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Behaviorism

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17 views23 pages

Behaviorism

Uploaded by

dgdheal
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Behaviorism

What is behaviorism all


about?
• Behavioral psychology is the
study of external behavior
• Behavior is objective and
observable, where as what goes on
in one’s mind can never really be
known or measured (the mind is a
“black box”)
• Behavior is the response of an
History of Behaviorism

• Pavlov
(1927), a
Russian
physiologist
discovered
classical
conditioning in
dogs.
“Give me a dozen
healthy infants, well-
formed, and my own
special world to bring
them up in and I’ll
guarantee to take any
one at random and
train him to be any
type of specialist I
might select – a
doctor, a lawyer,
artist…”
Classical Conditioning
• Explains some learning of involuntary
emotional and physiological responses.
– Dog drooling when it smells food and later
when it hears a bell
• It’s important for us as teachers to
understand since school is often the
cause of unintentional learning through
classical conditioning, especially anxiety.
– Test anxiety conditions us to have general
school anxiety
Ivan Pavlov's Classical Conditioning

Before
Conditioning
Unconditioned Unconditioned
Stimulus Response

Neutral Stimulus No Response


Ivan Pavlov's Classical Conditioning
During Conditioning

Neutral Unconditione
Unconditioned d
Stimulus Stimulus
Response
Ivan Pavlov's Classical Conditioning
After Conditioning

Conditioned Conditioned

Stimulus Response
Examples of Classical
Conditioning
• Kids who often get strep throat, after much
swabbing of their throat, begin to gag as
soon as they see the doctor with the swab.
• Hearing a teacher, roommate,
boyfriend/girlfriend say to you, “We need to
talk”. Upon hearing this phrase your
stomach “flutters”.
• The point is, we learn to associate a
stimulus with a response, and eventually
our body does this automatically in the
presence of the stimulus. Our response is
involuntary.
Classical Conditioning
…..
• Classical conditioning can face
“extinction”, where the learning is undone.
– This can happen naturally (the dog stops
getting meat when music is played)
– Or can happen through some type of therapy
in the case of severe anxiety reactions
• Ex: people who are afraid to fly….
• Remember: Classical conditioning is more
than forming an association – it is an
involuntary, physiological response
Classical Conditioning
in the Classroom
• Playing soothing music, dimming the
lights to calm and relax students
• Unintentional classical conditioning:
– Test anxiety
– Math anxiety
– Public speaking anxiety
– General school anxiety
B.F. Skinner (1904 –
1990)
• American psychologist - influential from the
1930’s - 60’s – developed operant
conditioning
• Skinner was interested in education
– He believed that behavior is sustained by
reinforcements or rewards, not by free will.
• Famous for the skinner box & the teaching
machine
• Often worked with pigeons
& rats and applied what he learned
with these animals to human learning
Operant Conditioning
(Skinner)
• This involves conditioning voluntary,
controllable behaviors, not the
automatic physiological responses in
Classical Conditioning
• With Operant Conditioning the
Response comes before the Stimulus
(the opposite of CC)
R S
Operant Conditioning
• Teachers can deliberately use
operant conditioning with their
students (training)

• How someone reacts to our


behaviors determines whether or
not we continue the behavior
– if we are rewarded for something we
will likely do it again - do you do this as
a teacher?
Skinner’s Operant
Conditioning
Positive Presence of
Reinforceme Pleasant Behavior
nt Stimulus
Increases
Negative Absence of
Reinforceme Unpleasant Stimulus
nt

Presence of Behavior
Punishment Unpleasant Decreases
Stimulus
Consequences for
Behaviors
• Positive Reinforcement – You behave in a certain
way that results in a reward, and as a result, you
are more likely to repeat that behavior

• Negative Reinforcement – You behave in a


certain way that results in the removal of
something unpleasant, and as a result you are
more likely to repeat that behavior (ex: doing a
paper early)
– In both cases, something happened that you saw as
“good” and as a result, you exhibited the behavior
more.
more
Consequences for
Behaviors
• Punishment – A consequence that follows
a behavior so that you do the behavior
less often in the future.
– Punishment can involve adding something
(paying a fine, staying after school) or
involve removing something you like
(losing recess time, leaving your friends)
– In both cases, adding something or removing
something, you perceive it as “bad” and as a
result, you exhibit the behavior less.
less
Differences Between
Negative Reinforcement &
Punishment
• Negative reinforcement: Something
unpleasant is removed & as a result you
are more likely to do it again
– Something happened that was “good”
• Punishment: A consequence happens
that you don’t like and you are less
likely to do it again. The punishment
can add something or take something
away.
–
Shaping New Behaviors
• Shaping is a process of reinforcing a
series of responses that increasingly
resemble the desired final behavior
• When a desired behavior occurs rarely
or not at all, we use shaping
– First reinforce any response that in some
way resembles the desired behavior, then
one that is closer etc.
– Think of animal training or the hyper kid
who can’t sit in his chair in class – do
things in small steps
Critiques of
Behaviorism
• External rewards may diminish intrinsic motivation
–Studies where participants work on an interesting
task (ex: puzzles) - experimental group is given a
reward when finished while the control group is
not.
– After initial period, during a non-rewarded time
participants are given a choice between
continuing to work on the task or switching to
another activity. Typical result is that participants
in the experimental group spend less time on the
activity than the control group. This is taken as
indicating that reward reduces intrinsic
motivation. Pizza Hut used to give away free pizza
to kids who read a certain number of pages. This
More Critiques …
• Behaviorism doesn’t account for
anything that isn’t an observable
behavior
– There has to be more going on than
what is observable - doesn’t there?
• Behaviorism only accounts for
learning through direct experience
with the environment (not
observational learning)
Check yourself…
• Can you come up with classroom
examples of:
– Classical Conditioning (use all the
right labels)
– Operant Conditioning (again, use all
the right labels)
– Positive and Negative
Reinforcement
– Punishment

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