Early Schools of Psychology &

Positivist Orientation
CONTENT:

i) Early Schools of Psychology:

a. Associationism,
b. Structuralism and
c. Functionalism
➢ Early Era Of Psychology:

● Psychology is the scientific study of behavior and mental processes.

Behavior includes all of our outward or overt actions and reactions, such as
talking, facial expressions, and movement.

● The term mental processes refers to all the internal, covert (hidden) activity
of our minds, such as thinking, feeling, and remembering.

● In Leipzig Germany in 1879, Wilhelm Wundt, a physiologist, attempted to

apply scientific principles to the study of the human mind. In his laboratory,
students from around the world were taught to study the structure of the
human mind.
● Wundt believed that consciousness, the state of being aware of external events,
could be broken down into thoughts, experiences, emotions, and other basic
elements. In order to inspect these nonphysical elements, students had to learn to
think objectively about their own thoughts. After all, they could hardly read
someone else’s mind.

● Wundt called this process objective introspection, the process of objectively

examining and measuring one’s own thoughts and mental activities. For example,
Wundt might place an object, such as a rock, in a student’s hand and have the
student tell him everything that he was feeling as a result of having the rock in his
hand and all the sensations stimulated by the rock.
● This was really the first attempt by anyone to bring objectivity and measurement
to the concept of psychology. This attention to objectivity, together with the
establishment of the first true experimental laboratory in psychology, is why
Wundt is known as the father of psychology.
 ➢ Early Schools of Psychology:

A. Structuralism:
● One of Wundt’s students was Edward Titchener (1867–1927), an Englishman
who eventually took Wundt’s ideas to Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.
Titchener expanded on Wundt’s original ideas, calling his new viewpoint
structuralism because the focus of study was the structure of the mind. He
believed that every experience could be broken down into its individual
emotions and sensations (Brennan, 2002).

● Although Titchener agreed with Wundt that consciousness could be broken

down into its basic elements, Titchener also believed that objective
introspection could be used on thoughts as well as on physical sensations.
● For example, Titchener might have asked his students to introspect about things
that are blue rather than actually giving them a blue object and asking for reactions
to it.

● Structuralism was a dominant force in the early days of psychology, but it

eventually died out in the early 1900s, as the structuralists were busily fighting
among themselves over just which key elements of experience were the most
important. A competing view arose not long after Wundt’s laboratory was
established, shortly before structuralism came to America.
 ➢ Functionalism:

● Harvard University was the first school in America to offer classes in psychology
in the late 1870s. These classes were taught by one of Harvard’s most illustrious
instructors, William James (1842–1910). James began teaching anatomy and
physiology, but as his interest in psychology developed, he began teaching it
almost exclusively (Brennan, 2002).

● Unlike Wundt and Titchener, James was more interested in the importance of
consciousness to everyday life than just its analysis. He believed that the
scientific study of consciousness itself was not yet possible.
● Conscious ideas are constantly flowing in an ever-changing stream, and once you
start thinking about what you were just thinking about, what you were thinking
about is no longer what you were thinking about it’s what you are thinking about
and … excuse me, I’m a little dizzy. I think you get the picture, anyway.

● Instead, James focused on how the mind allows people to function in the real
world how people work, play, and adapt to their surroundings, a viewpoint he
called functionalism.
 ➢ Associationism:

● Associationism is considered to be one the oldest perspectives in psychology. It

is regarded to be more of a principle rather than being a proper school of
psychology. Associationistic ideas have been said to have taken over all the
major schools of psychology. Even the first school of psychology structuralism
was majorly influenced by associationistic ideas.

● The principle of associationism suggests that mental processes operate by the

association of one mental state with the other that succeeds it. A major idea of
associationism is that “complex ideas come from the association of simpler
ideas”.
● The British empiricists majorly used associationistic principles in explaining
mental activity. This led to the widespread usage of forming associations in
explaining several psychological factors. In their attempts to apply something
more than pure philosophy in explaining the activity of the mind, the British
empiricists are said to have anticipated later psychological developments.

● After the British empiricists used associationism to explain mental activity, the
associationistic concepts played a central role in many of the learning theories.
Among them Hermann Ebbinghaus, Ivan Pavlov, and Edward Lee Thorndike
standout.
➢ BRITISH EMPIRICISM:

● Empiricism is the philosophy that emphasizes experience in knowledge attainment. By

experience, the empiricists refer exclusively to sensory experience, and not inner experiences
such as dreams and fantasies or mental experiences involved in problem solving and
mathematical deduction.

