Explain any three principles of Behaviourism.

Behaviourism is an approach to studying animal and human psychology that focuses on observable characteristics or behaviour only. Behaviourism grew in response to 17th and 18th century Mentalism that believed all source of knowledge to be derived from innate and intuitive mechanisms inside the mind. The behavioural approach was propounded by John Watson and later supported by psychologists like Skinner. Behaviourism ruled psychology (and even had a profound impact on fields like linguistics) during the early 20th century, but lost popularity after the mid-20th century paradigm shift towards Cognitivism. Some of the main behavioural assumptions and principles are as follows:

The source of truth and knowledge is only that which is observable and can be proven with empirical evidence. Behaviourism does not engage itself with events that happen inside the mind like intuition, thinking and other mental faculties, as these cannot be objectively studied and measured in any way.

All observable behaviour is an outcome of a person’s environment. In other words, response is conditioned by stimulus. Behaviourists try to study and measure these stimuli and responses under controlled laboratory experiments. The behavioural assumptions were even extended to emotional responses and language (verbal behaviour) by Skinner.

All behaviour is learnt from the environment alone. At birth, the mind is like an empty slate (tabula rasa).

One of the main behavioural principles is that the response from the environment has consequences on the possibility or intensity of behaviour (operant conditioning). Hence, a reward from the environment leads to positive reinforcement (increased or repeated behaviour). Punishment has an opposite effect of that of reinforcement (weakened or suppressed behaviour).