Behavioural Approach or Learning Theories

This file can be downloaded as MicroSoft Word Doc by Clicking here

Learning Theory and Behaviourism

Although learning theory developed mainly in the United States, a major influence was the work of a Russian physiologist, Ivan Pavlov. At the beginning of the last century, Pavlov was exploring the digestive system in humans and other animals. While he was undertaking research examining the salivary response of dogs, he observed what appeared to him to be ways in which dogs learnt to respond to objects and people. When it is given food, a dog will automatically salivate. This is a naturally occurring response. In the terminology of learning theory, the food is called the unconditioned stimulus and the response of salivating is called the unconditioned response. Pavlov observed that if a light went on or a bell rang (unconditioned stimuli) before the dog received food, after a few trials the dog would salivate when the light went on or the bell rang. The dog had learnt to associate what had been a neutral unconditioned stimulus (bell or light) with the food and salivated at the neutral stimulus even in the absence of food. This is the basis of what is known as classical conditioning. Pavlov (1906, 1927, 1928) carried out extensive research on the learning associated with classical conditioning.

Classical conditioning also accounts for some learning in humans. For example, suppose a parental goal was to bring up their young child to enjoy books. One scenario for achieving this, according to classical conditioning, would be to start with the child being cuddled on a parent’s lap an experience that makes the child feel good. This is an unconditioned response (naturally occurring). Reading a book across a room to a young child will initially be a neutral stimulus. However, if the parent reads the book to the child while cuddling the child on their lap, after a few repeated sessions, being read to will produce pleasant feelings in the child even when they are not being cuddled by their parent. In this way, reading books has become a conditioned stimulus that produces pleasure in the child. Once reading the book has become a conditioned response, reading to the child across the room will induce the same pleasurable response in the child.

Pavlov demonstrated that the conditioned response could generalise to similar stimuli. In the dog example, it could be changes in brightness or colour or the light that would evoke the same response. Similarly with children, reading while on their parent’s knee may generalise to being read to across a room and eventually to reading anywhere, even on their own, and finding it a pleasant experience. Pavlov showed that there are limits to generalisation. In the dog example, if the food is delivered to some sounds but not to others, the dog will learn to discriminate between the sounds and will only salivate to the ‘food’ sounds. Finally, Pavlov demonstrated that the conditioning process could be reversed. If the light is presented repeatedly with no food following, then the dog’s salivary response gets weaker and weaker, till eventually what is termed extinction is achieved.

At this point, you may wonder what all of this has to do with personality, but Pavlov went on to show that classical conditioning could explain many of our emotional reactions. It could be that I am an anxious person because I have had experiences where I learnt to be anxious; it is not simply that I possess a neurotic personality. The crucial difference is that if you have learnt to be anxious, then you can unlearn; or, in learning theory terminology, the anxiety response can be extinguished as it is not a part of your personality. We will return to this shortly with a detailed example once we have understood how Pavlov’s work came to be so influential within psychology. 

John B. Watson, an American psychologist, read the early work of Pavlov and was very impressed by it. He began to apply some of Pavlov’s observational techniques in his own research and replicated some of his work in the United States. As he became established within psychology, Watson began to call for a change in the direction of American psychology so that it could become a true science. He wanted to reject the methods of introspection and interpretation of patients’ reminiscences that Freud and the other psychoanalysts had employed. He saw these methods as unscientific and argued instead for a psychology that considered only observable aspects of behaviour. In practice, this means that no assumptions or hypotheses can be made about what is going on inside someone’s mind. Stimuli and their effect on behaviour are the subject matter of the behavioural approach, and rigorous scientific methods, mainly based in laboratories, are used to collect data. Watson published his views in 1914 in a book entitled Behaviour. In 1919, he published Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviourist. This book was influential in American psychology. It included summaries of Pavlov’s work on classical conditioning, thereby introducing Pavlov’s work to a wider audience. Watson is generally credited as being the founding figure of the School of Behaviourism, but his career as a psychologist ended with his withdrawal from academia in 1920 to enter business. Behaviourism and the popularising of Pavlov’s work had set the scene for developments in personality theorising and research. From this perspective variables are manipulated, ideally in a controlled laboratory setting, and then the effects of these manipulations on the subject of the research are carefully observed.

