"Introduction to Psychology" Notes (3) —— B.F.Skinner

Lecture 4: B.F.Skinner

Unlike Freud, Skinner was the successor in a school of thought -- behaviorism -- that was there long before. The main contribution of Skinner is he packaged these notions, expanded upon them, publicized them, developed them scientifically and presented them both to the scientific community and to the popular community and sociologically in the 1960s and 1970s.

At the core of behaviorism are three general positions of behaviorism.

1. Strong emphasis on learning: There is no innate knowledge, no real human nature. Everything you know is the result of experience.
2. Anti-mentalism: internal mental states like desires, wishes, goals, emotions and so on, are unscientific.you could explain human psychology without mental notions like desires and goals.
3. No interesting differences across species: you could study human learning by studying nonhuman animals.

Learning is the way that a species profits from its experience.It's the mechanism by which past experience guides future behavior. Learning allows us to do two important things in the quest for survival:

1. to anticipate the future from past experience
2. to control a complex and ever- changing environment.

Main learning principles

1. Habituation: a decline in the tendency to respond to stimuli that are familiar due to repeated exposure.You get used to things. It's a way to learn through experience, to change your way of thinking through experience.
2. classical conditioning(经典条件反射): the learning of an association between one stimulus and another stimulus. New mainstream view is the conditioned response is a preparation for the unconditioned stimulus.
3. instrumental conditioning(工具性条件反射): Those behaviors followed by good consequences are selected and repeated, while those leading to bad consequences or no consequences at all are not repeated.
4. operant conditioning(操作性条件反射): behavior operates upon the environment and produces consequences. And operant conditioning is the change that takes place when those consequences have a particular effect, and we call this effect strengthening or reinforcing.

Reinforcement is something that makes the behavior increase. There are 3 types of reinforcements:

1. Positive reinforcement: something give to you when you to do something;
2. Negative reinforcement: something are taken away when you do something.
3. Partial reinforcement: reinforce given intermittently

In Skinner's view of psychology, all learned behavior can be stripped down to the relationship between the behavior, its antecedents, and its consequences. Any behavior that is followed by a consequence will change in its rate of occurrence in direct relationship to changes in the consequence. Beyond this, recognizing alternatives to a particular behavior helps to change that behavior.

3 main claims from behaviorism are mistaken because:

1. There is considerable evidence for different forms of innate knowledge and innate desires
2. Science, particularly more advanced sciences like physics or chemistry, are all about unobservables. They're all about things you can't see. And it makes sense to explain complex and intelligent behavior in terms of internal mechanisms and internal representations.
3. The reward helps, but the reward is in no sense necessary. e.g. How rat learn to run a maze.
4. There is animal-specific constraints for learning.

Behaviorists have provided a richer understanding of certain learning mechanisms, particularly with regard to nonhumans. But today behaviorism as a dominant intellectual field has faded, as Chomsky suggests that the law of effect when applied to humans is either trivially true, trivially or uninterestingly true, or scientifically robust and obviously false.