“Behaviorism also called the learning perspective
(where any physical action is a behavior), is a
philosophy of psychology based on the proposition
that all things which organisms do — including acting,
thinking and feeling — can and should be regarded
as behaviors. This school of psychology maintains
that behaviors as such can be described scientifically
without resource either to internal physiological
events or to hypothetical constructs such as the mind”.
Everyone has heard the term behaviorism, right? If not, let me explain it with my own words: behaviorism is one the most well-known / famous / classical schools of psychology that says that our whole thinking, acting and feeling process can be quantified, proved and divided into many little behaviors (stimuli- response). This school is the responsible of the typical struggle of psychology to be considered a science.
I could spend days and days talking about the theoretical aspects of behaviorism, but my concern is something different… I wonder if ALL of our psychological processes can be divided into little-quantifiable-scientific-technical behaviors. Can we sort of “predict” behavior if we manipulate every possible variable?
First, a little background: behaviorism general premises are that all of our actions are conditioned somehow, classically or operationally. Classical conditioning conditions stimuli to natural reactions; for example, we have Pavlov’s famous experiment with the dogs: whenever they heard a bell they salivated, because every time he would feed the dogs, he rang the bell first. Operational conditioning is the one in which we “operate” on the environment to obtain something. For example, if I cheat in a quiz and I get an A+, probably I’ll do it again and again to get the same positive outcome.
We also have the “black box” term, making reference to the airplanes black box (this little box in which all the airplane’s operations are registered) and used as an analogy to say that all the psychological processes are compared to a black box; in behaviorism, theorists only take into account the following:
Stimuli à Black box (mind) à Response
Easy, right? Behaviorists are only interested in the thing that causes behavior, and the following outcome; whatever happens in between (that is, let’s be honest, the difficult part!) they simply don’t care! Maybe that is why, nowadays, being 100% absolutely behaviorist is considered obsolete, and this psychological school is now paired with other kind of schools, such as the Cognitive Psychology. With this, we have the new and moderns kind of therapy “Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy”, in which the therapist and the patient try to identify all the “thinking” factors around the problem and see which thinking process is the one that causes the problem; then, they try to change this so-called “cognitive dissonances”.
So, what do you guys think about this? Do you think our behavior – thoughts – actions can be reduced to a simple black box symbol?