Although the behavioural approach is a radical departure from the psychoanalytic approaches in previous chapters, it still maintained a heavy focus on behaviour change, particularly within a clinical context. Put simply, if your hypothesis is that behaviour is learnt, then it is necessary to show that it can be unlearnt. The behavioural approaches, like the psychoanalytic approaches, focused on demonstrating that mental health problems (psychopathology) could be cured using behavioural interventions. A crucial difference between the psychoanalysts and the early learning theorists concerns how psychopathology arises. For the psychoanalysts, as we have seen, psychopathology arises because of inner causes such as unresolved developmental crises; or conflict between the structures within the personality such as the id, ego and superego; or problems in personality development of some other kind. The learning theorists rejected this as an explanation for the cause of mental problems, seeing it as unscientific to refer to what they saw as unobservable inner mental processes and/or structures to explain observed differences in behaviour. For these learning theorists, psychopathology was a learnt maladaptive response to a situation that may have generalised to other situations or similar stimuli, and as such, it could be unlearnt. Normal development was about learning adaptive responses in a variety of situations, while abnormal development resulted from acquiring maladaptive responses.

PAVLOV

Pavlov (1927) began this line of research by inducing what he called experimental neuroses in one of his laboratory dogs. The dog was conditioned so that he would salivate to the shape of a circle. He then learnt to distinguish between circles and ellipses, only salivating to circles. However, when the distinctions between circles and ellipses became harder to distinguish, the dog became very distressed; his behaviour was disorganised, with a preponderance of neurotic symptoms. The dog barked when taken into the laboratory, shivered in his harness and tried to bite the restraining straps. Pavlov interpreted this as demonstrating that when the dog could no longer cope with what was being asked of him, he developed neurotic symptoms. 

THE RADICAL BEHAVIOURISM OF B. F. SKINNER

 Skinner had been influenced by the research of Pavlov and Watson, among others, and developed it further. (See the Profiles box on page 77.) He did not claim that unconscious processes or inner states did not exist, but he strongly felt that it was unscientific and unnecessary to rely on these unobservable processes to explain behaviour. He did not deny that we had ideas and thoughts, but he strongly believed that these inner thoughts did not cause our behaviour. Suppose you do not turn up to do a seminar presentation; you may say that you were so anxious at the thought of doing it that you could not make yourself attend. For you, the explanation is that your anxiety prevented you from attending. You are claiming anxiety as the inner cause of your not attending behaviour. You may even go as far as to claim a neurotic personality. Skinner would not agree with this interpretation. This inner state of anxiety is not the cause of your non-attendance. He would argue that you experienced certain aversive behaviours when preparing to attend; you may have felt nauseous, had palpitations, sweated and so on, perhaps at the sight of your presentation or while packing your bag. This resulted in you altering your preparatory behaviour. The change in your behaviour and the change in your feelings have the same cause. Saying that you are an anxious person does not explain the cause of the anxiety. For Skinner the cause of your anxiety was located somewhere in your developmental learning history where you have learned maladaptive responses. Skinner felt that much of the time, we do not know the real causes of our behaviour, in terms of what stimuli in the environment trigger specific behaviour; and he rejected completely the notion of behaviour being motivated by inner states. So if you say you feel happy, something in the environment has triggered a response that you have previously learnt to label as happiness; it is not some internally generated feeling for Skinner, but is stimulated by something in the environment.

Skinner (1948) did not accept the concept of personality, seeing it as unnecessary and unscientific to postulate unobservable, inner psychological, personality-generating structures. He accepted that our genetic inheritance would have some influence on how we interacted with the environment, but he played it down, claiming instead that the situational determinants were crucial in explaining the cause of behaviour. He made reference to Charles Darwin’s principles of natural selection, suggesting that over many generations human beings have evolved particular characteristics to meet the demands of their particular environment, and he believed this had led to some genetically based individual differences. Perhaps being agile had a survival value for a particular group of people; then these individuals would have opportunities to express their agility in their environment, and these responses would be reinforced. The more agile you were, the greater the reinforcement and so on. This then would explain observed individual differences in behaviour. Heredity would only impose limits on behaviour. For Skinner, it is not the kind of person you are, but the learning history you have had and the current demands of your environment that dictate how you behave.

Skinner accepted the principles of classical conditioning but felt that it applied to a limited range of learning situations. He argued that what happened after particular ways of behaving was a crucially important aspect of learning that applied to most situations where we learn. He suggested that the classical conditioning paradigm, consisting of a stimulus followed by a response, is too simplistic for most learning situations. He demonstrated that what happens after the response – the consequences of the response – is what is crucial, as it affects the probability of the response being repeated. If you are praised for your seminar presentation, then you are more likely to volunteer to do a seminar presentation in future; if you are heavily criticised, then you are more likely to want to avoid future presentations.