● Empiricists assert that sensory experience constitutes the primary data of knowledge, that
knowledge is unable to exist until sensory evidence has been gathered first, and that all
subsequent intellectual processes must focus only on sensory experience.
CONTRIBUTION OF BRITISH EMPIRICISTS:

● Thomas Hobbes:

● Thomas Hobbes is often referred to as the founder of British empiricism; he believed that all
knowledge was derived from sensory experience.
● Hobbes used the principle of associationism to explain complex thought processes. He made an
attempt to explain the tendency of one thought following another in a coherent manner, which is
referred to as “trains of thought”.
● To explain trains of thought hobbes used the law of contiguity, The law of contiguity states that
when events are experienced together, they are remembered together and therefore are
subsequently thought of together.
John Locke:

● John Locke’s major work with respect to the discipline of psychology is An Essay
Concerning Human Understanding (1690).
● The primary concern of Locke was to understand how the mind acquires knowledge. He
rejected Rene Descartes' notion of innate ideas and suggested that all humans are born
without any knowledge.
● Locke used Aristotle’s notion of tabula rasa, which means blank slate – indicating that
the mind at birth is like a blank slate on which experience is written.
● According to locke, certain concepts are learnt at a very early age and individuals are
unaware about it, which is why they may seem to be as innate during adulthood. Thus,
according to Locke, the mind acquire knowledge through experience.
● Further, Locke differentiated between simple and complex ideas. Simple ideas arise from
sensation and reflection that the mind receives passively. Simple ideas are elements in nature;
they cannot be reduced to simpler forms. Simple ideas can be actively combined by the mind
to create new ideas, which are complex ideas. For example, the color red is a simple idea as
we cannot conceive of two or more separate ideas that form the concept of the color red. A red
chair is a complex idea.
● Ideas being compounded is regarded as the beginning of the mental-chemistry approach of
association. According to this view, simple ideas are associated with each other forming
complex ideas.
● Locke argued that ideas are like machines. Just like machines can be dismantled into smaller
components and reassembled to form complex machines, so can be human ideas.
● The simple ideas are like basic particles that cannot be further reduced to smaller particles but
can be combined or associated to form more complex structures. Therefore, the theory of
association was significant in considering the mind, like the body, to be a machine.
George Berkeley:

● Berkeley applied the principle of association in explaining about knowing objects in the
real world.
● Berkeley explained that complex ideas are formed by joining the simple ideas that are
received through the senses. For instance, Berkeley explained the knowledge of a coach, a
complex idea, is gained by the sound of its wheels, the sturdiness of its frame, the smell of
its leather seats, and the visual image of its boxy shape.
● According to him the mind constructs complex ideas by fitting together these basic mental
building blocks, which are simple ideas.
● Berkeley used association to explain visual depth perception. He examined the problem of
how we perceive the third dimension of depth, given that the human eye has a retina of
only two dimensions. Berkeley suggested that depth is experienced as a result of the
individual’s experience.
● As the eyes of an individual adjust to seeing objects at different distances, visual impressions are
associated with sensations and the movements that are made in approaching and retreating the
objects.
● This means that the sensory experiences of reaching out or walking towards objects as well as the
sensations from the eye muscles get associated, resulting in depth perception. Therefore, depth
perception rather than being a simple sensory experience is an association of ideas that must be
learned.
● Berkeley carried forward the associationistic trend by explaining cognitive process in terms of
the association of sensations. His explanation anticipated the modern view of depth perception.
David Hume:

● David Hume differentiated between two contents of mind, impressions and ideas.
● Impressions are the basic elements of mental life. In the present-day, the equivalent of
impressions are sensations and perceptions. Ideas are the mental experiences that take place in
the absence of any immediately present stimulating object. The equivalent of ideas in the present
day is image.
● Impressions differ from ideas in terms of their relative strength and not their source. Impressions
are strong and vivid. In contrast, ideas are weak versions of impressions. Both of these mental
contents may be simple or complex.
● A simple idea will resemble its simple impression. Complex ideas do not necessarily resemble
simple impressions. Instead, complex ideas are evolved from simple ideas being combined into
new patterns; they are compounded from simple ideas by the process of association.
● Hume gave three laws of association – resemblance or similarity, contiguity in time and space,
and cause and effect.
● The law of similarity suggests that the more similar the ideas are, more readily they will be
associated. The law of contiguity suggests that the more contiguous two ideas are or the more
closely two ideas are experienced in time, more readily the ideas will be associated. The law of
cause and effect suggests that the more frequently two ideas, events, or objects are experienced
in the same sequence, more likely they are inferred that one will cause the other, and more
strongly they will be associated.
David Hartley:

● David Hartley suggested contiguity and repetition as two fundamental laws of association.
● Hartley explained the processes of memory, reasoning, emotion, and voluntary and involuntary
action, thereby expanding the scope of British empiricism.
● Contiguity means that for ideas or sensations to be associated, according to Hartley, they should
occur simultaneously or successively, thus, one occurrence being connected with the other.
● Hartley also proposed that Associationism repetition of sensations and ideas is necessary for
associations to be developed.
● Like John Locke, Hartley also suggested that knowledge is not present at birth and that there are
no innate associations. Knowledge is derived from experiences through the senses. As varied
sensory experiences are accumulated, which the child is growing, complex mental connections
are established. By the time individual reaches adulthood, higher systems of thought are
developed. These higher systems, which include skills like judging and reasoning are
compounds of mental elements or simple sensations.
● Hartley also suggested that simple ideas combine to form complex ideas. In this case, complex
ideas are a higher mental process. Hartley was the first person to apply the theory of association
in explaining all types of mental activity.
James Mill:

