Behaviorism

The term ‘behaviorism’ refers to a family of doctrines that emphasize the importance
of behavior over mind, or cognitive processing, in psychology, notably as its proper
subject matter or its ultimate evidential basis.

Psychological Behaviorism
Early in the 20th century, JamesWatson wove together three 19th-century ideas –
 Darwin’s evolutionary theory emphasizing the physical as well as
psychological continuity between animals and humans,
 Wundt’s experimental method in psychology, and
 James’s functionalist psychology – into both a method and theoretical
overview for animal and human psychology.
In 1913, he published ‘Psychology as the behaviorist views it,’ which contained a
number of distinct but related doctrines, three of which are of particular interest for the
student of language:
(1) The rejection of introspection as an experimental method,
(2) The shunning of internal events, and
(3) The emphasis on learning.
The rejection of introspection as an experimental method
In the late 19th century, Wundt convinced psychologists that scientific work in their
discipline must be experimental and quantitative, but like all 19th-century
psychologists, he continued to work on psychology’s traditional object –
consciousness – and to access it by the traditional route of introspection. Watson,
trained as an animal experimenter, argued that consciousness and introspection were
not a proper basis upon which to establish an experimental scientific psychology.
According to Watson, experimentation in psychology begins and ends with observable
behavior.
The shunning of internal events
If all internal events are characterized by the fact that they are conscious and
accessible only through introspection, then Watson’s rejection of conscious experience
as the object of psychology amounts to a rejection of all internal events from the scope
of psychology.
Emphasis on Learning
Watson turned to the work of Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov (1927), who had
recently won the Nobel Prize in medicine for his work on a type of learning called
classical conditioning. Since so many of human behavioral dispositions are not innate,
Watson hoped that classical conditioning would offer a means to account for what is
typically human in human psychology.