"Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select--doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief, and, yes, even beggarman and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors. I am going beyond my facts and I admit it, but so have the advocates of the contrary and they have been doing it for many thousands of years." –John B. Watson
John B. Watson (1878-1958) is the father of the theory known as behaviorism. He was not interested in studying the impact of internal factors such as genetic influences and the workings of the mind on human development. He concentrated on what he could see: behavior, or what people do. Watson believed that the environment is the most important factor in determining our personality, our abilities, and all our other qualities.
Behaviorism: the theory that focuses on environmental control of observable behavior
One way in which we learn from our environment is through a process called classical conditioning.
Classical conditioning: the process by which a stimulus (the unconditioned stimulus) that naturally evokes a certain response (the unconditioned response) is paired repeatedly with a neutral stimulus; eventually the neutral stimulus becomes the conditioned stimulus and evokes the same response, now called the conditioned response
John B. Watson (1878-1958) is the father of the theory known as behaviorism. He was not interested in studying the impact of internal factors such as genetic influences and the workings of the mind on human development. He concentrated on what he could see: behavior, or what people do. Watson believed that the environment is the most important factor in determining our personality, our abilities, and all our other qualities.
Behaviorism: the theory that focuses on environmental control of observable behavior
One way in which we learn from our environment is through a process called classical conditioning.
Classical conditioning: the process by which a stimulus (the unconditioned stimulus) that naturally evokes a certain response (the unconditioned response) is paired repeatedly with a neutral stimulus; eventually the neutral stimulus becomes the conditioned stimulus and evokes the same response, now called the conditioned response