behaviorism

Skinner and his pigeons, into behaviorism — a school of thought that considered behavior a Rube Goldberg machine of stimulus and response governed by reflex, disregarding interior mental states and emotional response.

From there, “he segues into an introductory psychology course tackling behaviorism, stereotyping and projection. All the material is enthralling.”

Skinner’s long-prevailing theory of behaviorism, human behavior was regarded as the result of conditioning through positive and negative reinforcement.

Dr. Staats found behaviorism, on its own, inadequate to explain human behavior in all its complexity.

This was the rationale behind behaviorism, a now-dead theory of psychology that took this trend to a perverse extreme.