In the world of psychology, behaviorism is an idea created by Ivan Pavlov that has been further researched by many different psychologists, still being studied today. Behaviorism, the term coined by John Watson, focuses on observable behavior and conditioning. The two main contenders in this field were Pavlov’s classical conditioning and B.F. Skinner’s operant conditioning. These two types of conditioning have each served as important pieces of psychology but while they were published under both Pavlov and Skinner, many speculate that they weren’t the first of time to come up with these ideas. Studies by psychologists such as Herman Helmholtz’s and his phenomenon of primary colors and Edward Thorndike’s study in 1898 suggest that these ideas
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Skinner became interested in operant conditioning through a series of readings about Watson and Pavlov and their ideas on behaviorism. In the article A Case Study in Scientific Method (Skinner, 1956), he talks about how before getting into Harvard that he read up on Watson and Pavlov and that those two ultimately drove his passion in behaviorism. Once he came up with the idea of operant conditioning, Skinner goes on to talk about operant conditioning in his book Science and Behavior how he got his base of work from Thorndike’s law of effect (Skinner, 1953). From the ideas of Thorndike, he then went into detail about how he came about the idea of operant conditioning with animals such as rats and pigeons. Skinner also talks about how he set up his operant chamber and how he kept up with a cumulative record of any time the rat did one of his specified tasks. Throughout the tests, Skinner came up with contingencies of reinforcement to emphasize there being times where a response warranted a treat or not. The four reinforcement schedules were a fixed interval schedule, a fixed-ratio schedule, a variable interval schedule, and a variable-ratio schedule. Skinner also believed that negative and positive reinforcements both played key roles in operant …show more content…
In his experiment (Fancher & Rutherford, 2012), Helmholtz had subjects try to grab an object while wearing glasses that distorted the subject’s vision. This relates back to operant conditioning because at the beginning subjects would tend to overcompensate and reach for an object they thought was farther than it really was. With multiple tries, this idea of perceptual adaptation occurred where subjects knew where to place their hands to where they thought the ball would be rather than where they saw the ball to be. This is like operant conditioning because the idea of them repeating the test enough to the point where they got the idea down and figured out what to do to get the ball lines up almost with Skinner’s experiment where he had rats press a lever to get food. The difference between Helmholtz and Skinner is the idea that Helmholtz took a different route to explain this phenomenon calling it unconscious inference whereas Skinner stated it in a physical
Skinner became interested in operant conditioning through a series of readings about Watson and Pavlov and their ideas on behaviorism. In the article A Case Study in Scientific Method (Skinner, 1956), he talks about how before getting into Harvard that he read up on Watson and Pavlov and that those two ultimately drove his passion in behaviorism. Once he came up with the idea of operant conditioning, Skinner goes on to talk about operant conditioning in his book Science and Behavior how he got his base of work from Thorndike’s law of effect (Skinner, 1953). From the ideas of Thorndike, he then went into detail about how he came about the idea of operant conditioning with animals such as rats and pigeons. Skinner also talks about how he set up his operant chamber and how he kept up with a cumulative record of any time the rat did one of his specified tasks. Throughout the tests, Skinner came up with contingencies of reinforcement to emphasize there being times where a response warranted a treat or not. The four reinforcement schedules were a fixed interval schedule, a fixed-ratio schedule, a variable interval schedule, and a variable-ratio schedule. Skinner also believed that negative and positive reinforcements both played key roles in operant …show more content…
In his experiment (Fancher & Rutherford, 2012), Helmholtz had subjects try to grab an object while wearing glasses that distorted the subject’s vision. This relates back to operant conditioning because at the beginning subjects would tend to overcompensate and reach for an object they thought was farther than it really was. With multiple tries, this idea of perceptual adaptation occurred where subjects knew where to place their hands to where they thought the ball would be rather than where they saw the ball to be. This is like operant conditioning because the idea of them repeating the test enough to the point where they got the idea down and figured out what to do to get the ball lines up almost with Skinner’s experiment where he had rats press a lever to get food. The difference between Helmholtz and Skinner is the idea that Helmholtz took a different route to explain this phenomenon calling it unconscious inference whereas Skinner stated it in a physical