John Broadus Watson
John Broadus Watson (1878-1958) is the founder of the behaviorist school of thought in the scientific field of psychology. Behaviorism is the belief that all things that humans and organisms do (actions, thoughts, feelings) should be viewed as behaviors. This theory also states that no theory should be considered valid if it is not observable in the public.
Watson majored in psychology and neurology and minored in philosophy. He studied behavior using animal subjects that mostly consisted of white rats, monkeys and birds.
Watson’s beliefs, though complex, can be summed up fairly simply. He believed that all human behavior is learned either directly or through life experiences. He strongly disagreed with any notion of instinct or innate responses. “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 beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations and race of his ancestors. I am going beyond my facts and I admit it, but so have the advocates of the contrary and they have been doing it for many thousands of years.” (John B. Watson). He believed that children should be treated with respect, but with some level of emotional detachment. This was a widely criticized notion.
Watson performed a famous (or should I say infamous) experiment known as the “Little Albert” experiment. The goal of this experiment was to show that responses could be classically conditioned in people. He felt this would further prove his theories of behaviorism. The subject of this experiment was a 9-month-old baby named Albert. The experiment involved showing the baby certain stimuli that consisted of a monkey, a rabbit, a white rat, a burning newspaper and masks. At first, baby Albert showed no fear toward any of these things. Then he started pairing the stimuli with the load noise of a hammer hitting a metal pipe. The noise, of course, made little Albert cry. After pairing the noise with the animal or object a few times, baby Albert began to cry just at the sight of the animal or object without the noise.
B.F. Skinner
B.F. Skinner (1904-1990) became interested in behaviorist psychology after failing as a writer and picking up a copy of An Outline of Philosophy. A book written by Bertrand Russell in which he discussed the behaviorist theories of John B. Watson. This theory interested him so much he applied to and attended Harvard University as a psychology student.
Skinner is credited with the development of the first operant conditioning experiments and the belief that all behaviors are conditioned as a result of positive or negative reinforcement. He agree with Watson that all behaviors are learned and none are innate. But he took it to a new level and developed a new perspective of behaviorism known as Radical Behaviorism . This theory states that behavior is the result of the environment whether positive or negative. From this theory Skinner developed a rule known as schedules of reinforcement . This rules shows that the timing of rewards or punishments (positive or negative reinforcements) determines how quickly the conditioned response is learned and the strength of the new response. There are two types of reinforcement schedules; continuous reinforcement and partial reinforcement. These are fairly self-explanatory. In continuous reinforcement, the behavior is reinforced every time. The objective is to create a strong conditioned response. This is usually the first part of a learning process or experiment. Next partial reinforcement will be used. In this method, the behavior is not reinforced every time, but only some of the time. If this is the primary mode of learning, the behavior is learned slower than continuous reinforcement, but it is more resistant to extinction (the weakening and eventual disappearance of a conditioned response due to the lack of reinforcement).
Edward C. Tolman
Edward C. Tolman (1886-1959) graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1911 and was working toward a career in electrochemistry physics. Then Toleman came across and was inspired by the writings and theories of psychologist William James. He went on to study philosophy and psychology at Harvard’s graduate school.
Unlike Watson and Skinner, Tolman was the only behaviorist to find the stimulus-response theory unacceptable. His reason was simple; reinforcement was not necessary for learning to occur. He believed that individuals do not simply go through life responding to stimuli, but acting according to emotions, beliefs, attitudes and changing environments while striving towards goals. His theory stated that behavior is holistic (the entire organism is involved in learning), cognitive and purposive. He developed his own learning theory called sign Gestalt Theory. His proposed that the learner is following a series of signs to a goal, learning his/her way as if following a map. Hence, the learning is learning meanings, not movements.
Toleman reached the conclusion that expectancy of reward was a huge determinant of performance and that learning was a form of cognitive mapping when he performed a goal-directed experiment on mice. He put mice in a maze to see if they would learn the maze with or without food at the end. He found that the mice learned the maze whether or not there was food at the end. However, the rate and the speed that the mice coursed the maze was greatly intensified by the offer of food at the end of the maze.
When comparing the two types of learning, both stimulus-response and sign learning generally produce the same behavioral outcome. Watson, Skinner and Toleman all made significant contributions to the field of psychology by producing new theories and perspectives of behaviorism.
References
http://psychology.about.com/od/classicpsychologystudies/a/little-albert-experiment.htm
http://psychologistsseattle.com/behavioral-psychology.php
http://www.bfskinner.org/BFSkinner/AboutSkinner.html
http://psychology.about.com/od/behavioralpsychology/a/schedules.htm
http://psychology.about.com/od/eindex/g/extinction.htm
http://www.lifecircles-inc.com/Learningtheories/behaviorism/Tolman.html