Читать книгу The Behavior of Animals - Группа авторов - Страница 17

The emphasis of the North American psychologists on learning was epitomized by the rise of behaviorism in the 1930s. Behaviorism was a very influential school of thought initiated by the American psychologist John B. Watson (1878–1958), with his book Behaviorism (1924). Essentially, Watson considered psychological phenomena to be physical activity rather than some kind of mental event. He proposed that we cannot make any scientific statements about what might be going on in our minds, and that introspection was unreliable. Rather, for behaviorists, psychology is the study of observable behavior and of the external physical factors that influence it. At the time, behaviorism was extremely influential in science and beyond. Within North American psychology it was the dominant school of thought for several decades. Behaviorist theory also affected education practice, particularly with Watson’s book Psychological Care of Infant and Child (1928). Watson once made the famous statement:

Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select—doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief, and, yes, even beggarman and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors.

This epitomizes behaviorist ideas about child rearing. Watson considered the upbringing of children to be an objective, almost scientific exercise, without the need for affection or sentimentality.

Watson’s most famous student was Burrhus Frederic Skinner (1904–1990), who applied behaviorist ideas to the study of learning. For Skinner (1938) and his behaviorist colleagues, learning had to do with changing relationships between visible entities, not with what might be going on inside the animal’s head. In particular, behaviorist learning theorists suggest that learning refers to changes in the frequency of responding due to its consequences. Most of their experiments involve operant conditioning (see Chapter 8), in which a certain response by the animal (e.g., pressing a lever) is rewarded (“reinforced”) with food.