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...