Behaviorism

Behaviorism is just one of the many schools of thought within psychology developed to explain and explore observable behavior. It is described by its founders as the subject matter of human psychology and the behavior of humans and animals. Behaviorism argued that consciousness is neither definite nor a useable concept and that only the observable behavior of the organism being studied was the basis of psychology. The behaviorists such as Watson, Skinner, and Pavlov experimented with the physical behavior of an organism and believed that the behavior was the only measurable response worth studying within the realms of psychology.
Behaviorism was first defined as the philosophy of science rather than the science of behavior (RE, 388). It was developed as the explanation for behavior and thought to embody all that was and is psychology, but later was categorized as a school of thought within psychology amongst many other schools of thought. The most influential characters in this particular school of thought are considered to be: Watson, Skinner, and Pavlov. These scientists pioneered the study of behavior with their experiments, and expanded upon the knowledge already existing from previous notable scientists and scholars in the field of psychology which helped develop behaviorism.

Watson, thought to be the founder of behaviorism, was born in south Carolina, and educated in a one room school house. He continued his education in an attempt at a philosophy degree, but his enthusiasm for philosophy diminished and later studied biology and physiology earning a PH.D from the University of Chicago. He rejected the earlier views of consciousness being the focal point of psychology and instead developed watsonian behaviorism from a combo of comparative and contributions from experimental psychology. Comparative psychology puts an emphasis on the continuity of species and on parsimony in the explanation of complex behavior (re, 388). Watson believed that the emotional development of an individual was reflected on the conditioning processes represented by that individual's behavior.

B.F. Skinner is arguably one of the most notable psychologist of the 20th century and influenced much of the development of Behaviorism. Skinner won countless awards for his work in the field of behaviorism and his contributions to psychology and was quite an influential figure on par with Freud for his achievements within psychology. Skinner was known mainly for his experiments with animals and his methods of experimentation namely the skinner boxes which were equipped with some type of response lever an organism would be trained to manipulate for a desired response to measure the resulting behavior. With this research, skinner coined the term operant conditioning and discovered many important principles of operant learning. In Brief, operant conditioning occurs when the frequency of behavior chances based on the behavior's consequences (Donohue, 2).