behavioral psychology is a schools of psychology that originated in the United States in the early 2th century, and its founder is American psychologist Watson.
behaviorism holds that psychology should not study consciousness, but only behavior. The so-called behavior is the combination of various physical reactions that organisms use to adapt to environmental changes. These reactions are nothing more than muscle contraction and gland secretion. Some of them are manifested outside the body, while others are hidden inside the body, with different intensities.
Watson pointed out that thoughts and emotions that have always been regarded as pure consciousness are actually implicit and slight physical changes. The former is the change of whole body muscles, especially speech organs, and the latter is the change of internal organs and glands. Since the 192 s, the technology of recording the changes of muscle potential has been continuously improved, and it has been found that psychological activity is accompanied by slight muscle contraction. But the joint events are not necessarily the same event. So a slight muscle contraction when thinking is not enough to prove that thinking is a slight muscle contraction.
Watson believes that both muscle contraction and gland secretion can be attributed to physical or chemical changes; The stimulus that causes the organism to react can only be the physical or chemical changes inside and outside the organism. In this way. All behaviors, including psychological activities, are nothing more than some physical or chemical changes causing other physical or chemical changes. Therefore, he believes that psychological images can be explained by physical and chemical concepts. Weiss, an early behaviorist, took this view to extreme reductionism, but Watson himself advocated that psychology should only focus on the adaptive behavior of the organism as a whole, without asking about these physical and chemical changes.
Watson claims that behaviorism is the only complete and logical functionalism. He was deeply influenced by functionalism at the University of Chicago. Angel, one of the representatives of functionalism, also said that psychology should study behavior. But functionalists regard consciousness and behavior as means for people to adapt to the environment. According to pragmatism, the philosophical basis of functionalism, the only criterion to test the adaptability of consciousness can only be the adaptability of behavior. Therefore, there is no need to examine consciousness when examining behavior; On the other hand, if we don't examine behavior, we can't examine the adaptability of consciousness. Therefore, complete functionalism must admit that we can study behavior without consciousness, but we cannot study consciousness without behavior.
Watson claims that psychologists should use consciousness like physicists, that is, they only regard it as experience about objective things, not as experience about psychological activities, thus denying the difference between direct experience and indirect experience that Wundt refers to, and equating the consciousness studied by psychologists with the objective things studied by physicists. Lashley clearly pointed out that this is a new realism viewpoint, and expressed great appreciation.
Watson believes that the task of psychological research on behavior is to find out the regular relationship between stimulus and response. In this way, we can infer the reaction according to the stimulus and the stimulus according to the response, so as to predict and control the behavior.
behaviorists abandon introspection in research methods and advocate objective observation, conditioned reflex, speech report and test. This is the inevitable conclusion that they deny consciousness in the research object.
On the one hand, Watson opposes introspection, on the other hand, he has to make use of some materials that only introspection can provide. So he kicked introspection out of the front door and invited it in from the back door in the name of "speech report" This confuses the two functions of speech. Although words, like actions, are responses to objective stimuli, they can also be used to state one's own psychology, which is actually introspection.
behavioral psychology's methodology is deeply influenced by animal psychology since the advent of the theory of evolution. Animals don't make introspective reports, so they can only infer their psychology according to their responses to stimuli. In this way, the early animal psychology was heavily anthropomorphic. Morgan proposed to overcome anthropomorphism as much as possible. After Loeb's further efforts, until Thorndike, this problem was not completely solved.
Watson has done a lot of research on animal psychology, and finally draws a conclusion against anthropomorphism, asserting that there is no qualitative difference between human beings and animals in psychology, but we can't infer animal psychology according to human psychology. On the contrary, we should study human psychology like animal psychology. Therefore, he greatly appreciates Pavlov's conditioned reflex method, because it can transform subjective experience such as sensory discrimination into objective facts of reaction differences.
But fundamentally speaking, Watson is completely different from Pavlov. Watson denied the special importance of the nerve center in animal behavior, thinking that it only plays a liaison role. Pavlov regards the relationship between the activities of the body's peripheral organs and the activities of the nerve center as a projection relationship, and investigates the activities of the peripheral organs in order to understand the activities of the nerve center. Furthermore, Pavlov does not deny consciousness, but also attaches great importance to the essential psychological differences between humans and animals.
Watson believes that all complex behaviors depend on environmental influences except a few simple reflexes, and this influence is achieved through conditioned reflexes. Therefore, he regarded Pavlovian conditioned reflex as the "pivot stone" of behaviorism. Watson boasted that by giving him a dozen healthy babies and cultivating them in a completely controlled environment, he could turn any baby into any kind of person. He did an experiment on the baby's emotional behavior, which made the baby's love and fear change through the change of conditioned reflex. He later talked in vain about establishing experimental ethics of behaviorism.
The influence of Watson-style behavioral psychology reached its peak in the 192s. Some of its basic viewpoints and research methods have penetrated into many humanities, thus giving rise to the name of "behavioral science". Until today, the fields involved are still expanding. Although they are not all guided by behaviorism, the origin of names cannot but be attributed to behaviorism. Watson's environmental determinism has influenced American psychology for 3 years. His viewpoint of predicting and controlling behavior promoted the development of applied psychology.
It is recognized by American psychologists that for a long time after the advent of behavioral psychology, American psychologists were mostly actual behaviorists. After the rise of cognitive psychology, although consciousness has been re-valued, cognitive psychology also tries its best to study subjective experience by observing objective behavior.
Watson's oversimplified stimulus-response formula cannot explain the most remarkable characteristics of behavior, namely selectivity and adaptability. After 193s, some of his successors tried to overcome this fatal shortcoming under the guidance of operationalism, thus forming various forms of new behaviorism. If Watson's idea of abolishing consciousness is gradually abandoned because psychology loses its theme, then methodological behaviorism continues in the United States through the clever argument of operationalism.