Understanding Behaviourism
Watch the following video on behaviourism before continuing along with the lesson. Note that bolded words in the paragraphs below indicate that their definitions are found in the glossary towards the end of this page!
Behaviourism
Behaviourism is a psychological approach that focuses on how learning occurs through observable changes in behaviour (CrashCourse, 2014). It places emphasis on the notion that all behaviours are learnt through conditioned interactions with the environment. Instead of examining internal thoughts and emotions, behaviourism focuses on how individuals respond to external stimuli and form behavioural patterns through experience. Behaviourism is grounded in the foundational work of Ivan Pavlov and B.F. Skinner, who introduced the principles of classical and operant conditioning, highlighting associations, reinforcement and punishment as a mechanism through which behaviour is shaped.
[Two dogs facing opposite directions with descriptions on Operant and Classical Conditioning]
Classical Conditioning
Classical conditioning is a form of learning in which an individual comes to associate a previously neutral stimulus with a meaningful one, eventually training the individual to elicit a learned response in regards to the neutral stimulus (CrashCourse, 2014). The concept emerged from Ivan Pavlov’s early 20th century research on the digestive reflexes in dogs. While studying how the stomach functions, Pavlov observed that dogs salivated not only at the sight and smell of food, but also at clues that signaled food was coming. This unexpected finding led Pavlov to investigate how such associations formed.
Photo by Karsten Winegeart on Unsplash [French bull dog in a yellow shirt with a blue background]
To explore this, Pavlov presented dogs with the sound of a bell, which would act as a neutral stimulus, which elicited no salivation. Immediately after the bell rang, Pavlov presented food to the dog, which naturally triggered salivation (CrashCourse, 2014). By repeatedly pairing the neutral stimulus with food, the dogs eventually learned that the sound of the bell predicted the arrival of food. After enough pairings, the sound of the bell alone, without any food, caused the dogs to salivate. Through this work, Pavlov demonstrated that a neutral stimulus could become a conditioned stimulus capable to eliciting a conditioned response, establishing one of the foundational principles of behaviourist learning theory.
Operant Conditioning
Operant conditioning is the second major form of behaviourism, which focuses on how behaviours change in response to their consequences (CrashCourse, 2014). This type of learning shapes a bunch of our day to day learning, from studying more following receiving bad grades, to learning to check your phone when it buzzes. The core idea follows as such:
- Behaviours followed by unpleasant outcomes become less likely
- Behaviours followed by rewards become more likely
[Two rats, one beside a plate of food indicating reward and one beside sparks indicating punishment, on a blue background illustrating operant conditioning]
B.F. Skinner expanded this idea by studying how animals learned through reward and punishment (CrashCourse, 2014). In his experiments, Skinner placed a rat inside a controlled environment (a “Skinner Box”), which contained a lever the rat could press. Depending on the setup, pressing the lever either delivered food or a mild shock. Through these trials, Skinner demonstrated how different types of consequences shape behaviour.
From this work, Skinner outlined the types of reinforcements and punishments and how they operate:
| Types of Consequences | Defintion | Example |
| Positive Reinforcement | Adding something desirable | Skinner gave the rats food in response to pushing the lever |
| Negative reinforcement | Removing something unpleasant | Skinner removed a mild shock from the rats in response to pushing the lever |
| Positive punishment | Adding something unpleasant | Skinner gave the rats a mild shock in response to pushing the lever |
| Negative punishment | Removing something desirable | Skinner removed food from the rats in response to pushing the lever |
Skinner also discovered that how often a behaviour is rewarded affects how strongly a behaviour is learned, as well as how quickly the learned behaviour will stop after consequences stop (CrashCourse, 2014). For example, by rewarding a behaviour every time an individual succeeds leads to fast learning, however quick extinction when the reward is no longer given. Whereas, rewarding a behaviour unpredictably makes the behaviour more persistent.
Glossary
| Associations | A mental connection between things |
| Conditioned response | A learned reaction that happens because a person or animal was trained to connect two things |
| Conditioned stimulus | Something that used to be neutral but, after being paired repeatedly with a stimulus, now causes a learned response. |
| Consequences | A result of an action |
| Controlled environment | A setting where you manipulate all important variables |
| Extinction | Disappearance of a learned behaviour |
| Neutral stimulus | A stimulus that does not cause a specific response |
| Punishment | A consequence that makes a behaviour less likely to happen again |
| Reinforcement | A consequence that makes a behaviour more likely to happen again. |
| Stimuli | An object, event, or factor that can cause a response in an animal or person |
Lesson 1 Tasks
Learning objective: Students will be able to identify the theories and processes of operant and classical conditioning that make up behaviourism, and apply them to real-world examples.
| Watch attached Crash Course video on “How to train your brain” | ~10 minutes |
| Read through the lecture content | ~10 minutes |
| Take the lesson 1 quiz on Behaviourism | ~10 minutes |
In your first lesson, you will complete the following quiz on the behaviourist theories and principles outlined in the video and text above. Feel free to look back at this page while you take the quiz. Once you complete the quiz, click submit and view your score to receive feedback on your responses.
Now that you have completed your first lesson assignment, ensure you feel confident on all the material before moving on to the next lesson.