behaviorism vs cognitive black box

Demonstration

BehaviorismVs

Cognitive Psychology

Use the left and right arrow keys to go backwards or forwards through slides.

To behaviorists, the human mind is like a black box. It’s sealed, and you can’t see inside.

The behaviorists claimed that we could still study the organism by selectively presenting stimuli to the “black box”

Stimulus

Then…something happens in the person, and we see responses emitted by the organism (fancy way of saying “people do things”)

Stimulus

Example Responses:

Working harder in the future

Response

Example Stimuli:

Giving a raise after good performance

………………………….

Then…something happens in the person, and we see responses emitted by the organism (fancy way of saying “people do things”)

Stimulus

Example Responses:

Working harder in the future

Buying the product

Response

Example Stimuli:

Giving a raise after good performance

Pairing music and attractive people with products in ads

………………………….

………………………….

Then…something happens in the person, and we see responses emitted by the organism (fancy way of saying “people do things”)

Stimulus

Example Responses:

Working harder in the future

Buying the product

Staying away from the person who yelled

Response

Example Stimuli:

Giving a raise after good performance

Pairing music and attractive people with products in ads

Getting yelled at

………………………….

………………………….

…………………………..

Then…something happens in the person, and we see responses emitted by the organism (fancy way of saying “people do things”)

Stimulus

Example Responses:

Working harder in the future

Buying the product

Staying away from the person who yelled

Head turning, staring

Response

Example Stimuli:

Giving a raise after good performance

Pairing music and attractive people with products in ads

Getting yelled at

Seeing a hottie

………………………….

………………………….

…………………………..

…………………………..

To a behaviorist, the black box is sealed, closed, and inaccessible. They looked for law-like relationships between stimuli and responses (in a broad sense).

Stimulus

Example Responses:

Working harder in the future

Buying the product

Staying away from the person who yelled

Head turning, staring

Response

Example Stimuli:

Giving a raise after good performance

Pairing music and attractive people with products in ads

Getting yelled at

Seeing a hottie

………………………….

………………………….

…………………………..

…………………………..

To Watson, what goes on in the box is

unimportant!

They found classical conditioning (associative learning) and operant conditioning (instrumental learning)

Stimulus

Example Responses:

Working harder in the future

Buying the product

Staying away from the person who yelled

Head turning, staring

Response

Example Stimuli:

Giving a raise after good performance

Pairing music and attractive people with products in ads

Getting yelled at

Seeing a hottie

………………………….

………………………….

…………………………..

…………………………..

reinforcement

punishment

Classical cond.

Me being funny

Problem…Consider two different people.

You see both get the same stimulus. You see both make the same response.

Are they the same?

Did the same thing go through the “black box” (the minds) of both people?

Problem…Watson would answer:

It doesn’t matter if the same thing goes through their minds or not. We can’t study consciousness, so any consideration of what’s in the “black box” of people’s minds is unscientific.

Skinner would answer:What goes through people’s minds is irrelevant. They have learned to

have their particular thoughts under these circumstances with this stimulus. What is important is understanding the relationships between input (stimulus) and output (response) through the “black box.”

Cognitive psychologists would answer:Very different cognitions (thoughts) may be going on in the “black

box.” Here’s evidence for how we know this…

Cognitive psychologists specialize in using creative ways to study what is going on in the black box.

It is difficult to study what is going on in a person’s thoughts,

but it is not impossible.

In general, you can start with observing a tie between a stimulus and a response and hypothesize what is going on cognitively in the “black box,” that is, what is going through one’s mind?

Response

Stimulus

•Maybe they’re thinking A

•Maybe they’re thinking B

Then you can change the stimulus or some other aspects of the experiment so that the different hypothesized cognitions would produce DIFFERENT responses.

Change the Experiment

Response if A

•If they think A, we’ll see them do one behavior

•If they think B, we’ll see them do another behavior

Response if B

Notice, although we can not study what is in the “black box” directly in one study, we CAN gain information about cognitions with a series of creatively designed studies!!

Change the Experiment

Compare Results

The challenge to a researcher is to find ways to change a

study so that different hypothesized cognitions will

produce different results

• Cognitive research gets very detailed and technical, but when the findings are put together, we get to peer into the Black Box of the Mind

• More recently, cognitive neuroscientists attempt to tie the creative findings of cognitive research with physiological findings from neuroscience

Take home message:

Even if something is not easily observed, you may be able to study it scientifically.