Behaviorism

Abstract

Behaviorism is the once powerful school that employs the scientific method to study the overt behavior of animals as a function of external stimulation. It was born shortly before World War I in the United States, where it quickly became the dominant trend in psychology and exerted a strong and often beneficial influence on the social sciences. The early doctrine was watered down two decades later with the introduction of the so-called intervening variables and hypothetical constructs. The behaviorist movement started to decline in the mid-1950s with the revival of mentalism in cognitive psychology and the reinforcement of physiological psychology. At the time of writing, behaviorism is only a shadow of what it was in the 1930s and 1940s. However, it is still going strong in clinical psychology (see Chapter 12), and it may come back in basic psychology as a reaction against the excesses of information-processing psychology. (See sections 5.4 and 9.4.)