behaviourism

behaviourism

Highly influential academic school of psychology that dominated psychological theory in the U.S. between World War I and World War II. Classical behaviourism concerned itself exclusively with the objective evidence of behaviour (measured responses to stimuli) and excluded ideas, emotions, and inner mental experience (see conditioning). It emerged in the 1920s from the work of John B. Watson (who borrowed from Ivan Pavlov) and was developed in subsequent decades by Clark L. Hull and B.F. Skinner. Through the work of Edward C. Tolman, strict behaviourist doctrines began to be supplemented or replaced by those admitting such variables as reported mental states and differences in perception. A natural outgrowth of behaviourist theory was behaviour therapy.

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behaviourism (US), behaviorism

1. a school of psychology that regards the objective observation of the behaviour of organisms (usually by means of automatic recording devices) as the only proper subject for study and that often refuses to postulate any intervening mechanisms between the stimulus and the response

2. Philosophy the doctrine that the mind has no separate existence but that statements about the mind and mental states can be analysed into statements about actual and potential behaviour