Quotes About Behaviorism

rewards for improved performance work better than punishment of mistakes. This proposition is supported by much evidence from research on pigeons, rats, humans, and other animals.

Noam Chomsky pointed out, the number of possible sentences is infinite in any language; there is no limit to the grammatical combination of words. Behaviorism cannot explain how, after relatively limited exposure to a mother tongue, young children acquire complex syntactic structures and begin to produce "correct" utterances never heard before, by themselves or by others. What's more, they accomplish these amazing intellectual feats without being explicitly taught.

To those who held the behaviorist view, human potential was almost perfectly malleable, shaped by the environment.

At present, we have a policy-response (to climate change) shaped by sophisticated climate science, brilliant technology and pop behaviourism, based on simple assumptions about carrot-and-stick incentives.

The ideal of behaviorism is to eliminate coercion: to apply controls by changing the environment in such a way as to reinforce the kind of behavior that benefits everyone.

I never really expected to be controversial.

Do we think at all — about these allegations, or about anything else — or do we just respond mechanically with conditioned prejudices, as the Behaviorists assure us? If we laugh at the gross bigotries of the 13th Century, what do we think about the data that seems flatly impossible to us?

You didn't learn the Bible as a Fundamentalist. You learned fragments of Old Testament legalism mixed with Behaviorism & Nietzschean ethics

This was John Watson, a founder of behaviorism, writing around 1925. Behaviorism, with its notion that behavior is completely malleable, that it can be shaped into anything in the right environment, dominated American psychology in the midtwentieth century;

The Behaviorist cannot find consciousness in the test-tube of his science.

You didn't learn the Bible as a Fundamentalist. You learned fragments of Old Testament legalism mixed with Behaviorism & Nietzschean ethics

I have a suspicion that the politicians' revival of the old behaviourist ideas and techniques will be helped and reinforced by a powerful ally - the machines we have built. The computers.

The ideal of behaviorism is to eliminate coercion: to apply controls by changing the environment in such a way as to reinforce the kind of behavior that benefits everyone.

This new environmental determinism (as, for instance, preached by John Dewey and his behaviorist forerunners) is an even more evil invention than Calvin's doctrine concerning predestination. Environment is merely a factor, an influence exercised on the human free will, but not a fatal and coercive power.

In this way the theory of human nature coming out of the cognitive revolution has more in common with the Judeo-Christian theory of human nature, and with the psychoanalytic theory proposed by Sigmund Freud, than with behaviorism, social constructionism, and other versions of the Blank Slate. Behavior is not just emitted or elicited, nor does it come directly out of culture or society. It comes from an internal struggle among mental modules with differing agendas and goals.

There was a joke that captured the antiseptic spirit of behaviorism that Skinner himself liked to tell: A couple makes love. Afterward, one of them turns to the other and says, "It was good for you. How was it for me?

The central question posed by Gestalt psychologists was the question the behaviorists had elected to ignore: How does the brain create meaning? How does it turn the fragments collected by the senses into a coherent picture of reality?

Behavioral trainers never talk about vices and depravity. Behaviorists are some of the most optimistic' teachers and trainers there are, because if a person or an animal isn't learning, a behaviorist is trained to examine what he is doing wrong, not what the person or animal is doing wrong. This means that behavioral teachers and trainers don't blame the student.

This was a natural step, because whereas behaviorists were mostly psychologists, ethologists were mostly zoologists. They discovered that behavior is not nearly as fluid and hard to define as it might seem. It has a structure, which can be quite stereotypical, such

There is a 'well-documented lifestyle effect', he notes, in which 'people outside the top 1 percent increasingly live beyond their means. Trickle-down economics may be a chimera, but trickle-down behaviourism is very real.

Behaviorism was but one instance of a terrible temptation for all intellectuals, namely that of nothing-but-ism. History is nothing but the clash of class interests, human behavior is nothing but a response to economic incentives, etc., etc.

Behaviorism entails the systematic denial of meaning, a denial which does violence to both the evidence and the everyday experience of humanity.

In the 1950s, American psychology was dominated by the behaviorists, whose endless experiments with lab rats aimed to show how easily the mammalian mind was shaped by its environment. Harlow

Emerging in the 1960s, cognitive psychology used the same rigorous scientific approach as behaviorism but returned to the question of how behavior is actually generated inside the head. Between