School of thought in Psychology

1. NeoBehaviorism

2. Neobehaviorism
• Period of American psychology between 1930-1970
• Neobehaviorists were interested in theory, focused their
research on learning, motivation, role of reinforcement on
learning, and used animals, mostly rats as their preferred
objects of study.
• Edward Hull gained immense popularity between 1940 to
1950.
• Tolman (1940) got re-prominent during 1960. Because of its
relation with cognitive psychology
• After 1960 skinner ideas gained prominence. His psychology
seems to be an outlier.

3. Tolman Cognitive behaviorism
• Tolman worked with Robert Yarkees.
• His book in 1932, “purposive behavior in animals and
men”
– Purposive= directed toward some goal.
• Purposiveness is determined by cognitions.
• “Behavior is purposive and cognitive” Tolman (1932)
• Criticized the Watson for strict S-R framework.

4. Tolman Cognitive behaviorism
• Focused on intervening variables- processes
• within the organism that intervened the S-R.
• Cognitions are the intervening variables
• Distinction between Learning and performance
• Learning could not be observed but could be inferred by
measuring performance
• Performance is behavior and learning is internal state

5. Hull Hypothetico-Deductive Behaviorism
• Call Leonard Hull- principles of behavior
• Hull liked to tell his graduate students that
“Watson is too naïve. His behaviorism is too simple
and crude” (quoted in Gengerelli, 1976, p. 686).
• Perhaps no other psychologist was so devoted to
the problems of the scientific method.
• Hull had a prodigious command of mathematics
and formal logic

6. The Spirit of Mechanism
• Hull described his behaviorism and his image
of human nature in mechanistic terms and
regarded human behavior as automatic and
capable of being reduced to the language of
physics.

7. The Spirit of Mechanism
• In 1926, Hull wrote:
• “It has struck me many times that the human
organism is one of the most extraordinary
machines—and yet a machine. And it has struck
me more than once that so far as the thinking
processes go, a machine could be built which
would do every essential thing that the body
does” (quoted in Amsel & Rashotte, 1984, pp. 2–
3).

8. Objective Methodology and
Quantification
• Hull’s mechanistic, reductionistic, and objective
behaviorism provides a clear view of what his
methods of study had to be.
• First, they would be objective. In addition, they
would be quantitative, with the fundamental laws of
behavior expressed in the precise language of
mathematics.

11. Final note
• About Watson two point of views:
• He has narrowing the field and limited the development
of psychology and closed important areas of research.
• Developmental of psychology in 20th century is because
of Watson. He demanded complete break with
philosophy
• Watson behaviorism strengthen the role of physiological
processes in psychological explanation, expanded
psychological methods and more evident the ties
between the animal and human behavior.