● His goal was to strongly establish the idea that the mind is nothing but a machine and was
adamant in refuting the idea of subjectivity and psychic activities, which he referred to as
nothing but an illusion.
● Mill was emphasizing that the mind is passive and is acted on by external stimuli.
● Mill proposed the method of analysis to study the mind. According to this method, to
understand the mind, it should be reduced to its elementary components. This method
was proposed because of the idea that a complex phenomenon like the mind needs to
broken down to its smallest components, in order to understand it in a better way. These
elements of the mind, according to Mill, are sensations and ideas.
● Mill also suggested that knowledge begins with sensations, and then, through the process
of association, higher complex ideas are derived. Further, Mill suggested that association
took place due to contiguity or concurrence, and that it is either simultaneous or
successive.
● As per Mill, association is a mechanical process, and the resulting ideas are a sum of the
smaller elements. He added that the association that takes place is passive and automatic,
and that the mind has no creative function.
John Stuart Mill:

● According to John Stuart Mill, when simple ideas are associated, they do not just add up to become
complex ideas, because they take the form of new qualities that were not found originally in the simple
ideas.
● eg; like colors merge and develop into an entirely new color, in the same manner, when simple ideas are
associated, they combine together forming something that is completely new, which are complex ideas.
● The simple ideas getting associated to form new qualities is known as creative synthesis. In other words,
creative synthesis means that mental elements always combine to produce some unique quality that was
not originally present in the elements initially.
● John Stuart Mill was being influenced by research in chemistry. John Stuart Mill used this notion of
chemical synthesis to explain association, by suggesting that simple ideas do not merely add up to form
complex ideas.
● Instead, they develop into completely new forms. John Stuart Mill referred Associationism to this new
approach of association as mental chemistry. In this way, John Stuart Mill brought about a major change
in British Empiricism, changing the course of the system of associationism.
Alexander Bain:

● According to Bain, the mind has three components, which are feeling, volition, and intellect.
● Bain proposed some laws of association. Bain suggested the law of contiguity to be a basic
principle of association. Bain suggested that actions, sensations, and states of feeling get
associated when they occur together. Along with the law of contiguity, Bain suggested
another law that was common with the earlier British empiricists, which is the law of
frequency.
● One thing that made Bain different from other empiricists was that according to him, the
laws of contiguity and frequency took place because of neurological changes, which is now
referred to as changes in the synapses. Bain also suggested the law of similarity as a principle
of association. According to the law of similarity, the experience of an event elicits memories
of similar events even if those similar events were experienced under widely different time
and circumstances.
● Bain added two of his own laws, which are the law of compound association and the law of
constructive association. The law of compound association states that associations are usually links
between many ideas at the same time, through contiguity or similarity, instead of just the linking of
one idea with another. When this takes place, then there is compound association. The law of
constructive association states that the mind has the power and ability to form new combinations
different from the ones that were present during the course of experience. According to Bain, the
mind reforms and rearranges memories of various experiences into infinite number of combinations.
 ASSOCIATIONISM AND LEARNING
THEORISTS:

Three learning theorists stand out as contributors to this aspect of associationism – Hermann Ebbinghaus, Ivan
Pavlov, and Edwin Thorndike.

1. Hermann Ebbinghaus:
● Hermann Ebbinghaus caused a profound shift in associationism. He began his study with the initial
formation of the associations. In this way he could control the conditions under which the chains of
ideas were formed and thereby make the study of learning more objective.
● For the basic measure of learning Ebbinghaus adapted a technique from the associationists, who had
proposed frequency of associations as a condition of recall.
● He resonated that the difficulty of learning material could be measured by this frequency, that is, by
counting the number of repetitions needed for one perfect reproduction of the material. In order to
study learning, Ebbinghaus invented what are known today as nonsense syllables.
● To study learning, Ebbinghaus was looking for some alternatives to everyday words for his
subject. He felt that there is an inherent difficulty in using stories or poetry as stimulus materials,
because such material meanings or associations have already been attached to words by people
familiar with the language. These existing associations tend to facilitate learning. In such
material connections are already present at the time of the experiment, so they cannot be
controlled by the experimenter.
● Ebbinghaus wanted to use material that would be uniformly unassociated, completely
homogeneous, and equally unfamiliar—material with which there could be few, if any, past
associations. The nonsense syllables he created, consisted of two consonants with a vowel in
between (for example: lef, bok, or yat). He wrote all possible combinations of consonants and
vowels on cards, yielding a supply of 2,300 syllables from which he drew at random, the
stimulus materials to be learned.
Ivan Pavlov:

