Tag Archives: Behaviorism

Behaviorism in Every day Life

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Behaviorism in Every Day Life

            Behaviorism is a holistic theory of development that can be seen everywhere in our daily lives. It focuses on the concept that the environmental experiences can shape us and create the person that we are today.  Pavlov, Watson, and Skinner all focused on behaviorism and its effects.  However, in my case, I want to focus on Skinner’s learning theory, operant conditioning.

As a sophomore, living with three other roommates in an apartment can become very hectic. The trash fills up, the bathroom is gross, and someone “accidentally” eats your food. Our biggest problem, however, was the dirty kitchen. There was always a huge pile of dishes in the sink. While I always dutifully rinsed my dishes and put them in the dishwasher, it seemed that 2 of my other roommates liked to toss their dirty dishes into the sink and wait a week. Instead of someone doing the dishes, the pile would just get bigger and bigger. Every time I walked into the kitchen, I would grimace and clean the dishes myself. As an experiment, I stopped cleaning the dishes and waited for either one of them to do it themselves. When one of them finally did it, I made a huge show of it. I thanked them, and marveled at “how clean” the kitchen finally was.

It didn’t take long before my roommates got the point and started picking up their own slack. I was surprised at how easily I got them to clean up after themselves, without yelling or awkwardly pointing it out to them. Just by simply using positive reinforcement, I was able to have a clean kitchen and still maintain good relationships with my roommates. By reinforcing their good behaviors and ignoring the bad ones, I was increasing their good behaviors without any animosity. It’s a simple idea, but when put to practice can show a lot of information about the human brain and how it works.

How Behaviorism relates to our lives

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One theory in class that we have discussed and applies to my life is the idea of Behaviorism. This idea focuses on the behaviors of animals mainly, and shows that mental events can be triggered by some sort of stimuli and lead to a preferred behavior. There is usually some sort of reward or payment in turn for this action. An example of this was the video clip from “The Office” that we watched in class. In the video, every time Jim’s computer makes a certain noise, he offers Dwight a mint. This continues for a while and Dwight does not notice that there is a pattern going on. Eventually, Dwight gets to the point where he hears the noise from Jim’s computer and immediately sticks his hand out for a mint, even though he was not offered one. He was subconsciously trained to receive a mint when he heard that noise, without even realizing it.

A similar situation to this that is close to me is going on right now at my sister’s house. She is currently pregnant, and they have a 5 year old pitbull dog that has been with them for the past three years. The dog is very calm, which is not stereotypical for his breed, but just as a safety precaution my sister and brother in law are teaching him to stay out of the baby’s room, just to make sure that there is no chance of him accidentally harming the baby. To start, they would reprimand him when he tried to enter the room and give him a small treat when he sat down outside of it. After these actions continued for a couple weeks, he learned to stop at the door and either lay down or go somewhere else in the house when either my sister or her husband entered the baby’s room. The stimulus for the dog was seeing someone enter the room while he went up to the doorway, and the reaction was him realizing he shouldn’t go in and changing his behavior. He does not even try to go into the room anymore. Now when the baby comes, the dog will not be able to bother it because he will know not to enter the room.

What Dwight from The Office and my sister’s dog have in common is that they were both trained to do certain actions and expect certain rewards for performing an ideal behavior. Dwight would get a mint when he heard the noise, and the dog originally would get a treat when the parents went into the baby’s room. This idea was practiced and studied in the 1920’s and it can still apply today.

Attempt at conditioning

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Last semester, my close friends and I spent a lot of nights staying up late.  Staying up till 3 am maybe watching a movie, or just talking.  Eventually it caught up to us and we would feel tired throughout the whole day, but we would still just sit around.  Soon enough we became more productive during the time we stayed up late.  We would bring in some work, and many of us had similar classes, so we would be able to work together and help each other out as we worked.  But the only problem with this was one of our friends would still decide to not do any work.  This problem is still occurring now, and we are trying to help our friend start.  During past few weeks, due to a lack of difficult work, we all just hung out, not doing much.  But now that some exams are coming up, everyone started to study more.  We attempted to get our friend to study by having everyone around our friend study.  We would all be quiet, and focused, hoping that would persuade our friend into wanting to study too, since it would be like a last option for our friend.  Our friend’s mind was still set on not doing work, even though there is an exam coming up very soon.  We all want to have fun, but we are too worried that our friend may get stuck behind because of the lack of effort our friend puts forth into studying.   A big part of the problem we have with getting through to our friend is the fact that our friend is often alone doing whatever, so if our friend were to get bored of us studying, then our friend can leave and do whatever.  Hopefully we can get our friend conditioned to study with us when we study, especially since we can all help him with at least one of his classes.

The Unconscious Mind and Behaviorism

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When I was little, my parents would train my dog, Harley to get the newspaper.  They would ring a bell while standing by the front door so the dog would learn that that meant to go outside and get the newspaper for them.  Eventually my parents stopped ringing the bell and every time they were by the front door, my dog would automatically go fetch the newspaper.

This is an example of the behaviorism theory that psychologist John Watson came up with and argued against the structuralists.  This theory means that all behavior is learned and stems from unconscious motivation.  Behaviors can be measured, learned, and changed.  Also a physiologist, Ivan Pavlov explained that if there is an unrelated stimulus present, than an involuntary reaction can occur in response to that certain stimuli (Psychology).  To add on to this, behaviorists strongly believe that it doesn’t matter a person’s ethnic background, what their thoughts are or what their personalities are like, they have the potential to be trained to perform any task.  The idea of behaviorism can be summed up by Watson’s quote he once said, “Behaviorism…holds that the subject matter of human psychology is the behavior of the human being.Behaviorism claims that consciousness is neither a definite nor a usable concept. The behaviorist, who has been trained always as an experimentalist, holds, further, that belief in the existence of consciousness goes back to the ancient days of superstition and magic” (The Rise of Behaviorism).

The experience with my dog, Harley clearly relates to this idea of Behaviorism because it follows the definition.  The stimuli in my example is the bell my parents would ring.  Once they took away the stimuli, and my parents were by the door, he unconsciously went to get the newspaper.

There are numerous different examples of Behaviorism such as when Watson used a baby and taught the baby to get scared when he saw a rat by making a loud, obnoxious noise.  Soon enough when the baby saw the rat without hearing the noise, the baby would get very scared and start to cry (Psychology).  Behaviorism theory is still used around the world today.

 

 

 

References

Ciccarelli, Saundra K., and J. Noland White. Psychology. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 2012. Print.

“Ivan Pavlov – Biographical”. Nobelprize.org. Nobel Media AB 2013. Web. 3 Feb 2014.     <http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1904/pavlov-bio.html>

“The Rise of Behaviorism.” About.com Psychology. N.p., n.d. Web. 02 Feb. 2014. <http://psychology.about.com/od/historyofpsychology/a/psychistory_3.htm>.