What makes you entirely unique from any other person on this planet? Well one might argue that every person is uniquely the sub of every experience that they've had. We have all witnessed different things, we were taught specific lessons or experience certain events that have shaped, how we make decisions and how we display specific behaviors.
Let’s focus in on that
last word behaviors, this discussion is all about the behavioral perspective of
personality. While this theory of personality has its critics, it is the result
of some of the most fascinating and well-known psychological experiments to
date. So what is the behavioral perspective?
Behavior perspective or behaviorism is a
belief that personality is a result of an individual's interaction with their
environment.
psychologists can
actually pinpoint and connect incidents and behavior to predict how a person's
personality was shaped, these interactions might include things like traumatic
life, experiences lessons that you learned from your parents or your teachers,
lessons from movies or other forms of media, the relationships that you have
and all the things that we have observed are great examples of ways that may
contribute to the way that you behave. So taking every single interaction that
a person has with the world can feel overwhelming.
So let's zoom in on
two ways that we might be conditioned to behave one way or behave another way. According
to behaviorism these types of conditioning shape all of our later decisions and
ultimately our personality.
Psychologists have
categorized behaviorism into two different processes:
1. Classical
conditioning and
2. Operant conditioning
Now there are two important people that you should know in
the world of behaviorism because they illustrate two different types of
conditioning,
1.
classical conditioning:
Ivan Pavlov, the father of the now-famous Pavlov's dog experiment, now in this experiment Pavlov set off a metronome-click for
a group of dogs. Whenever the dogs heard the bell after this metronome, they
would get a treat. This is a case of classic conditioning, soon the dog started
to physically salivate whenever they heard that metronome because they knew
that food was coming. They automatically associated to unrelated stimuli through
behavioral training and if you want a good example, there's also an episode of
the office where Jim conducts a similar experiment on Dwight, so are we like
Pavlov's dogs do. We associate two stimuli to each other and grow to commit
certain behaviors from the Association.
Well there's another study it's called the little Albert study and it says that we do this study was led by an American ecologist named John B Watson. Watson used a young boy named Albert as his
so-called dog. Now he exposed the boy to images of a white rat and a bunch of
other items anyways, whenever he showed the image of the white rat he would
make a loud and scary noise. Soon enough the boy was literally classically
conditioned to react with fear, whenever he saw the image of a white rat he
showed him an image of the white rat the boy would get scared.
Now there's one caveat in this experiment,
little Albert also begin to act in a similar manner towards other white things
rather than associating his fear with a loud noise with the rat for being White.
Albert made other assumptions and behaved in an unpredictable manner towards
objects that he personally associated with the rat. So in this example we
consider behavioral perspective as a comprehensive theory unless it can really account for how
we associate two separate stimuli.
2. operant conditioning :
This
type of conditioning can help to better predict how someone will behave rather
than using two unrelated stimuli. Operant conditioning uses rewards and
punishment to shape behavior. Now the person can predict the reaction they will get if
they behave in a certain way and that might alter their behavior based on
whatever type of reaction that they want. the man that many people associate
with operant conditioning is named BF Skinner you can remember that Skinner and
operant go together because they both have seven letters in their name, now
along with Freud he is one of the top known psychologists in the world today
Skinner and Freud didn't always agree but their theories coincide to help
explain why people make decisions.
Freud believes that the unconscious
mind is constantly seeking pleasure and avoiding pain in any way possible and
Skinner he kind of agreed with this now we often associate rewards with
pleasure and Punishment with pain
It’s going
to believe that you can change a person's behavior by using a series of rewards
and punishments. People are going to seek behaviors that they know will bring
them pleasure even if they're not inclined to act that way. Skinner's work led
him to teach pigeons how to play Ping-Pong and eventually it helped soldiers
during World War two. We might not think that pigeons are naturally sporty and
patriotic creatures, operant conditioning led them to display these types of
behaviors that they wouldn't have otherwise displayed.
Skinner's box also known as an operant conditioning chamber is a famous laboratory piece used in the study of behaviors
of animals. Within the box there's usually a small animal, it's usually a rat
there is also a lever and a food dispenser and they're usually hooked up
together, so that whenever the rat pushes the lever a food pellet will come out.
Skinner
wanted to see if the rat would associate pushing the lever to dispensing food
well it worked why the rat pushed the lever in the first place though because
it surely didn't know that that lever would actually move or that it would
dispense food pellets well. Rats are exploratory creatures just like us humans
and they enjoy exploring their environment now this includes pushing random
buttons like a lever so after a ton of research.
Skinner realized there are four ways to
encourage or discourage any type of behavior and here's the definition with
some examples of operant conditioning,
1. Positive reinforcement:
This is whenever you add something to increase
the behavior, an example is to give a rat, a food pellet whenever it pushes a
lever now here's a real-life example paying someone for a good job.
2.
Negative reinforcement:
whenever you remove something to try to
increase the behavior, an example of this is to continuously shock the rats
feet and only stop shocking it whenever it pushes the lever, a real-life
example is whenever you go to clean your room because your mom has asked you to
do it over and over and over again and eventually your mom will stop asking you
after you have cleaned your room now both of these reinforcement increases the
behavior right but we go about it in two different ways, we either add a
stimulus like food or remove a stimulus like stop shocking a rat now what do we
want to do if we want to stop a behavior that's when punishment comes in. number.
3.
Positive punishment:
whenever you add something to decrease a
behavior an example would be smacking your dog and whenever it barks, a
real-life example you might encounter would be a speeding ticket whenever
you're going 20 miles an hour over right, you add a ticket to decrease the
behavior of speeding number.
4. Negative punishment:
whenever you remove something to decrease the
behavior, an example would be to stop paying attention to a barking dog
eventually it'll stop barking, now something in real life that you might relate
to is, when you go too fast over the speed limit you'll actually be arrested
and you'll actually have your license taken away, you remove a license to
decrease the behavior of speeding. Now you can remember these simply by knowing
that the word positive like in math means to add something negative also like
in math means to take away.
reinforcement means to reinforce a behavior
punishment means to discourage it. so negative reinforcement would be to get rid
of because negative means to subtract a stimuli that's the negative part with
the end goal of increasing a behavior that's the reinforcement part a lot of
people get these words confused, so I just wanted to take some extra time in
this discussion to help explain them that how does behavioral perspective fit
in with personality psychology behaviorism.
Personality psychology behaviorism:
Personality psychology behaviorism says
that we and our personality can change every day if you're trained right you
can become a person with any sort of personality trait. It certainly gives hope
to people who may aspire to be more driven more punctual or have any other
traditionally good or successful trait. If you enjoy self-development then you
probably relate to this because you know that you can improve yourself, anyone
who's ever successfully trained a dog to behave in a certain way knows that
there is some truth to this theory behavioral perspective though is rather
limited. When it comes to explaining the overall psychology of personality. Behaviorists
don't take into account like the thoughts that people have or the feelings
behind someone's actions, these are real things but they don't take into
account in behaviorism. A person may be on time for work every day but not
because they want to or because they are in general a punctual person but they
may just be terrified of losing their job and not having any money.
Sometimes people choose to sacrifice
their values and larger personality traits for wants their needs and their
desires. So behaviorism is just one piece of the personality puzzle but it's
also an important one - no we can't entirely discredit behaviorism because it
really does influence how people do make decisions.
so as I think, some of your daily habits why do
you do some of them are their rewards or are their punishments, do they reflect
who you are overall as a person or do they just reflect the values and patterns
of thought that you have established over the years what is your commitment to
these types of values say about your personality.
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