● Pavlov’s work on learning helped to shift associationism from its traditional emphasis on
subjective ideas to objective and quantifiable physiological events such as glandular secretion
muscular movements.
● The area of research of Pavlov that occupies a prominent place in the history of psychology, is
the study of conditioned reflexes.
● In working on the digestive glands in dogs, Pavlov used the method of surgical exposure to
permit digestive secretions to be collected outside the body where they could be observed,
measured, and recorded.
● One aspect of this work dealt with the function of saliva, which the dogs secreted involuntarily
whenever food was placed in their mouths. Pavlov noticed that sometimes saliva flowed even
before the food was given.
● The dogs salivated at the sight of the food or at the sound of the footsteps of the person who
regularly fed them. This unlearned response of salivation got connected with, or conditioned to,
stimuli previously associated with receiving food.
● The dog’s response of salivating when food is placed is a natural reflexive response of the
digestive system - learning is not necessary for it to occur. Pavlov called this an Innate or
unconditioned reflex(response). Salivating at the sight of food however is not reflexive but must
be learned. Pavlov referred this response as conditional reflex.
Edwin Thorndike

● Thorndike believed that psychology must study behavior, not mental elements or conscious
experiences, and thus reinforced the trend towards greater objectivity. He interpreted learning
in terms of concrete connection between stimuli and responses.
● Thorndike referred to his experimental approach to the study of association as connectionism.
● According to him, the human mind has connections of varying strengths between (a)
situations, elements of situations, and compounds of situations, and (b) responses, readiness to
respond, facilitations, inhibitions, and directions of responses.
● The learning theory of Thorndike represents the original S-R framework of behavioral
psychology: Learning is the result of associations forming between stimuli and responses.
Such associations or “habits” become strengthened or weakened by the nature and frequency
of the S-R pairings. The paradigm for S-R theory was trial and error learning in which certain
responses come to dominate others due to rewards. The hallmark of connectionism (like all
behavioral theory) was that learning could be adequately explained without referring to any
unobservable internal states. (S; Stimulus R; Response))
● Thorndike’s theory consists of three primary laws: (1) law of effect – responses to a situation
which are followed by a rewarding state of affairs will be strengthened and become habitual
responses to that situation, (2) law of readiness – a series of responses can be chained together to
satisfy some goal which will result in annoyance if blocked, and (3) law of exercise –
connections become strengthened with practice and weakened when practice is discontinued. A
corollary of the law of effect was that responses that reduce the likelihood of achieving a
rewarding state (i.e., punishments, failures) will decrease in strength.
● The theory suggests that transfer of learning depends upon the presence of identical elements in
the original and new learning situations; i.e., transfer is always specific, never general. In later
versions of the theory, the concept of “belongingness” was introduced; connections are more
readily established if the person perceives that stimuli or responses go together (c.f. Gestalt
principles). Another concept introduced was “polarity” which specifies that connections occur
more easily in the direction in which they were originally formed than the opposite. Thorndike
also introduced the “spread of effect” idea, i.e., rewards affect not only the connection that
produced them but temporally adjacent connections as well.
● The classic example of Thorndike’s S-R theory was a cat learning to escape from a “puzzle
box” by pressing a lever inside the box. After much trial and error behavior, the cat learns to
associate pressing the lever (S) with opening the door (R). This S-R connection is established
because it results in a satisfying state of affairs (escape from the box). The law of exercise
specifies that the connection was established because the S-R pairing occurred many times (the
law of effect) and was rewarded (law of effect) as well as forming a single sequence (law of
readiness).
● Learning requires both practice and rewards (laws of effect /exercise)
● A series of S-R connections can be chained together if they belong to the same action sequence
(law of readiness).
● Transfer of learning occurs because of previously encountered situations.
● Intelligence is a function of the number of connections learned.
● Learning requires both practice and rewards (laws of effect /exercise)
● A series of S-R connections can be chained together if they belong to the same action sequence
(law of readiness).
● Transfer of learning occurs because of previously encountered situations.
● Intelligence is a function of the number of connections learned.
Positivist Orientation:
JOHN B. WATSON (WATSONIAN BEHAVIOURISM)

● “Psychology, being the science of behaviour, must deal with actions, which can be described
objectively, and thus, it becomes important to discard the use of mentalistic concepts and terminology,
which are subjective in nature” Watson.
● Watson’s behavioural psychology was an attempt to develop a science, without mentalistic notions and
subjective methods; a science which was as sound and objective as physics.

● Watson explained four types of behaviour:

I. Explicit (overt)
II. Implicit (covert)
III. Explicit unlearned behavior
IV. Implicit unlearned behaviour
● Explicit (overt)– behaviour which can be learned and is overt such as talking, writing, and
playing;
● Implicit (covert)– behaviour which can be learned but is covert such as the increased heart rate
caused by the sight of a dentist’s drill
● Explicit unlearned behaviour– behaviour which comes naturally and is visible such as grasping,
blinking, and sneezing;
● Implicit unlearned behaviour– behaviour, which comes naturally but is not visible such as
glandular secretion and circulatory changes.
According to Watson, these categories incorporate everything that a person does, that is, from thinking to
blinking. For studying these types of behaviors, Watson proposed four different methods:

● Observation– observing in either naturalistic or experimentally controlled environment;

● The conditioned reflex method: proposed by Pavlov;
● Testing– refers to behavior samples and not measurement of “capacity” or “personality”;
and
● Verbal reports– another type of overt behavior
Instincts

