Behavioral Approach

BEHAVIORIAL APPROACH I want to use behaviorist approach to explain the time I taught my dog how to sit and play tricks. Behaviorism is an avenue in psychology, which has associates with elements of reasoning, process, and theory. It started in the early twentieth century as a reaction to "mentalist" psychology, which often had difficulty making predictions that, could be tested using rigorous experimental methods. The primary precept of behaviorism, as embodied in the writings of John B Watson, B. F. Skinner, and others, is that psychology should enterprise itself with the perceivable behavior of people and animals, not with unobservable events that take place in their minds. The behaviorist school of thought maintains that behaviors as such can be described scientifically without recourse either to internal physiological events or to hypothetical constructs such as thoughts and beliefs. There are two aspects of behaviorism Operant conditioning and classical conditioning; operant is distinguished from classical conditioning (or respondent conditioning) in that operant conditioning deals with the alteration of operant behavior. Operant behavior operates on the environment and is sustained by its punishments and reinforcements, while classical conditioning deals with the conditioning of reflexive (reflex) behaviors, which are elicited by antecedent conditions. Behavior’s conditioned via a classical conditioning procedure are not maintained by consequences.

A few years ago I taught my dog how to sit and do a few tricks and I want to use the behavioral approach to explain how I thought my dog. When I first started to train him I pushed his back down and yelled sit, if he sat I gave him a treat which was the re enforcer and if he refused to sit I did not give him any treat. The reason why the treat was the reinforcer, which was a positive reinforce, because that causes a behavior to occur with greater frequency. And since I did not give him any treats while he didn’t sit that was the negative punishment which made him decrease in that behavior.