Other Psychology's Person

Pavlon, Watson And The Dawn of Behaviourism

  Ivan Pavlov,like freud,was not a psychologist. He was a Russian Physiologist who working with dogs,had shown that reflex  such as salivation,which is normally produced by actually having food in one's mouth could be stimulus such as the sound of a bell. He would ring the bell,give the dogs food,and they would salivate. After several repetitions, the dogs would salivate to the sound of the bell before the food was presented-a learned (or "condition") reflexive response and this process called Conditioning

   In the early 1900s,psychologist John.B Wattson had tired of the arguing among the structuralists; he challenged the functionalist viewpoint ,ass well aspsychoanalisis,with his own "Science of Behaviour",or Behaviourism.(Watson,1924). Watson wanted to bring psychology back to a focus scientific inquiry ,and he felt that the only way to do that was ignore the whole "consciusness" issue and focus only on observable behaviour-something that could be directly seen and measured. he had read of Pavlov's work and thought that conditioning could form the basis of his new perspective of behaviourism.

  Watson was certainly aware of freud's work and his views on unconscious repression. Freud believed that all behaviour steem form unconscious motivation,whereas Watson believed that all behaviour is learned. Freud had stated that a phobia, an irrational fear,is really a symptom of an underlying,repressed conflict and cannot be "cured" without years of psychoanalysis to uncover and understand the repressed material.

Watson believed that phobias are learned through the process of conditioning and set out to prove it. He took a baby,known as "Little Albert" and taught him to fear a white rat by making a loud,scary noise every time the infant saw the rat,until finally seeing thet rat caused the infant to cry and become fearful (Watson & Rayner,1920). Even though "Little Albert" was not afraid of the rat at the start,the experiment worked very well-in fact ,"Little Albert" became afraid of anything white and fuzzy,including white beards and furry rabbits skins.

  Watson wanted to prove that all behaviour was a result of a stimulus-response relationship such as that described by Pavlov. Because Freud and his ideas about unconscious motivation were becoming a dominant force, Watson felt the need to show the world that a much simpler explanation could be found. althought scaring a baby sounds a little cruel,he felt that the advancement of the science of behaviour was worth the baby's relatively brief discomfort. One of Watson's graduate students later decided to repeat Watson and Rayne's study but added training that would "cancel out" the phobic reaction of the baby to the white rat.

Behaviourism,like a Psychoanalysis is still a major perspective in psychology today. It has also influenced the development of the others perspective,such as cognitive psychology.