Psychological behaviorism
| The Personality Theory of Psychological Behaviorism | |
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Preceding Behaviorists Author Major Works |
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Psychological behaviorism is a form of behaviorism – a major theory within psychology which holds that behaviors are learned through positive and negative reinforcements. The theory recommends that psychological concepts (such as personality, learning and emotion) are to be explained in terms of observable behaviors that respond to stimulus. Behaviorism was first developed by John B. Watson (1912), who coined the term "behaviorism," and then B.F. Skinner who developed what is known as "radical behaviorism." Watson and Skinner rejected the idea that psychological data could be obtained through introspection or by an attempt to describe consciousness; all psychological data, in their view, was to be derived from the observation of outward behavior. Recently, Arthur W. Staats has proposed a psychological behaviorism – a "paradigmatic behaviorist theory" which argues that personality consists of a set of learned behavioral patterns, acquired through the interaction between an individual's biology, environment, cognition, and emotion. Holth also critically reviews psychological behaviorism as a "path to the grand reunification of psychology and behavior analysis".
Psychological behaviorism’s theory of personality represents one of psychological behaviorism’s central differences from the preceding behaviorism’s; the other parts of the broader approach as they relate to each other will be summarized in the paradigm sections
Preceding Behaviorists
Ivan P. Pavlov
Edward L. Thorndike
John B. Watson
B. F. Skinner
Clark L. Hull
Author
Arthur W. Staats
Major Works
Complex Human Behavior
Learning, Language, and Cognition
Child learning, intelligence, and personality
Behavior and personality
Social Behaviorism
Psychology's Crisis of Disunity
The Marvelous Learning Animal
Staats proposes that radical behaviorism is insufficient, because in his view psychology needs to unify behavioral sciences to include knowledge about learning and other internal processes that result in the behaviors making up personality. According to this theory, personality consists of three behavioral repertoires:
The infant begins life without the basic behavioral repertoires. They are acquired through complex learning, and as this occurs, the child becomes able to respond appropriately to various situations.
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