Behaviorism: The Essence of a Pedagogical Approach

Contents:

• What is behaviorism
• How the behaviorist approach to learning came about
• B.F. Skinner's radical behaviorism
• How the behaviorist approach is used in learning
• What behaviorism is criticized for
• Behaviorism vs. cognitivism

Modern researchers believe that designing effective learning is impossible without understanding how human thinking works. This approach is called cognitivism. But this wasn't always the case. For a long time, a completely different point of view dominated educational theory: internal processes are secondary, and human behavior itself is what matters most.
This approach is called behaviorism. And although over time it has lost its positions, some of its provisions are still successfully used in education.

What is behaviorism

The essence of behaviorism is partly hidden in its name: it comes from the English word behavior. It is the behavior and behavioral reactions of humans and animals that are the subject of study and analysis of behaviorist psychology.
Supporters of this school believe that behavior is determined by interaction with the environment. Simply put, behavior is a set of motor reactions to external stimuli - they are also called stimuli. If you know the nature of the stimulus, then the response can be predicted. According to behaviorism, responses can be either innate (called unconditioned) or acquired (conditioned).
Learning in the behaviorist approach is the modification or formation of desired behavior, and skills are formed through the development of conditioned reflexes. Behaviorists, by the way, also considered thinking a skill.
According to this approach, the teacher must manipulate the environment in such a way as to stimulate the desired behavioral changes in students. Behavioral psychology views the latter as a "blank slate." That is, it practically does not take into account innate or inherited (genetic) factors, emotions and other internal processes.

How the behaviorist approach to learning came about

John B. Watson, an American philosopher and psychologist, is considered the "father" of behaviorism in psychology and pedagogy. In 1913, he published the article "Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist" (this work is often also called the Behaviorism Manifesto). In it, the psychologist proposed abandoning attempts to subject consciousness to experimental research and instead focusing on the behavioral manifestations of intelligence.
Psychology, Watson argued, should be purely objective and focus exclusively on predicting and controlling observed behavior. According to the psychologist, thoughts, feelings, and other internal processes cannot be observed or controlled using scientific methods, and therefore should be ignored when analyzing behavior.
According to Watson, behavior is nothing more than a reaction to a stimulus. He represented this relationship as the S-R formula (stimulus-response, which translated from English means "stimulus and reaction") and believed that changing behavior through influencing it with the help of stimuli is learning.

Watson's ideas are now called classical (or methodological) behaviorism. Researchers also distinguish radical behaviorism, a later, expanded, and slightly modified version. It was proposed by Burrhus Frederick Skinner, and we will discuss it further.
However, it would be unfair to claim that Watson invented or developed behavioral theory. Rather, he generalized the research conducted before him in the field of behavioral reactions and popularized in the psychological community the idea of ​​learning through the control of observed behavior, and also coined the terms "behaviorism" and "behaviorist."
We will list several researchers and their work that influenced both Watson and the development of the behavioral approach in general.

Russian roots of behaviorism

Despite the fact that the United States is formally considered the birthplace of behaviorism, most historians admit that the origins of this approach should be sought in the works of Russian physiologists.
The first in this row is usually called Ivan Mikhailovich Sechenov, who believed that any mental phenomenon, including thinking, is based on physiological processes - reflexes.
Sechenov raised the question of the existence of brain reflexes - learned, acquired in the course of individual development and dependent on the conditions in which they are formed. He also discovered the existence of a central inhibitory apparatus in the brain—mechanisms that suppress or inhibit the body's responses to external stimuli (i.e., reflexes).
The study of reflexes was continued in the works of Vladimir Mikhailovich Bekhterev, who believed that psychology should be an objective science and investigated the relationships between environmental factors and observed behavior.
Another great physiologist and the first Russian Nobel laureate, Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, derived one of the most important tenets of behaviorism—the principle of classical (respondent) conditioning. This is a form of unconscious learning in which the repeated pairing of an unconditioned and conditioned stimulus causes the organism to respond to the conditioned stimulus as it would to the unconditioned one.
Pavlov discovered this principle while studying the digestive system of dogs. He noticed that the animals began salivating even before food entered their mouths—for example, in the presence of a technician who usually fed them. The scientist subsequently conducted several experiments to confirm his suspicions.
For example, he began ringing a bell before giving the animals food. At first, the dogs did not react to the sound, but over time they learned to associate feeding with the ringing of the bell. In behaviorist terms, dogs began to produce a conditioned (i.e., learned, acquired) response to a neutral stimulus.

