Behavioural Psychology

Behavioural psychology is one of the important fields of psychology and in order to understand it we must first understand what behaviour is, as defined by American Psychological Association behaviour is “an organism’s activities in response to external or internal stimuli, including objectively observable activities, introspectively observable activities, and non conscious processes.” So we can say that our response to an activity in our environment is behaviour, it is something one can observe.

It can be said that behavioural psychology is the branch that deals with understanding and observing human behaviour. Behavioural psychology seeks to find out why we behave in a certain way and different aspects of human behaviour. Various behavioural psychologists like Albert Bandura, Evan Pavlov, and Hugo Munsterberg used different ways to understand human behaviour; how environment shapes behaviour, how we imitate others and learn from our environment.  Behavioural psychology is the study and analysis of human behaviour. The concept of behavioural psychology is relevant in psychotherapy.

Ivan Pavlov was a Russian psychologist who performed experiments on classical conditioning who showed how we can bring a change in an organism’s behaviour by pairing two stimuli a number of times to evoke a response. One stimulus is called as unconditioned stimulus and other is called as conditioned stimulus. This experiment does have a little significance in human life as well as we consider emotional responses important. For a person any significant face, scene or voice may produce a response which can be said as a conditioned stimulus that is the one which evokes the response whereas unconditioned stimulus is the one which produces a response after being paired with the first stimulus a few number of  times.

On the other hand Albert Bandura showed how we learn from our environment, how environment influences our behaviour which is called as social learning.  We observe and then we behave. His bobo doll experiment is very famous where he showed how children pay attention to other people’s behaviour and then imitate them; this can be regardless of their gender or whether it is right or wrong.

The people that they observe are termed as “models”, these models can be their parents, siblings or family members. They imitate the behaviour if they feel it is rewarding.

This does explain certain behaviour of human beings which they follow as a standard for social acceptance or for rewards.  Even BF Skinner performed an experiment to show operant conditioning in his skinner box where hungry rat was kept, firstly rat was inactive but then the rat started exploring the box and discovered lever inside the box and food got released, for the next time when he grew more hungry he pressed it again and this process continued now conditioning was done as every time rat was rewarded for his behaviour.

Another behaviourist John Watson performed an experiment on little Albert where he induced fear in the child by conditioning, his experiment showed how emotions can be induced by conditioning. He even claimed that during the developmental stage of infant the environment plays a really important role, he understood how important nurturing is in the upbringing of a child.

“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 beggar-man 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.”- Watson

So we can say that in behavioural psychology we try to understand behaviour of living organisms. Behaviour can be acquired through conditioning, social learning, by reinforcements and many other ways . This view also believes in the importance of heredity.

References

https://dictionary.apa.org/behavior

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_learning_theory

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Watson