Tayyaba Shehzadi
3 min readJun 27, 2024

What is Behavioural Psychology.

Introduction

Behavioural psychology is a branch of psychology that aims at analyzing behaviour without necessarily having to examine the entity’s mind or internal workings. Consequently, the behaviorism can be regarded as the learning theory begun in the early XX century and headed by John B. Watson and BF Skinner. From the largest concept of behaviourism view, it holds that people’s behaviour is learned; hence it is measurable, visible, and modifiable.

Key Concepts

Classical Conditioning:

This theory was founded by association and is credited to Ivan Pavlov. Pavlov in his experiment on dogs was able to demonstrate the fact that how a conditioned stimulus for instance a bell can become a stimulus for an unrelated stimulus for instance food and in return elicit a trained response for instance salivation. This concept emerged from the idea residential on how one can program behaviours about various stimuli.

Operant Conditioning:

The second kind of strengthening of behaviour through conditioning was developed by B. F. Skinner: This procedure is referred to as operant conditioning- a type of learning that is brought by consequences. Skinner through his experiment with the rats and pigeons was therefore able to establish what can be described as the foundation of behaviour, that behaviours could be built up using reinforcement; which is rewarding a behaviour, or brought down by punishment which is punishing a behaviour. Whereas, Positive reinforcement and Negative reinforcement cause the frequency of the behaviour to go high, punishment intends to bring it down.

Reinforcement Schedules:

It also contains directions on other types of agenda of reinforcement that is predominant in learning and conditioning of the behaviour and is relatively very large. These are the fixed-ratio, variable-ratio, fixed-interval, and, variable-interval schedules, which have a distinct collision on the behaviours.

Applications

Behavioural psychology has practical applications across various fields: They are obvious across all aspects of life because CLT is a branch of psychology with multiple applications.

Education:

In this case, the faculty employs the post paradigms to force the learners to demonstrate some procedural conduct in the class such as submitting tasks among others.

Clinical Psychology:

He also enlists systematic desensitization, token economy, and many more which are working in the treatment of phobias, anxiety disorders as well as other mental illnesses through alteration of behaviour.

Organizational Behaviour:

The behaviourist concepts are used in business organizations to relate to the specifically targeted employees concerning performance and production through the use of incentives and appraisals.

Criticisms and Evolution’

Some criticisms relevant to the behavioural psychology include the following: It pays very little concentration to the intrapersonal aspects and only gives further significance to the concept of the meaning of behaviour so that only phenomena that can be viewed can be included into it. However, it paved way for the cognitive-behavioural therapy which is a combination of both cognitive and behaviour therapies that is centred on the identification of the cause of psychological disorders by pointing at their thinking and behavioural patterns.

In conclusion,

societal behaviour and conditioning to alter behaviour, which is one of the leader focal points of behavioural psychology, has outstandingly influenced theoretical and beneficial psychological science and has provided important information regarding the learning and preservation of behaviour.

Thanks for reading..