Talk:Behaviorism
From Academic Kids
Wow. Very nice edit of Behaviorism, 12.225.170.144!
Arthur 18:42 Jan 22, 2003 (UTC)
Reverted move to Behavior Analysis. Behaviorism is by far the more common name, and it is also more general; Behavior analysis is a term used essentially by subscribers to Skinner's radical behaviorism, and connotes that particular flavour of behaviorism. There are several other flavours, and this article should and does them all - it did last time I looked at it. Trying to make the article cover one flavour only offends against Wikipedia's NPOV rules. If we need a specific article on Skinnerian behaviourism, it should either be under radical behaviorism or under the experimental analysis of behavior, both of which we have. Furthermore, "behavior analysis" and "behavioral science" are in no way synonyms for behaviorism; behaviorism is an approach to psychology, behavior analysis and behavioral science are terms for a field of study, which may or may not be coterminous with psychology. seglea 06:08, 21 Mar 2004 (UTC)
The way the page is now, behaviorism is based upon a proposition that EVERYONE agrees with ("the proposition that behavior is interesting and worthy of scientific research"). That's neither informative nor interesting. It makes it look like everyone but everyone is a behaviorist.
- Please sign your comments, so that a discussion can go on intelligibly. If you haven't got a username, it doesn't take a moment to get one.
- Would that it were true that everyone agreed that behaviour is interesting and worthy of scientific research... It wasn't true in William James's time, and it isn't true now: try talking to some transpersonal psychologists, for example, or a good many cognitive scientists. seglea 04:02, 22 Mar 2004 (UTC)
Bandura's social learning theory
One crucial behaviourist theory which is ignored is Bandura's study on SLT. He used it to explain learned behaviour, aggression and other sorts of behaviour. On the whole, I reckon this is an omission, deliberate or no. How do people feel about including this theory on the page? (I am appealing to expert psychologists here)