● Watson made the point that instincts are present in infants, which are quickly displaced by learned
habits.
● In 1914, the role of instincts in behaviour was accepted by him. Instincts had a noteworthy role in his
theory.
● In 1925, the idea of instincts in humans was completely discarded by him, asserting that there maybe
few simple responses as sneezing, crying, eliminating, crawling, sucking, and breathing, but no
complex, innate behavior patterns called instincts.
● Watson contended that, “People are made what they are by experiences and not inheritance.
Personality is ought to change depending upon experiences.”
● One of the reasons of Watson’s profuse popularity was his immense stress on nurturing effects of
parental and social environment with an implication of training children in whichever way possible.
● Behaviours that appeared to be inherent seemed to be as a result of early childhood training. Children
are not born with innate abilities to be great musicians or athletes, but the encouragement and
reinforcement of their parents and caregivers made their inclination towards such behaviours.
● With denying the role of instincts, Watson also dismissed the existence of inherited capacities like
temperaments or any kind of talents.
Emotions

● Watson, however, holding the belief that emotions represented observable responses, attempted to
experimentally create emotional responses in order to study them.
● Watson considered emotions to be bodily responses to specific stimuli. An internal body change such
as rapid heart rate is produced by the presence of an attacker, which results in an appropriate learned
response. No conscious perception of the emotion or sensations from the internal organs is suggested
by the theory.
● Watson believed internal responses to be predominant. Emotion is then understood as a kind of
implicit behaviour in which physical manifestations such as blushing, perspiring, or increased pulse
rate make the internal responses evident to some extent.
● The theory of James asserted that the perception of stimulus was immediately followed by the bodily
changes, the feeling of which results in experiencing emotion. The standpoint of James, on emotions,
was criticized by Watson.
● Watson professed that emotions can be described completely with regard to the objective stimulus
situation, the overt bodily response, and the internal physiological changes, discarding the conscious
perception of the situation and the feeling state.
● Watson investigated the stimuli that bring about emotional responses in infants in a classic research
and concluded that three fundamental emotions, namely, fear, rage, and love are shown by infants.
● Fear is produced as a result of loud noises and loss of support, rage is evoked by restriction of bodily
movements, and love is generated by caressing the skin or by rocking and patting.
● Fear, rage, and love were theorized as unlearned emotional responses and the composition of these
basic emotions gives rise to other human emotional responses by the process of conditioning, making
it possible to attach them to stimuli that were not originally capable of eliciting them.
Thought Processes

● Watson’s attempt was to reduce thinking to implicit motor behaviour by claiming that thought was
some sort of sensorimotor behaviour like all other aspects of human functioning.
● Going by the reason that thinking behaviour must involve implicit speech reactions or movements,
Watson, reduced thinking to subvocal talking, which relies on the same muscular habits that are learnt
for overt speech.
● These muscular habits turn inaudible as children grow up because they are constantly warned by
parents to stop talking to themselves, subsequently making thinking a way of silently talking to
themselves.
● According to Watson, the voice box, that is, the muscles of tongue and larynx, are involved in this
implicit behaviour of thinking.
● Overt reactions to the stimuli that are expressed by gestures such as frowns and shrugs, are also
representations of thoughts.
Learning

● Watson was convinced that thorndike's law of effect ( when satisfaction follows an association, it is more likely to
be repeated) was unnecessarily mentalistic. Thorndike believed that the center of satisfiers in the brain
made reinforcement work. However, Watson presumed this to be a feeling or a state of consciousness.
● According to Watson, the critical thing about conditioning is its ability to cause contiguity, that is,
causing events to be associated in time.
● Rather than relying on thorndike's law of effect, Watson explained learning with respect to the ancient
principles of contiguity and frequency.
● Watson specified that a learning trial always ends with the animal making a correct response in a
learning situation. This indicates that the correct responses are more likely to occur as compared to
incorrect responses and the probability of repeating a response is increased as the frequency of its
occurrence increases. This is the law of frequency.
● This also indicates that the final response of the organism in learning situation will be the one which it
will likely make when it will next encounter the same situation, known as the law of recency (things
most recently learned are best remembered) as labeled by Watson. Watson concluded that mechanical
arrangement of stimuli and responses results in learning.
The Mind-Body Problem: Four views on the mind-body relationship existed by the time Watson had began
to formulate his theory. These are given as follows:

● Interactionist view– According to this view, the mind and body interact in a way that the mind
influences the body and likewise the body can influence the mind. This view was proposed by Rene
Descartes and was accepted by William James.
● Psychophysical parallelism– As per this view, mental and bodily events are parallel having no
interaction between them. (if a person wants to move their hand, i.e. to grasp an object with their fingers, that want is
made aware to God and then God makes the person's hand move. )
● Epiphenomenalism– This view posits that mental events are the byproducts of bodily events but do not
cause behaviour. That is, bodily events cause mental events, but mental events cannot cause bodily
events.
● Physical monism (materialism)– This view discarded the existence of mental events (consciousness)
altogether.
● Initially, accepting the epiphenomenalism viewpoint, Watson later switched to the physical monism
viewpoint. Watson maintained that consciousness is an unprovable plain assumption. He, thus,
resolved the mind-body issue by straightforwardly denying the existence of mind. He argued that any
approach to psychology that approves the study of consciousness in any form cannot be called science.
CRITICISMS OF WATSONIAN BEHAVIOURISM:
The following two points summarize the major criticism against Watsonian behaviourism:

