J. B. Watson:
Early in the 20th century, John B. Watson argued in his book Psychology
from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist for the value of a psychology which
concerned itself with behavior in and of itself, not as a method of studying
consciousness. This was a substantial break from the structuralist psychology
of the time, which used the method of introspection and considered the
study of behavior valueless. Watson, in contrast, studied the adjustment
of organisms to their environments, more specifically the particular stimuli
leading organisms to make their responses. Most of Watson's work was comparative,
i.e., he studied the behavior of animals. Watson's approach was much influenced
by the work of Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov, who had stumbled upon
the phenomenon of classical conditioning (learned reflexes) in his study
of the digestive system of the dog, and subsequently investigated the
phenomena in detail. Watson's approach emphasized physiology and the role
of stimuli in producing conditioned responses - assimilating most or all
function to reflex. For this reason, Watson may be described as an S-R
(stimulus-response) psychologist.
Methodological behaviorism
Watson's behaviorist manifesto persuaded most academic researchers in
experimental psychology of the importance of studying behavior. In the
field of comparative psychology in particular, it was consistent with
the warning note that had been struck by Lloyd Morgan's canon, against
some of the more anthropomorphic work such as that of George Romanes,
in which mental states had been freely attributed to animals. It was eagerly
seized on by researchers such as Edward L. Thorndike (who had been studying
cats' abilities to escape from puzzle boxes). However, most psychologists
took up a position that is now called methodological behaviorism: they
acknowledged that behavior was either the only or the easiest method of
observation in psychology, but held that it could be used to draw conclusions
about mental states. Among well-known twentieth-century behaviorists taking
this kind of position were Clark L. Hull, who described his position as
neo-behaviorism, and Edward C. Tolman, who developed much of what would
later become the cognitivist program. Tolman argued that rats constructed
cognitive maps of the mazes they learned even in the absence of reward,
and that the connection between stimulus and response (S->R) was mediated
by a third term - the organism (S->O->R). His approach has been
called, among other things, purposive behaviorism.
Methodological behaviorism remains the position of most experimental psychologists today, including the vast majority of those who work in cognitive psychology – so long as behavior is defined as including speech, at least non-introspective speech. With the rise of interest in animal cognition since the 1980s, and the more unorthodox views of Donald Griffin among others, mentalistic language including discussion of consciousness is increasingly used even in discussion of animal psychology, in both comparative psychology and ethology; however this is in no way inconsistent with the position of methodological behaviorism.
Read more about the "politics" in methodological behaviorism
