Did the Behaviourist approach in psychology use Introspection or did they dismiss it?
Im doing revision on psychology and im revising the behaviourist approach to psychology! However i'v forgotten if the behaviourist approach used introspection or if they dismissed it? I know John Watson made psychology more scientific but did that mean him dismissing introspection as a way of attaining information?
Answers:
they dismissed it because you can't observe introspection so it isn't reliable or scientific enough - behaviourists focussed on observable behaviour as it is more scientific
I don't think Watson was overkeen on introspection. I would regard myself as a behaviourist, and am interested in the cause of hallucinations. However, I find personal accounts by those who have them give me more clues as to their cause than modern psychological experiments.
Behaviourist disliked introspection.
Behaviourism was psychology's response to operationalism in science. Operationalism says that a measurement is defined by the operations performed to acquire that measurement, so you might conveniently describe something as 'mass' or 'length', but in order to make it scientifically meaningful you have to describe the operations you use to get it.
Introspection does not allow for easy repetition, is not open to verification and can't be applied consistently to all the subjects in a group (not to mention the problems of teaching rats and pigeons to introspect). Introspection when properly applied required the subject to have practised the process for a long time and in a well-defined way - not just a matter of asking people picked off the street what was going on inside their heads.
The more radical behaviourist also said that the proper domain of scientific psychology was behaviour (rather than the mind) so the only part of introspection that was interesting was the verbal behaviour itself. (Not introspection in its original meaning).
And the even more radical behaviourists denied the existence of any sort of scientifically interesting inner life. To them it was simply an epiphenomenon ie it arose from and was secondary to behaviour.
Probably a lot more than you wanted to know, but there you are anyway.
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Answers:
they dismissed it because you can't observe introspection so it isn't reliable or scientific enough - behaviourists focussed on observable behaviour as it is more scientific
I don't think Watson was overkeen on introspection. I would regard myself as a behaviourist, and am interested in the cause of hallucinations. However, I find personal accounts by those who have them give me more clues as to their cause than modern psychological experiments.
Behaviourist disliked introspection.
Behaviourism was psychology's response to operationalism in science. Operationalism says that a measurement is defined by the operations performed to acquire that measurement, so you might conveniently describe something as 'mass' or 'length', but in order to make it scientifically meaningful you have to describe the operations you use to get it.
Introspection does not allow for easy repetition, is not open to verification and can't be applied consistently to all the subjects in a group (not to mention the problems of teaching rats and pigeons to introspect). Introspection when properly applied required the subject to have practised the process for a long time and in a well-defined way - not just a matter of asking people picked off the street what was going on inside their heads.
The more radical behaviourist also said that the proper domain of scientific psychology was behaviour (rather than the mind) so the only part of introspection that was interesting was the verbal behaviour itself. (Not introspection in its original meaning).
And the even more radical behaviourists denied the existence of any sort of scientifically interesting inner life. To them it was simply an epiphenomenon ie it arose from and was secondary to behaviour.
Probably a lot more than you wanted to know, but there you are anyway.
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