Behaviorism
One school of psychology vigorously rejected Freud and his staunch accent on unconscious motivations, the reduction of everything to sexuality, and the reliance on the ramblings of the patient. They were the “doubting Thomases” of psychology. They favored an empirical approach that could be observed, studied, and confirmed through a scientific method. This group became known as the
John Watson
One of the first Behaviorists was John Watson, no relation to Sherlock Holmes's sidekick. He viewed psychology as one of the natural sciences, an objective discipline to predict and even control behavior. He had no use for delving into the unconscious. He felt everything that you needed to know you could see for yourself through your own powers of observation. He was originally an animal psychologist, and he believed that the differences in behavior patterns of humans and animals were nominal.
We may have multiple personae, which is not the same as multiple personalities. Problems arise, as they always do, when one aspect of the psyche predominates. The objective is to know your persona and use it as necessary, but to also know that it is only a small piece of your
B. F. Skinner
B. F. Skinner (1904–1990) is the most famous Behaviorist. He believed that people's behavior could be changed through the process of conditioning. The famous example of conditioning involves the rat in a box (designed by Skinner and appropriately named the Skinner Box). The rat learned that if it presses a lever, a food pellet is released. This positive reinforcement ensures that the behavior will be repeated and is called
Skinner and his followers felt that these techniques could be applied to people, and they conducted many experiments attempting to modify the behavior of humans. They learned that as far as conditioning was concerned, a human and a rat were not that far apart. His controversial book
