What is Behaviorism?

Behaviorism was primarily an American model.  J.B. Watson founded it, but its most famous advocate is Harvard psychologist B.F. Skinner.  Behaviorism views psychology as an objective science that studies only overt behavior without any references to mental processes.  Although most research psychologists would agree that psychology should be objective not all agree that it studies only overt behavior without a reference to mental processes.

Behaviorism advocates the usage of experimental processes to study observable behavior (responses) in relation to environment (stimuli).  It was psychology that dominated the study of inner experiences or feelings by subjective methods.  The American psychologist J.B. Watson did not deny the existence of inner experiences, but he insisted that such experiences could not be studied because they were unobservable.  Watson made the proposal to study behavior by utilizing only objective methods, such as laboratory experiments designed to create statistically significant results.  This behaviorist view led to the formulation of a stimulus response theory of psychology.

Behavioral psychologists watched their subjects to note how they would respond to various stimuli.  These experiments created great interest in conditioning studies similar to those performed by Pavlov.  Skinner believed that operant conditioning could actually mold behavior in the same way that a sculptor shapes clay.  He even believed that he could make a pigeon an overachiever by reinforcing it on a proper schedule.

Obviously the distinctions between pigeons and children will be demonstrated in the levels of achievement brought about by each.  Of course, this conditioning by behaviorists seeks to produce a “new-paradigm thinking.”1  In the psychological process of mastery learning various stimuli conditioning is said to cause a student to behave desirably (the required response).  Such theories are totalitarian in their orientation and are hostile to biblical morality.  The real strength of behaviorism is witnessed in Outcome Based Education, whereby children are being “dumbed-down,” and controlled by a globalist mindset of creating “compliant automatons” (e.g. Hitler’s “citizen-servants”).2

1 Berit Kjos, Brave New Schools (Eugene, OR:  Harvest House, 1995), p. 60.

2 Charlotte T. Iserbyt, “Conditioning For Control,” The New American, 21 July 1997, p. 25.