1) Psychology got restricted by behaviorism since it confined the behavior solely to the peripheral events of
stimulus and response elements. Watson also ignored physical, central mediation of stimulus and response
bonds by relinquishing mental events. ‘

2) Watsonian behaviourism resorted to reductionism by assuming that behaviour is reducible to

environmental stimuli and observable responses.
OVERALL IMPACT OF WATSON

Watson’s view of psychology has two long lasting effects:

1) The major goal of psychology was changed from the description and explanation of states of
consciousness to the prediction and control of behavior.

2) Overt behavior became almost the exclusive subject matter of psychology

Clark Hull:

● Clark Hull’s systematic approach is called hypothetico-deductive theory. This theory came closest to a
comprehensive treatment of behavioural issues governed by common principles. The central idea of
Hull’s approach is habit formation, which is the accumulation of experiences of effective adaption.
● Hull’s scientific approach was truly systematic. He advocated a hypothetico-deductive structure to
guide research as he recognized the importance of observation and experimentation.
● Following the approach of Euclidian geometry, in this strategy a behaviour principle is first deduced
from hypothesis and rigorously tested. A brief supported by a successful test to form the postulates,
and a failure results in revision of the postulates. Following a logical progression, Hull’s approach was
positivist and verified through empirical demonstration.
● Hull’s system relied heavily on mathematical predictions and was complex. As his experimental tests
progressed over time, he made detailed modifications. Hulls theory of learning is defined in terms of
the reduction of drives arising from motivational states as essentially it is focused on the necessity of
reinforcement. A homeostatic model seeking equilibrium from drive forces is the context used to view
the behaving organism.
● The core of Hull’s analysis is the idea of intervening variables. Intervening variables are unobservable
entities that psychologists employ to account for observable behaviour. Thus, from a purely
behaviouristic perspective, Hull extended Watson’s conceptualization of behaviour in terms of the
peripheral (S–R) events to a consideration of central, organismic factors, stimulus– organism–response
(S–O–R), intervening variables. It was Woodworth who had suggested this expansion of the
behavioural model, in 1918, but it was Hull who systematically articulated organismic variables.
● In Hull’s theory, Habit strength, (S HR), is the chief intervening variable for learning. It depends on
two factors for associations.

I. Contiguity is the first principle, which means that a close temporal relationship must exist between
stimulus and reinforcement.
II. Reinforcement is the second principle, which is defined in its primary form as drive reduction. There
are also secondary reinforcements, which are cues that are reliably associated with the primary
reinforcement and take on the reinforcement properties. Eg, if in the presence of light, a hungry rat is
repeatedly given food for correct responses, the light takes on some of the rewarding characteristics of
the food.

● In order to get the basic procedure in which learning occurs as contiguity of stimulus and response
under conditions of reinforcement, Hull attempted to integrate thorndike’s law of effect with pavlovian
conditioning.
● Habit strength (s H r) and drive (D) interact to produce what Hull referred to as reaction potential (s E
r). Reaction potential is defined as the “Tendency to produce some reaction under the effect of the
stimulus.” S ER is a theoretical concept, which is not synonymous with observable responses. It is the
product of S HR and D:
sHr×D=sEr

● Hull’s intervening variables, therefore, represents a qualitative conceptualization along with an attempt
to define qualitative relationships. For example, on the basis of the aforementioned expression, little
performance would be observed from a hungry but naive rat. In such cases, drive will be high, and
habit strength is not, which shows a low tendency to respond.

● Similarly, a rat with a well-established response to bar-press for food reward would not perform if it is
not hungry, accounting for the distinction between learning and performance. In such a case, habit
strength is high, but drive is low, which will produce little expectation of reaction potential.
● In order to complete his framework for intervening variables that mediate performance, Hull included
negative, inhibiting factors (I) that result from fatigue and boredom, as a by-product of performance.
Hull also included the contributions of stimulus magnitude (Response) (V), such as, a faint versus a
loud; the magnitude of reinforcement (K) such as one versus four food pellets per correct response;
and the oscillating, momentary threshold of reaction for an individual subject (s O r). All of these
intervening variables are related in the following manner:

sHr×D+V+K-I-sOr=sEr

● As Hull’s theory developed this summary equation was itself articulated into more refined
components. Hull’s entire detailed structure was applied to the quantification of all possible influences
on the acquisition of adaptive behaviour. His conceptualization has been supported by laboratory tests
that have been largely conducted on rats. This analytic approach assumed that more complex forms of
behaviour could be derived from these intervening variables.
● Despite being supported by experimental tests, Hull’s theory as a whole was not found to be very
successful. Empirical discrepancies were found in Hull’s system, in that it was unable to deal with
insightful and rapid asset of behaviour.
● Hull had stressed upon the importance of practice during training, which produced continuous but
gradual improvement during acquisition. More importantly, the theory failed in its attempt to quantify
the conceptual relationships among intervening variables.
● Hull’s views have also been found to be premature. His system is often suggested to be a fixed, rigid
structure that is perhaps not suitable for the variability of human and animal behaviour. Nevertheless,
Hull’s system has been found to be superb as a model for research.
Edward Tolman:
● Edward Tolman’s approach is called cognitive behaviourism. Tolman proposed a consideration of
behaviour that was molar, as opposed to molecular in his major work, Purposive Behaviour in Animals
and Men (1932).
● According to him, molar behavior (behaviour described in large response units rather than smaller
ones) is a unified and complete act, which provides the proper unit for psychology. He suggested that
underlying molecular elements like neural, muscular, or glandular processes are not good enough to be
considered as a molar act.
● Tolman relies heavily on many of the premises of Gestalt psychology. (Gestalt theory emphasizes that
the whole of anything is greater than its parts.) He used the term Gestalt to describe holistic, insightful
learning experiences. Further, his notion of molar behaviour and adoption of mental isomorphism were
directly taken from Gestalt psychology. He used the term mental isomorphism to describe the central
product of learning in terms of the acquisition of field maps, which exist in the brain as cognitive
representations of the learned environment.
● Tolman’s laws of acquisition mainly focused on practice that builds up sign Gestalts, or expectancies.
For instance, in his maze learning experiments with rats, Tolman described the acquisition of place
learning, which he inferred as the acquisition of relationships or cognitive maps in the subject.
● In the same way, he demonstrated expectancy of reinforcement, when he found that rats that were
trained to one kind of reward switched to a more appealing food.
● Finally, he demonstrated the idea of latent learning in rats, which suggests different effects on
performance levels can be applied, depending on the quality of reinforcement.
● In all these experiments, Tolman clearly showed that organisms are guided by central, mediating
processes that are beyond the environment. In doing so, he used cognitive explanations as intervening
variables.
● The theoretical orientation of Tolman has not been very systematic, when compared to the approach of
Hull. Further, Tolman explanations of the central mediation of cognitive learning have been found to
be vague.
● Despite these criticisms, Tolman is credited with bringing about a new perspective of behaviourism.
He enabled behaviourism to move away from the reductionist, molecular view of Watson.
● Additionally, his discovery of performance being different from learning, which he even repeatedly,
showed that learning is not something that can simply be reduced to elements of stimulus-response-
reinforcement. He was able to firmly establish the notions of molar behavior, and stimulated a great
deal of research in it.
Burrhus Fredrick Skinner

● In 1950 B. F. Skinner published a paper “ Are Theories of Learning Necessary?” This paper brought
about what is called the end of the theory building phase of behaviorism. Skinner felt that theory
building had a number of limitations.He felt that theories are based on a-priori assumptions that are
questionable and misrepresent behavioral sciences.
● Instead of theories, Skinner suggested a system of behaviourism that is guided by data. For Skinner,
theory should only be used in making descriptive generalizations that are made on the basis of facts,
using a positivistic approach. Skinner’s approach had more of a methodological emphasis.
● He propagated a return to the study of behaviour with respect to peripheral events (coincident). He,
thus, was completely against the usage of central mediating agencies of behaviour, whether they were
cognitive or physiological.
● Instead of central mediating agencies, Skinner strongly believed that behaviour is only determined by
the environment.
● Because of this, Skinner’s approach has been referred to as radical environmentalism. Due to his
strong emphasis on environmental determinacy, Skinner believed that if the environment is controlled,
then behaviour can also be controlled.
● For this reason, he gave preference to thorough and complete single subject studies, comparing the
subject in different environmental conditions. He belived that orgnisms differ due to differences in the
environmental and nor individual differences inherent in them.
● The study of operant behavior (behavior “controlled” by its consequences) was the basis for Skinner’s
research. When response are caused by specific stimuli, then it is referred to respondent behvaior
(behavior that is caused by stimulus in the environment).
● In contrast to that, operant behaviour is something that is ongoing, without any apparent stimulus.
Operant behaviour is also about the organism operating on the environment.
● To study operant behaviour, Skinner developed an environmental chamber in which birds could
engage in pecking (The pigeons were trained by Skinner to peck at a target, and they rewarded with food when they
completed the task correctly) Skinner felt that using such framework makes it easier to control the
environment enabling to record ongoing, operant rates of responses.
● According to Skinner, learning takes place when the operant behaviour is controlled by reinforcement
from the environment. Initially, the operant responses are shaped by reinforcement of estimation of the
desired operant behaviour.
● In order to increase the probability of the operant, a reinforcing event is introduced after the intially
refined operent. For example, if food is presented after the act of bar pressing.
● Therefore, for Skinner reinforcement is the probability of changes in the operant rate. This makes his
idea of reinforcement to be different from that of thorndike and hull.
● Thorndike saw reinforcement in terms of satisfire or annoyers, and hull saw saw reinforcement in
terms of drive reduction. Skinner avoided these two ways of defining reinforcement.
● Skinner showed that specific response rates can be obtained for particular schedules of reinforcement,
demonstrating the power of reinforcement. In the same way, he translated conditioning processes such
as generalization and discrimination to a reinforcement contingency framework.
● Skinner has been heavily criticized for his approach. His idea of behavioral control and his mechanical
conception of human nature have not gone down well with a lot of people.
● Skinner however felt that human activity does not involve personal freedom or self determinacy. He
argued that the humanistic characteristics that are assigned to human beings, making them different
from other species, is more of an illusion that has been created throughout history.
● According to Skinner, to be truly human means to be in control, understanding and using the
environment for benefitting the self.
➢ Cognitive revolution:

● Cognitive psychology has grown rapidly since the 1950s. A milestone was the publication of Cognitive
Psychology in 1967. This book gave a new legitimacy to the field.
● In the 1970s, a related new field called cognitive science emerged; it attempts to integrate research
efforts from psychology, philosophy, linguistics, neuroscience, and AI. The fields of cognitive
psychology and cognitive science overlap.
● Cognitive science makes greater use of such methods as logical analysis and the computer simulation
of cognitive processes, whereas cognitive psychology relies heavily on experimental techniques for
studying behavior that grew out of the behaviorist era.
● Cognitive psychology as we know it today took form in the two decades between 1950 and 1970, in
the cognitive revolution that overthrew behaviorism. Three main influences account for its modern
development.
● The first was research on human performance, which was given a great boost during World War II
when governments badly needed practical information about how to train soldiers to use sophisticated
equipment and how to deal with problems such as the breakdown of attention under stress.
● Behaviorism offered no help with such practical issues. The work during the war had a very practical
bent, the issues it raised stayed with psychologists when they went back to their academic laboratories
after the war.
● The work of the British psychologist Donald Broadbent at the Applied Psychology Research Unit in
Cambridge was probably the most influential in integrating ideas from human performance research
with new ideas that were developing in an area called information theory.
● Information theory is an abstract way of analyzing the processing of information. Broadbent and other
psychologists, such as George Miller, Fred Attneave, and Wendell Garner, initially developed these
ideas with respect to perception and attention, but such analyses soon pervaded all of cognitive
psychology.
● The second influence, which was closely related to the development of the information-processing
approach, was developments in computer science, particularly AI, which tries to get computers to
behave intelligently, as noted above.
● Allen Newell and Herbert Simon, both at Carnegie Mellon University, spent most of their lives
educating cognitive psychologists about the implications of AI (and educating workers in AI about the
implications of cognitive psychology).
● Although the direct influence of AI-based theories on cognitive psychology has always been minimal,
its indirect influence has been enormous. A host of concepts have been taken from computer science
and used in psychological theories.
● Probably more important, observing how we can analyze the intelligent behavior of a machine has
largely liberated us from our inhibitions and misconceptions about analyzing our own intelligence.
● The third influence on cognitive psychology was linguistics, which studies the structure of language.
● In the 1950s, Noam Chomsky, a linguist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, began to
develop a new mode of analyzing the structure of language.
● His work showed that language was much more complex than had previously been believed and that
many of the prevailing behaviorist formulations were incapable of explaining these complexities.
● Chomsky’s linguistic analyses proved critical in enabling cognitive psychologists to fight off the
prevailing behaviorist conceptions.
● George Miller, at Harvard University in the 1950s and early 1960s, was instrumental in bringing these
linguistic analyses to the attention of psychologists and in identifying new ways of studying language.
Information Processing Model.

● The information-processing approach draws comparison between human cognition and computerized
processing of information.
● Central to the information-processing approach is the idea that cognition can be thought of as
information (what we see, hear, read about, think about) passing through a system (us or, more
specifically, our minds).
● Information is processed in stages and that it is stored in specific places while being processed. One
goal within this framework, then, is to determine what these stages and storage places are and how
they work.
Received Stored Recoded Transformed Retrieved Transmitted

● Other assumptions underlie the information-processing approach as well. One is that people’s
cognitive abilities can be thought of as “systems” of interrelated capacities.
● Different individuals have different cognitive capacities—different attention spans, memory capacities,
and language skills, to name a few.
● Information-processing theorists try to find the relationships between these capacities, to explain how
individuals go about performing specific cognitive tasks.
● In this model, boxes represent stores, and arrows represent processes
(leading some to refer to information-processing models as “boxes-
and-arrows” models of cognition).
● A general-purpose information-processing system is shown in Figure 1-2. Note the various memory
stores where information is held for possible later use and the different processes that operate on the
information at different points or that transfer it from store to store.
● Certain processes, such as detection and recognition, are used at the beginning of information
processing; others, such as recoding or retrieval, have to do with memory storage; still others, such as
reasoning or concept formation, have to do with putting information together in new ways.
● The information-processing tradition is rooted in structuralism, in that its followers attempt to identify
the basic capacities and processes we use in cognition.
● Psychologists working in the information-processing tradition are interested in relating individual and
developmental differences to differences in basic capacities and processes. Typically, information-
processing psychologists use experimental and quasi experimental techniques in their investigation.
Thank You!