today, what happens in the human mind in its internal processes, combined with the loss of prestige of the stimuli as causes for human conduct, and added to criticism of renowned scholars such as Noam Chomsky, who argues that this theory is not sufficient to explain phenomena of language and learning, take the Behaviorism to lose space between the dominant psychological theories.
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