Conditioning, Behaviorism, Self-Actualization

Early psychology produced an area of study called "conditioning." It is the process wherein an animal recognizes a given behavior produces a desired result: food, water, freedom, etc. The animal then begins to produce that behavior regularly because the result is still desired. Part of conditioning includes the tenet that desire for the result can be stopped, or "extinguished." The result initially produces a behavior, but then over time the behavior begins to produce the result desired. The behavior thus programmed can be autonomic, such as salivation (as Pavlov found) or conscious (as Skinner studied and experimented with).

Behaviorism was a more recent branch of psychology, begun by John B. Watson out of his belief that "consciousness" or the "unconscious" were merely modern terms for the soul. He wanted to put psychology on the same plane as the other sciences by limiting it to observable phenomena, which in the case of humans is how behavior. Watson proposed that human behavior should be studied in the same way animal behavior was studied: in laboratory conditions by objective scientists. Clark L. Hull and B. F. Skinner, working a

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Category: Psychology - C