"So, here are the three general positions of behaviorism.
...Finally, I talked about phobias and I'll return to phobias later on in this course. But the claim that people have formed their phobias through classical conditioning is almost always wrong. Instead, it turns out that there are certain phobias that we're specially evolved to have. So, both humans and chimpanzees, for instance, are particularly prone to develop fears of snakes.
...But what seems likely is the sort of phobias you're likely to have does not have much to do with your personal history but rather it has a lot to do with your evolutionary history.
... So, behaviorism as a dominant intellectual field has faded, but it still leaves behind an important legacy and it still stands as one of the major contributions of twentieth century psychology. For one thing, it has given us a richer understanding of certain learning mechanisms, particularly with regard to nonhumans. Mechanisms like habituation, classical conditioning and operant conditioning are real; they can be scientifically studied; and they play an important role in the lives of animals and probably an important role in human lives as well. They just don't explain everything."
© Paul Bloom
Yale Lectures on Introduction to Psychology, 2007
- That there is no innate knowledge. All you need is learning.
- That you could explain human psychology without mental notions like desires and goals.
- And that these mechanisms apply across all domains and across all species.
I think it's fair to say that right now just about everybody agrees all of these three claims are mistaken. First, we know that it's not true that everything is learned. There is considerable evidence for different forms of innate knowledge and innate desires and we'll look — and we'll talk about it in detail when we look at case studies like language learning, the development of sexual preference, the developing understanding of material objects. There's a lot of debate over how much is innate and what the character of the built-in mental systems are but there's nobody who doubts nowadays that a considerable amount for humans and other animals is built-in.
Is it true that talking about mental states is unscientific?
Nobody believes this anymore either. Science, particularly more advanced sciences like physics or chemistry, are all about unobservables. They're all about things you can't see. And it makes sense to explain complex and intelligent behavior in terms of internal mechanisms and internal representations. Once again, the computer revolution has served as an illustrative case study. If you have a computer that plays chess and you want to explain how the computer plays chess, it's impossible to do so without talking about the programs and mechanisms inside the computer.
Nobody believes this anymore either. Science, particularly more advanced sciences like physics or chemistry, are all about unobservables. They're all about things you can't see. And it makes sense to explain complex and intelligent behavior in terms of internal mechanisms and internal representations. Once again, the computer revolution has served as an illustrative case study. If you have a computer that plays chess and you want to explain how the computer plays chess, it's impossible to do so without talking about the programs and mechanisms inside the computer.
Is it true that animals need reinforcement and punishment to learn?
No, and there's several demonstrations at the time of Skinner suggesting that they don't. This is from a classic study by Tolman where rats were taught to run a maze. And what they found was the rats did fine.
They learn to run a maze faster and faster when they're regularly rewarded but they also learn to run a maze faster and faster if they are not rewarded at all. So the reward helps, but the reward is in no sense necessary. And this is the sort of finding, an old finding from before most of you were born, that was a huge embarrassment for the Skinnerian theory, as it suggests that rats in fact had mental maps, an internal mechanism that they used to understand the world – entirely contrary to the behaviorist idea everything could be explained in terms of reinforcement and punishment.
They learn to run a maze faster and faster when they're regularly rewarded but they also learn to run a maze faster and faster if they are not rewarded at all. So the reward helps, but the reward is in no sense necessary. And this is the sort of finding, an old finding from before most of you were born, that was a huge embarrassment for the Skinnerian theory, as it suggests that rats in fact had mental maps, an internal mechanism that they used to understand the world – entirely contrary to the behaviorist idea everything could be explained in terms of reinforcement and punishment.
...Finally, I talked about phobias and I'll return to phobias later on in this course. But the claim that people have formed their phobias through classical conditioning is almost always wrong. Instead, it turns out that there are certain phobias that we're specially evolved to have. So, both humans and chimpanzees, for instance, are particularly prone to develop fears of snakes.
...But what seems likely is the sort of phobias you're likely to have does not have much to do with your personal history but rather it has a lot to do with your evolutionary history.
... So, behaviorism as a dominant intellectual field has faded, but it still leaves behind an important legacy and it still stands as one of the major contributions of twentieth century psychology. For one thing, it has given us a richer understanding of certain learning mechanisms, particularly with regard to nonhumans. Mechanisms like habituation, classical conditioning and operant conditioning are real; they can be scientifically studied; and they play an important role in the lives of animals and probably an important role in human lives as well. They just don't explain everything."
© Paul Bloom
Yale Lectures on Introduction to Psychology, 2007
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