BEHAVIORISM (from the English, behavior -behavior), the leading direction in amer. psychology, which has had an impact on all disciplines related to the study of man. The basis of B. is the understanding of human and animal behavior as a set of motor and reducible verbal and emotional responses (reactions) to external influences (stimuli). Wednesday. It appeared at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries under the direct. the influence of experimental studies of the animal psyche.
Because in these studies, the method of self-observation, which prevailed in the study of the human psyche, could not be used, then the experimental method was built, the main one. on a series of controlled effects on animals and registration of their reactions to these effects. This technique has been transferred to the study of the human psyche. The general methodological prerequisites of B. were the principles of the philosophy of positivism, according to which science should describe only the directly observable, and any attempts to analyze internal, not directly observable mechanisms are rejected as philos. speculation. Hence the osn. Thesis B.: psychology should study behavior, not consciousness, which in principle is not directly observable; behavior is understood as a set of "stimulus -reaction" (S - R) connections. The ancestor of B. is E. Thorndyke. Program B. and the term itself were first proposed by J. Watson (1913). On the formation of scientific. The foundations of B. were greatly influenced by the works of V. M. Bekhterev and N. P. Pavlov.
According to B., a person at birth has a relatively small number of born patterns of behavior (breathing, swallowing, etc.), over which more complex processes are built up, up to the formation of the most complex "behavioral repertoires" (B. Skinner). A successful reaction is fixed and henceforth tends to reproduce - the "law of effect". The fixation of reactions is subject to the "law of exercise", i.e. the repeated repetition of the same reactions in response to the same stimuli, as a result of which these reactions are automated. To explain how a given reaction is chosen in response to a given effect, Thorndyke put forward the principle of "trial and error", according to which the development of any new reaction begins with blind trials, continuing until one of them leads to a positive effect.
The highest development of B., in his classic. The basic ideas, research methods, and terms of B. were transferred to anthropology, sociology, and pedagogy in the 1920s. In the USA, these sciences, combined by the study of behavior, have received a common name. "behavioral sciences"; this is the title. it persists to this day, although now in most cases it no longer expresses immediacy. the influence of B. 's ideas
In the post-war period. The traditions of B. were continued in a number of studies on machine translation, as well as in the amer. concepts of so-called programmed learning (B. Skinner).
B.'s turn to the objective study of the psyche, the new experimental methods developed by him, and the widespread involvement of mathematics in psychology. the funds made up the strong side of B. However, in the sov. and foreign psychology, B. was seriously criticized (it was started by gestalt psychology and continued in the works of L. S. Vygotsky, S. L. Rubinstein, J. Piaget, etc.) for eliminating from psychology such fundamental concepts as consciousness, thinking, will, etc. D., for ignoring the social nature of the psyche, for the coarsening and primitivization of human behavior as a result of this, and, ultimately, for the loss of their own. the subject of psychology. The validity of this criticism was confirmed by the very development of B.: his followers introduced the so-called intermediate variables into the S-R scheme, i.e. they turned again to the analysis of the psyche and thereby abandoned the main thesis of B. in his classic. form (see Neobehaviorism).