The Little Albert Experiments

While Pavlov conducted experiments only with animals, John Watson attempted to prove that classically conditioned behavior could also be achieved in humans. In 1920, together with his assistant (and later wife) Rosalie Rayner, he published a study that became known as the Little Albert experiment. Today, this work is considered one of the most unethical in the history of psychology.
During the experiment, a nine-month-old baby (his real name is unknown; in Watson's notes, he appeared as Albert B.) was first shown a rabbit, a white rat, a dog, a monkey, and various objects, such as masks with and without hair, cotton balls, and a burning newspaper. None of this frightened the child.
However, the next time the boy was shown a white rat, Watson hit a metal pipe with a hammer. "Albert" was frightened by the loud sound and burst into tears. The researchers repeated the action several times: showing the child a rat and hitting the pipe. Soon the baby began to expect a loud noise when a rat appeared, and then began to be afraid and cry at the mere sight of a rodent.
Later, it turned out that not only conditioning but also generalization of stimuli occurred, that is, the child began to be afraid of any white and fluffy objects: even Watson in a Santa Claus mask with a white beard scared him.

Edward Lee Thorndike and his cats

Another scientist whose work influenced behaviorism was Edward Lee Thorndike, a professor of educational psychology at Columbia University. He conducted research on animal behavior, specifically training cats to escape from specially designed puzzle boxes.
These were small boxes with a door attached to a rope and a weight. The cat could only escape by pressing a lever, which tightened the rope, lifted the weight, and opened the door. Once the cat was free, it was rewarded with food. Subsequently, such rewards for successfully completing an action or required behavior were called positive reinforcement in experiments.
Thorndike discovered that with each new attempt, the animals were able to escape from the box increasingly faster: while at first the result was more random, then the cats learned the required behavior and escaped faster. Thus, the researcher came to the conclusion that animals learn by trial and error, remembering the actions that lead to success.
During his experiments, Thorndike also formulated several laws important for the behaviorist approach. Among them:

• The Law of Exercise.It states that learned behavior is strengthened by practice, and disappears without it. That is, in order for a skill to be preserved, it must be trained.
• The Law of Effect.Its essence is that consequences - reward or punishment - are necessary conditions for learning. Any behavior that is followed by pleasant consequences is likely to be repeated, and behavior that leads to something unpleasant is likely to be stopped.

B.F. Skinner's Radical Behaviorism

By about the mid-1930s, many researchers and theorists began looking for ways to modify Watson's methodological behaviorism, since it could not explain such phenomena as:

• the apparent spontaneity of behavior - when some reactions develop seemingly without the characteristic stimulus that causes them;
• variability of behavior: even when a characteristic stimulus preceded the response, the topography and frequency of responses often differed significantly.

Among such neo-behaviorists, Burrhus Frederick Skinner stands out, whose ideas and approach are today called radical behaviorism.
This American psychologist believed that an individual's behavior is determined not only by external stimuli, but also by the internal activity of the person himself. For example, his ideas about the consequences of his reactions and actions in certain situations, which were formed under the influence of experience and attitudes.
Based on Thorndike's law of effect, Skinner formulated the theory of operant conditioning - a learning method in which behavior is controlled by its consequences. For every reaction, the body must receive feedback, which behaviorists call reinforcement. It can be:

• Positive.This event increases the likelihood that the action will be repeated. For example, if a parent praised a child for putting away his toys after playing, the likelihood that the child will do the same thing again in the future increases.
• Negative.An unpleasant event that can be stopped by changing the behavior. For example, a parent frowns and scolds when a child is naughty, but as soon as the child stops misbehaving, the parent smiles again.

It is important to note that behaviorists distinguish between negative reinforcement and punishment. Punishment is a result. Most often, it leads to the disappearance of unwanted behavior, while negative reinforcement accompanies an action and teaches behavior modification to avoid an unpleasant reaction.
Skinner believed that reinforcement is always more effective in training than punishment, and positive reinforcement works better than negative reinforcement.
Skinner attempted to confirm his theses experimentally, studying the behavior of various animals. Inspired by Thorndike's example, he created his own device, now known as the Skinner box - a closed apparatus with a lever or button inside and a hole through which food entered the device.

