Perspectives Paper
Name
PSY/310
July 23, 2012
Instructor

Perspectives Paper
Introduction
Even though psychological perspectives evolve as psychology matures, there are some perspectives that remain relevant even today. Behaviorism is, simply speaking, the analysis of a person’s response to his environment. John B. Watson, B. F. Skinner, and Edward C. Tolman would include their own varying details to accompany that definition. Most researchers in behaviorism concur that psychology should be considered as the study of behavior, not the study of the mental processes, and that behavior is caused by stimuli that abide in the external environment, not from the internal mind (Goodwin, 2008). From Watson’s first findings, which pushed behaviorism forward, Skinner proposed his own theory of behaviorism called radical behaviorism. Tolman believed that the important concepts of psychology could be deduced from the behavior displayed by rats traveling through mazes that he created (Goodwin, 2008). Even though they were thought of as behaviorists, their concepts and theories contrasted on a wide scale that went from Pavlov’s conditioning one end to the start of cognitive theory on the other end (Goodwin, 2008).
Fundamental Perspective of John B. Watson
John Watson (1878-1958) attended the University of Chicago where he studied under John Dewey. Dewey’s teachings did not satisfy him, and he soon decided to study under a functionalist psychologist named James Rowland Angell and Henry Donaldson, a physiologist. From their teachings, Watson began formulating his own beliefs, which would lead eventually to the establishment of what is called the psychological school of behaviorism. Watson’s theory is known as classical behaviorism. Much of Watson’s research was completed through the study of animal behavior. He claimed, in his work Behaviorism, that he could take