The Behaviourist approach

The Behaviourist approach

1. Determinism is the view that all behaviour is controlled by the way we've been reinforced and punished in the past. this means we can predict how they will behave if we know how they've been conditioned.

2. Environmentalism; that all behaviour come from experience and that biology and genetics have got little to do with our development. in the nature debate the behaviourists perspectives come down firmly on the side of nurture.

   • Even Watson with his extreme radical behaviourism couldn't accept that all behaviour is learned from the environment. He accepted e.g that children are born with innate reflexes or instincts such as the grasping reflex.

3. Empricism is the idea that psychology should only study things that can be observed recorded and measured (i.e. behaviour) this means that psychology can't sturdy mental events of any kind.

4. Reductionism is the idea that we can understand something by reducing it to its basic components. The behaviourists thought that human behaviour can be reduced to stimulus response associations