Essay On Watson's Methodological Behaviourism

Behaviour is, by definition, “everything an organism says and does” (Miltenberg, 2012). For example, if a person walked or an elephant slept, this would be considered behaviour. Skinner (1968) suggested that behaviour consists of both public and private events; this idea became classified as radical behaviourism. It has become a philosophy of the science of behaviour; an experimental analysis of behaviour that attempts to explain all behaviour, including private behaviour (Chiesa, 1994). The idea contrasted from the traditional methodological behaviourism of Watson (1913) and developed the empirical study of behavioural analysis.

In order to define something as radical it must be “thoroughgoing and extreme” (Warren, 1934); radical psychology
Leading on from this, Thorndike (1911) described ‘the law of effect’, suggesting that behaviour is more likely to be repeated if it produces a favourable response to the environment. He demonstrated this by conducting an experiment by which a cat was placed within a box. The cat could escape from the box by pressing a lever; once the cat discovered this, the cat was quicker to elicit the response and escape to a favourable environment. In 1913, Watson defined behaviourism as a science which focused on the nature of behaviour, with no scientific experimentation related to introspective stimuli. Watson’s methodological behaviourism focused on experiments where environmental stimulus elicited a response. He concluded that there was “no dividing line between the man and the brute” (Watson, 1913), rejecting the idea of the private behaviour. Jones (1915) agreed with Watson, stating that psychology needed to focus on observable phenomena in order to be considered a science, and “turn its back on all private data”. Skinner (1938) expanded behaviourism to distinguish respondent conditioning, the Pavlovian stimulus-response based, and operant conditioning, which focused on Thorndike’s favourable reoccurrence.