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Behaviorism and Social Learning Theory FOUNDATION
Behaviorism and Social Learning Theory FOUNDATION
Their approach is known as behaviorism because they believed that it was not
possible to study conscious experience scientifically.
Instead, the behaviorist studied the adaptive value of learning from
experience.
Behaviorism
1) Ivan Pavlov
• Ivan Pavlov and his coworkers conducted a research on digestion in
dogs.
• They had surgically implanted tubes in the cheeks of the dogs to study the
reflexive secretion of saliva during eating.
• Pavlov noticed that (the reflexive secretion of saliva) when the dogs saw food
being brought to them, not just when the food was placed in their mouths.
• He recognized that the dogs had learned to associate the sight of food
by salivating.
• He demonstrated that this interpretation was correct by conducting experi-
ments using a clicking metronome instead of the sight of food and a small
quantities of powdered meat.
• When the metronome and the meat powder were presented together, the
dogs quickly learned to salivate to the metronome alone.
Ivan Pavlov's Classical Conditioning
Before Conditioning
Unconditioned
Unconditioned Neutral
Stimulus Response
Stimulus
Ivan Pavlov's Classical Conditioning
After Conditioning
Conditioned Conditioned
Stimulus Response
Behaviorism
1) Ivan Pavlov
• His accidental discovery from the dog’s experiment was of tremendous impor-
tance to the new field of psychology.
• He had identified a simple form of learning or conditioning
• Pavlov had shown that even inherited reflexes could be influenced dramati-
cally by learning experiences.
• Pavlov thought that conditioning was so important to the survival of species.
Behaviorism
2) John B. Watson & Margaret Floy Washburn
• Pavlov’s research and theories were not immediately accepted in the United
States.
• But, in the 1910s and 1920s the concepts were taken up in the writing of be-
haviorists John B. Watson and Margaret Floy Washburn.
• They agreed with Pavlov that the importance of conditioning went far beyond
salivating dogs.
• Most human behavior was learned through classical conditioning.
• Until his death in 1990s, B. F. Skinner was the leading exponent of behavior-
ism.
Behaviorism
3) Social Learning Theory
• Albert Bandura is the leading spokesperson for the most contemporary be-
havioral psychologists endorse a broader version of behaviorism that inte-
grates the study of behavior with the study of cognition.
• This broader viewpoint is referred as social learning theory:
“ the most important aspects of our behavior are learned from other per-
sons in society. We learn to be who we are from our family, friends and cul-
ture”.
Social Learning Theory: Personality (Albert Bandura)
• The social learning view of personality is vastly different from that of the psychoanalysts.
• Social learning theorists focus on a psychological processes that is learning.
• This theory has its origins in the behavioral writings of Ivan Pavlov, John B. Watson and B. F.
Skinner.
• Each of these theorists argued that personality is no more than learned behavior and that the
way to understand personality is simply to understand the process of learning.
• Social learning theorists the key concepts in the study of personality are not id, ego and
superego but classical conditioning, operant conditioning and modeling.
Reciprocal determination: not only is a person’s behavior learned but the social
learning environment is altered by the person’s behavior.
Personality is learned behavior, but it is also behavior that influences future learning
experiences.
Social Learning Theory
• Self regulation:
• A woman might be friendly most of the time when she is with her family, but
cold and distant when she is with her gossipy coworkers, and stiff and formal
with her boss.
• People behave in ways that suit their situations – because situations are apt
to change – behavior cannot be consistent enough to be adequately
described in terms of personality traits.
Social Learning Theory
The situations that interact with our personal characteristics do not just
happen to us at random: we play an important role in selecting and creating
many of the situations in which we live.