An animal, such as a rat, was placed in a box. Each time it pressed a button, a light came on and food appeared (positive reinforcement). At first, the presses were random, but soon the rats understood the connection and deliberately pressed the lever to get a portion of food.
In another version of the experiment, Skinner demonstrated the work of negative reinforcement: he electrified the floor of the box, and programmed the lever to turn off the current for 30 seconds. In this way, the rats learned to press the button to get rid of unpleasant, painful sensations. The scientist found that the rats did not learn as quickly as in studies with positive reinforcement.
But Skinner's experiments with pigeons became especially famous, during which the psychologist suggested that pigeons might exhibit… superstitiousness. Several birds were first starved and then placed in a cage. At regular intervals, a food dispenser was lowered into the cage for a few seconds and then raised again.
Soon, in anticipation of food, the pigeons began to exhibit strange behavior, such as turning counterclockwise or making rocking movements. Skinner concluded that the pigeons were repeating the behavior they had tried when they were first offered a food reward. As the food appeared again and again, the meaningless behavior increased.
The psychologist suggested that this behavior of the birds resembles the superstition of people who, by doing something meaningless (knocking on wood, crossing their fingers), believe that they can achieve what they want.

How the behaviorist approach is used in learning

The history of behaviorism can be recounted for a long time, because the above-mentioned scientists are far from the only ones who worked on identifying behavioral learning strategies. For example, Clark Hull, Edward Tolman, Edwin Guthrie, and Albert Bandura also greatly influenced the development of behaviorism.
These are the main principles that form the methodological basis of the approach.

Many strategies of behavioral psychology continue to be actively used in teaching to this day. For example, everyone knows examples of positive reinforcement, when desired behavior and achieved results are encouraged, and undesirable actions are often followed by punishment: a bad grade, an entry in the diary, and so on.

The effectiveness of such teaching methods is confirmed by research. For example, in 2017, scientists from Indonesia presented the results of applying the principles described by Thorndike and Skinner to develop speech skills among 32 seventh-graders.
The authors of the experiment claim that building lesson plans based on behaviorist methods (using reinforcements to enhance motivation, training new skills in accordance with the law on physical exercise) had a positive effect on the development of speaking skills among the study participants.

Why behaviorism is criticized

Around the fifties and sixties of the twentieth century, behaviorism began to give way to another pedagogical approach - cognitivism, which, psychologists believe, appeared and developed precisely as a response to behaviorism and thereby its aspects, with which many scientists disagreed.
Here is what the behaviorist view of psychology and pedagogy has been and continues to be criticized for:

• Behaviorism focuses exclusively on external observable behavior and ignores internal mental processes. It does not explain how humans learn and process information.
• Some critics believe that reducing behavior to the stimulus-response-reinforcement formula is an oversimplification.
• The approach does not explain learning or behavioral changes that occur in the absence of environmental influences. Meanwhile, such phenomena may signal the existence of internal psychological or mental processes.

Behaviorism vs. Cognitivism

Even cognitivists pay tribute to behaviorism. For example, in 2004, on the centenary of B. Skinner's birth, the famous American psychologist and memory specialist Henry Roediger III published an article entitled "Whatever Happened to Behaviorism?"
In it, he argues that the behavioral approach is not a thing of the distant past, but "is alive and well, and nothing has 'happened' to it." Roediger points out that behavioral therapy, for example, remains the primary treatment for many phobias and behavioral disorders, as well as autism spectrum disorders. And respected behavioral journals such as the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior and the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis continue to be published.
Behaviorism "won the intellectual battle," Roediger believes, and all psychologists are actually behaviorists.
A similar opinion was expressed almost 20 years later by journalist and author of Teaching Machines: The History of Personalized Learning, Audrey Waters. She notes: Although it seems to us that education is now built rather on the principles of cognitivism, modern EdTech is based on the ideas of behaviorists.

With the help of distance learning systems, proctoring, and other technologies, schools, universities, and businesses not only monitor the behavior of those they teach—they try to change that behavior. Moreover, many things have crept into the educational process from business. And along with them, so have goals: monitoring behavior, striving for productivity, and so on.
Of course, this is a rather radical point of view, and Waters is known as a relentless critic of large tech companies (albeit a champion of new technologies in education). But it clearly demonstrates the main idea: although the ideas of behaviorists have faded into the background, it is too early to write them off.