Behaviorism, Overview

Introduction

Behaviorism shares with psychoanalysis the rare status of being a major tradition of psychological thought with a long history of critical exposure, fluctuating fortunes, and unprecedented diffusion into the larger culture. Like psychoanalysis, it emerged from a conducive backdrop of social and intellectual trends to pose challenges to orthodox cultural beliefs. But unlike the psychoanalytic tradition, behaviorism has sought to understand psychology by external manifestations rather than inner depths, and it represents a particularly American expression of the psychological enterprise. In that role, behaviorism has been afflicted with paradoxes, not least of which is its focus on the behavior of infrahuman subjects in narrow experimental settings while claiming to offer solutions to human problems in the wider world. Those solutions are often framed in terms of a behavioral technology to be applied to problems of social control and self-management.

Definition

Behaviorism...