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| CAREER
IN PSYCHOLOGY |
| Ideology |
Watson’s
behaviorism is sometimes referred to as classical behaviorism,
which emphasized four major views: Objectivism, Stimulus
Response Associationism, Peripheralism, and Environmentalism.
Later he put forward his new form of behaviorism as
neo-behaviorisms and showed how each of these four core
beliefs fared over time (Top-psychology 2001).
Objectivism
One
of Watson’s most important contributions was his
endorsement of an objective approach to psychology.
He rejected privately observable consciousness and insisted
that psychologists study publicly observable behavior.
By providing this, he gave a media through which psychology
could attain the status of a natural science (Pauly
1981; Top-psychology 2001).
Stimulus–Response Associationism
Watson
presumed that the goal of a natural-science psychology
would be helped by adapting concept of sensory-motor
reflex to psychological events. He had proposed that
psychological phenomena could be described on the basis
of three components: Stimulus, response, and the association
between them (Watson 1919).
Peripheralism
Watson
has explained Peripheralism in relation to its antonym,
centralism. Centralism emphasizes that root causes of
behavior are to be found in the central nervous system
– the brain and spinal cord. However, Watson insisted
peripheral events, external to the central nervous system,
play a major role in behavior. Pauly (1981) has indicated,
"Watson emphasized external and peripheral factors
at the expense of internal and central ones; he sought
broad generalizations across individuals and species;
his approach was holistic and dynamic...his goals were
experimental control and engineering." (Pauly 1981).
Environmentalism
Watson’s
environmentalism is captured in his famous boast: "Give
me a dozen healthy infants, well formed, and my own
specified world to bring them up, and I’ll guarantee
to take any one at random and train him to become any
type of specialist, I might select doctor, lawyer, artist,
merchant chief……" Essentially Watson
thus took the extreme environmentalism position merely
to contrast it with the extreme position of heredity
school that human behavior is genetically preset and
therefore not possible to modify (Top-psychology 2001).
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