The Behavioural Approach

The second 'approach' to Psychology we looked at was the Behavioural Approach. This rejects the idea that we need to understand the mind at all, and instead focuses on how behaviours are learned through simple mechanisms - classical and operant conditioning - that can be studied in rats and pigeons. The assumption of extreme behaviourists (who don't really exist any more) is that learned associations can explain all human behaviour.

Here is the presentation from the lesson on Wednesday 14th, including the slides on the debates in Psychology (nature vs nurture; reductionism; Psychology as a Science; Free Will vs determinism) which we discussed the following lesson.

Homework was to define, in your own words, the following:

• Classical conditioning
• Operant conditioning
• Scientific psychology
• Reductionism
• Free will
• Determinism
• Nature
• Nurture