Behaviorism

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Of the three, behaviorism had the greatest influence on scientific psychology. Its founder, John B. Watson, reacted against the tradition of his time that conscious experience was the province of psychology and boldly proclaimed a psychology without introspection. Watson made no assertions about consciousness when he studied the behavior of animals and infants. He decided not only that the results of animal psychology and child psychology could stand on their own as a science but also that they set a pattern that adult psychology might well follow. In order to make psychology a science, Watson said, psychological data must be open to public inspection like the data of any other science. Behavior is public; consciousness is private. Science should deal with public facts. Because psychologists were growing impatient with introspection, the new behaviorism caught on rapidly, particularly in the 1920s; for a time, most of the younger psychologists in the United States called themselves "behaviorists." In Russia, the work of Ivan Pavlov on the conditioned response was regarded as an important area of research by the behaviorists. The conditioned response was being investigated in the United States in a limited way before the advent of behaviorism, but Watson was responsible for its subsequent widespread influence on psychology. Behaviorists found it congenial to discuss psychological phenomena as beginning with a stimulus and ending with a response giving rise to the term stimulus response (S-R) psychology. S-R psychology, as it evolved from behaviorism, went beyond the earlier behaviorists in its willingness to infer hypothetical processes between the stimulus input and the response output, processes that were called intervening variables. If broad definitions are used, so that "stimulus" refers to a whole class of antecedent conditions and "response" refers to a whole class of outcomes (actual behavior and products of behavior), S-R psychology becomes merely a psychology of independent and dependent variables. Viewed in this way, S-R psychology is not a particular theory but a language that can be used to make psychological information explicit and communicable. As such, the S-R outlook is widely prevalent in psychology today.
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