Foundations and Criticism of Behaviourism

If you have read about behaviorism, the first name that would pop-up in your mind would be of B.F. Skinner, a psychologist who expanded many underlying theories to create an integrated canvas of behaviorism. 

The talk of behaviorism can begin with the idea of habituation which says that a new experience generates a surprising response but if the same experience is repeated, the surprise element is gone as the person gets habituated by it. When we see a new ad popping up on our TV screens, we pay good attention to it. If we like it then we do it, again and again, the third time. By the fourth time, we are habituated and not amazed anymore.

Going further, behaviorism makes three primary claims that make its foundation. These are –

1.     Emphases on learning – As per B.F Skinner, we as human beings are capable of learning anything irrespective of the race and gender we are if only we get the right environment.

2.     Anti-mentalism – This comes as an attack on the non-scientific Freudian claims that could not be falsified and thus, could not be tested. Skinner suggests that anything that is observable should only be seen as a science and we should stick to observations where we have an environment, a stimulus, and a response. Concepts like classical conditioning, operant conditioning, and reinforcements are based on this.

3.     No learning differences in different species – As per Skinner, irrespective of the species we are, animal or human, we all have the same mechanism for learning. Based on this assumption, Skinner did experiments on rats and cats to prove his claims.

As per Skinner, we learn in two ways – classical conditioning and operant conditioning.

Classical conditioning says that we can develop an association between a conditional and an unconditioned stimulus to produce a conditioned response. For example, a child sees chocolate is an unconditional stimulus. It becomes happy as a result is an unconditioned response. An uncle coming home is another stimulus but it is not likely to generate happiness as a response if the uncle is a stranger. But what if we add the action of the uncle bringing a chocolate every time? After a few times of doing this, the child will start feeling happy the moment this uncle enters home because his mind would start to associate happiness (which was generated by chocolate) with uncle. Isn’t that how you make friends with kids?

Operant conditioning is more intelligent and suggests learning through trial error method till one serves right and the person then learns that specific action can only get the desired results. Operant conditioning is based on the concept of reward and punishment and it says, “The tendency to do an action increases if it gets an award and decreases if it does not”. Parents are often seen using this principle to train their children on good habits and to discourage bad habits. For instance, every time your child scores good marks, you give a gift to the child and every time, the child misses doing his homework, you give the punishment. But a tricky thing with such reinforcements is that the moment this reinforcement stops, the behavior also stops. So, if you gave a gift to your child for good performance for a year and stop giving the same the next year, your child may no more get good marks.

A better strategy could be partial reinforcement which means you reward at times and not reward at other times. Suppose you have a team of employees working for you and every time they do good work, you either give them a pat on the back or a special reward like dinner, cake or a day-off. If your employee loves a day-off, even after you stop giving this reinforcement, the employee would continue to work hard for some time in an anticipation of a reward.

Despite its relevance to many situations, the claims of Skinner were heavily criticized by Noam Chomsky who believed that the claims presented were vague, wrong or empty as they could not explain a few things. Emphases on learning for instance, is the claim which completely denies the innate gifts that some humans may have. Anti-mentalism says that only what is observable can be seen as a science.

However, this may not always be possible. We could not see the earth rotating around the sun but we did believe that it does when it was claimed. The third claim of no learning differences between different species has also been denied as Noam argued of the possibility of some birds having different ways of learning navigation than humans. Skinner stressed much on conditioning and reinforcement but Noam questioned it too. How could behaviorism explain things like a human talking to self, creation of art, and fantasizing when they do not have any stimulus, conditioning or reinforcement? Noam says that Skinner’s theories have completely ignored the richness of the mental capacities of humans.

The observation of habituation and our capacity to get conditioned can still not be denied as they hold true in nature to a great extent. And this has created the foundation for the developments in the field. Many classical problems can still be explained by classical and operant conditioning parameters. However, the ignorance of the capacities of the human mind was much discussed and the weaknesses was resolved by the addition of cognition in later developments by behavioral scientists.

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