Skinner refers to this learning process as operant conditioning. If the consequence of a piece of behaviour is to encourage the repetition of that behaviour, this is termed positive reinforcement. Consequences that discourage repetition of the behaviour are termed negative reinforcement. Although Skinner’s primary interest was in human behaviour, most of his research was on animals in laboratory situations in the now famous Skinner box.

There were slightly different versions of the box for different animals; but essentially, there is a lever of some sort that the animal in the course of exploring the box will press at some point. When this happens, the animal is rewarded with food. There is an electronic device attached to the lever to record the animal’s rate of pressing. What Skinner demonstrated was that after the bar pressing had resulted in the animal’s being reinforced with food, the rate at which the animal pressed the bar increased. The animal did not have to be reinforced every time for learning to occur, and Skinner studied the effects of different schedules of reinforcement. Much of the detail of this work is not particularly relevant in the context of personality theory, and we will cover only the relevant concepts.

Skinner demonstrated that random or partial reinforcement schedules produce behaviours that are very resistant to change, as an example will show. In one family, the teenage son was told that his weekend curfew was 11 p.m. However, every Friday night, Tim (the teenage son) would plead with his mother to be allowed to stay out later, and an argument would often ensue. The mother could not understand why Tim always had to argue and could not just accept that 11 p.m. was the curfew. She said he was stubborn and argumentative like his dad. In other words, it was down to his personality. When asked if she ever did allow Tim to stay out later than 11 p.m. on a Friday, she said that sometimes he just wore her down; or if she was in a good mood, she sometimes let him have another hour. In Skinnerian terms, Tim was on a random/partial reinforcement schedule. The rule was that his curfew was 11 p.m. However, Tim had learnt that it was always worth challenging this as sometimes his mother gave in and he was rewarded with a later curfew. So, for Skinner it was unnecessary and unscientific to refer to internal personality attributes to explain this behaviour, as learning theory provided an adequate explanation based on observable events. We are sure that if you reflect on some of the conflicts that you have experienced over family rules when you were growing up, you will find that operant conditioning provides a good explanation. 

Another relevant Skinnerian concept is shaping. Skinner observed that when pigeons first entered a Skinner box, it might take them some time before they found the lever and pressed it. To speed up the process, he would deliver a food reward when they were facing in the direction of the lever, another reward when they came close to the lever and so on until the pigeon had actually achieved the desired response of pressing the lever. Shaping is applied to many aspects of behaviour where individuals are initially rewarded for behaviour that approximates the desired goal, and once that behaviour is established they are rewarded only for behaviour that comes closer to the goal and so on. Many of the current television programmes that help parents develop parenting skills areas are based on principles of operant conditioning where desired behaviours are gradually shaped. The children have a star chart. They are rewarded for ‘good’ behaviour with a star, and earning stars ‘buys’ treats. Gradually, as the initial good behaviour becomes established, the parents up the ante for the child to earn stars. Skinner’s contention is that eventually the children’s good behaviour will become selfreinforcing as their relationships will be better, and this is rewarding in itself. 

As we have seen, one of the big questions for personality theory is the nature of human motivation. For Skinner (1971, 1972, 1976) the issue was straightforward. He believed that human beings aim to produce pleasant events and to avoid painful events, if possible. All our emotional states can be understood by analysing the behavioural events in the environment that preceded them. He does accept that some behaviour is private, but he refuses to accept that internal private behaviour causes our emotions. You don’t get anxious because you have an anxious personality, but because something in your environment stimulates the anxious behaviour.

Skinner devoted a lot of his writing to examining Freudian concepts and dismissed most of them as unscientific, constructs for which there was no observable evidence. He agreed with Freud that the early experiences of the child had long-lasting effects, which could even continue into adulthood. However, he contended that it was the early conditioning experiences of the child that shaped their later behaviour, not the influence of inner conflicts between hypothesised personality structures. For Skinner, demanding individuals are not governed by their id impulses, as Freud would claim; rather, they have in the past been rewarded for displaying demanding behaviour by having their demands met and have therefore learnt to behave in a demanding way. Skinner (1953) agreed that personality trait names do convey useful information describing the individual, like how friendly or enthusiastic they are; but they do not explain, in any empirical way, how they came to be friendly or enthusiastic. For him the friendly person has been reinforced more for being friendly than has the unfriendly person and so on. Skinner also denies that human beings are purposeful. He claims that what we label ‘intentions’ are really responses to internal stimuli.