Behaviourism and Human Nature

             Behaviourism is one of many schools of modern psychology and had an enormous
             contribution regarding human nature and behavioural patterns. The supposed founder of
             modern psychology, Wihelm Wundt, began the discipline with Structuralism. This
             approach attempted to analyze the contents of the mind, using the introspectionist
             method, which meant that Wundt analyzed the content of his own conscious mind. Soon
             this approach was abandoned as psychology moved towards studying beahviour patterns
             rather than the content of the mind. This was the basis for the school of functionalism,
             which focused more on the process undertaken by the mind and eventually, many
             different adaptions to these early approaches were made, creating a fairly large number
             of modern approaches. The Behaviourist approach, pioneered by John Watson, is one of
             the most famous current schools and it emphasizes the role of environmental stimuli in
             determining the way in which human beings act. It utilized two main forms of associative
             leaning, operant and classical conditioning; both advocate Stimulus-Response
             relationships. Behaviourism seeked scientific methods and operational definitions to be
             used in psychology and also upheld the 'law of parsimony'; the fewer assumptions a
             theory makes the better. Although popular for many decades, this approach was criticized
             for its ignorance of free will, conscious mental processes and inborn learning, and its use
             of laboratory animals experiments to explain human behaviour.
             John Watson was once cited as saying 'Give me a dozen healthy infants and my own
             world to bring them up in and i'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him/her
             to become any type of specialist i might select..." His controversial assertion was
             influenced by the philosophy of empiricism which argues that humans are 'blank slates' at
             birth and so all knowledge comes from the environment via the senses. Although t...

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Behaviourism and Human Nature. (1969, December 31). In MegaEssays.com. Retrieved 06:30, March 28, 2024, from https://www.megaessays.com/viewpaper/38933.html