Psychology suggesting that there are important common principles. Others have argued that each species is adapted to a particular environment by evolutionary processes, and that this will be reflected in different methods of learning. The tradition in psychology known as behaviourism has emphasized common features amongst species, studying, in particular, rats and pigeons with an eye to extrapolation to humans. Behaviourism was essentially a revolt against the then prevailing ways of doing psychology. The revolt was staged in the early part of the twentieth century and was initially most closely associated with the American psychologist. (You can explore behaviourism and the researchers who worked within, or were influenced by it) In our table, there were two prongs to the attack on established psychology. First, there was a conviction that the methods then being used by psychologists were the wrong ones. One ofthe principal targets for attack was the idea that we can usefully gain insight by introspecting on our mental states. To our learned means, this was an unscientific way of approaching the subject. We wished to make psychology a science comparable to biology, physics or chemistry. He believed that the hallmarks of a scientific psychology should consist of objective observation and measurement.
Other sciences dispassionately observed, recorded and measured the world out there' as Darwin had done and We wished psychology to do the same. In the case of psychology, what is out there' to be observed is behaviour, hence the name behaviourism'. Mental states are not out there', they are not public data to be observed by detached scientists and so, according to study, they should have no place in the subject.
The second prong of radical critique of established psychology was directed at the weight given to so-called innate' or instinctive' factors. These terms refer to that with which an animal is equipped at birth and does not need to learn by experience. We did not deny the existence of such factors and indeed he researched them. He suggested that learning builds on innate factors. However, he argued that innate factors had been given unreasonable emphasis in psychology, which he claimed had underestimated the role of environmental factors. To them, human behaviour was largely at the mercy of the environment. For example, to him, saints and sinners were largely formed by early environmental influences.
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