Behaviorist Paradigm Research Articles

Constructive Mutualism: Teaching 21st Century Skills in 21st Century Classrooms

For more than fifty years education systems have been striving to go “beyond Behaviorism” without being able to reach a reliable way of mediating relationships in classrooms which assure full student engagement. ‘Constructive Mutualism’ is the name we are giving to a different paradigm, one which has been present in human societies from the moment we could call them human, and which provides the mechanism we are looking for. This paradigm is based on an explicit social dynamic which, once entered into by teacher and student, stimulates the student to willingly do their best work and to self- regulate to avoid classroom disruptions. For a student to enter such a relationship they must so value what it is that the teacher wants to provide them that full engagement becomes effortless. A key strength of this type of relationship is that once students have explicitly entered it, the teacher can direct their attention to other areas where the teacher wishes to impart their knowledge or otherwise facilitate learning. There are only a small number of teachers who have these relationships with all their students today, and we propose that the reason for this is a mismatch between what teachers are providing, which they believe is of high value, and how students are experiencing it, which many find not to be of such high value. The move towards the adoption of twenty-first century skills opens the door to a wider range of capacities that we believe are of intrinsic value to students and that could form the basis for a relationship of the type described. Our study shows that overwhelmingly students (and teachers) value psychological safety and although a large majority of teachers say they are providing this, a majority of students are not experiencing it to the required degree. We believe that this ‘gap’ can be explained though the realization that psychological safety cannot be provided consistently within the Behaviorist paradigm as this paradigm is always conditional. It is under Constructive Mutualism that students’ needs for psychological safety can be fully met. Thus, we can, finally, make a clean break from Behaviorism.

A behaviorist perspective on how to address negative consumer behaviors

AbstractThe cognitivist paradigm has dominated the past 50 years of consumer research. Cognitivist theories have provided extensive insights into pre‐consumption behaviors (i.e., information gathering, attitude formation, product choice, and product purchase) and the processes that support these behaviors (i.e., attitudes, persuasion, information processing, memory, knowledge, and choice processes). Yet, the cognitivist paradigm has limitations, especially when it comes to addressing detrimental consumption, over‐consumption, and perverse incentives in consumption systems. To address these issues, we discuss how a behaviorist paradigm can be used to identify more efficient and effective interventions for societal ills. The behaviorist perspective emphasizes that an alteration of the consumption environment can influence the ease of expressing a behavior and the rewards/punishments associated with this expression. Hence, behaviorism is useful in identifying and implementing intelligent nudges.

Natural intelligence and the ‘economy’ of social emotions: A connection with AI sentiment analysis

By approaching the concept of Natural Intelligence a new path may be open in a variety of theoretical and applied problems on social emotions. There is no doubt that intelligence emerges as a biological/informational phenomenon, although paradoxically a consistent elaboration of that concept has been missing. Regarding emotions, they have been keeping an unclear status, being often restricted to the anthropological or to ethological approaches closer to the behaviorist paradigm. Herein we propose a different track, centered in the life cycle advancement. The life cycle in its integrity becomes the nucleus of natural intelligence's informational processes, including the consistent expression of emotions along the maximization of fitness occasions. In human societies, the overall ‘economy’ of social emotions is manifest, showing up in the conspicuous interplay between bonding processes and different classes of social emotions. The essential link between natural intelligence, emotions, and the life cycle of individuals may harmonize with current progresses – and blind spots – of artificial intelligence fields such as ‘sentiment analysis.’

Native Language Transfer in Vocabulary Acquisition: An Empirical Study From Connectionist Perspective

Since the 1940s, the behaviorist paradigm, contrast analysis hypothesis and mentalist model have focused much attention on explaining the L1 - L2 relationship and how it works in second language acquisition. These studies support that different linguistic features of L1 and L2 would lead to language transfer. Nevertheless, there are still some questions being asked: How does native language transfer occur? What are the effective teaching methods to help L2 learners overcome the challenges of native language transfer? This study investigates native language transfer among Chinese university students in second language vocabulary acquisition. The results show that the connectionist model can explain the cognitive process of native language transfer through a dynamic approach, and adequate language input with timely grammar correction can enhance learning efficiency. The connectionist teaching method is effective in second language vocabulary acquisition.

‘Interpreted space’ as a mediator between physical environment and situated substance use: outline of a socio-spatial theory for substance use prevention

Environmental approaches to substance use prevention currently rely on a behaviorist paradigm. On this theoretical foundation, useful intervention strategies may be overlooked, and effectiveness may be limited. To address these issues, this study drew on Löw’s ‘sociology of space’ to develop a socio-spatial theory for prevention research. Salient dimensions of everyday settings (e.g. home, bar) were identified through mixed-methods research with 24 female university students who were current users of alcohol or cigarettes. Situational pathways explored the event-level interplay of these dimensions with other factors in relation to situational substance use and abstinence. On this basis, the article proposes a visual theory which outlines three mediating steps between physical environment and situated substance use outcomes: perceived space (construal of manifest aspects); interpreted space (construal of latent aspects); and momentary thoughts and feelings. Personal and cultural factors moderate this process. The theory is illustrated using three pathways in smoking ban contexts. The findings can inform intervention design and research into contextual factors of substance use by outlining a mechanism with specified variables, highlighting the role of subjective meaning-making, and suggesting specific environmental aspects for future consideration.

Cold War Pavlov: Homosexual aversion therapy in the 1960s

Homosexual aversion therapy enjoyed two brief but intense periods of clinical experimentation: between 1950 and 1962 in Czechoslovakia, and between 1962 and 1975 in the British Commonwealth. The specific context of its emergence was the geopolitical polarization of the Cold War and a parallel polarization within psychological medicine between Pavlovian and Freudian paradigms. In 1949, the Pavlovian paradigm became the guiding doctrine in the Communist bloc, characterized by a psychophysiological or materialist understanding of mental illness. It was taken up by therapists in Western countries who were critical of psychoanalysis and sought more ‘scientific’ diagnostic and therapeutic methods that focused on empirical evidence and treating actual symptoms. However, their attitude towards homosexuality often played a decisive role in how they used aversion therapy. Whereas Czechoslovakian researchers cautioned readers about low success rates and agitated for homosexual law reform in 1961, most of their anglophone counterparts selectively ignored or misrepresented the results of ‘the Prague experiment’, instead celebrating single-case ‘success’ stories in their effort to correct ‘abnormal’ sexual orientation. In histories of queer sexuality and its pathologization, the behaviourist paradigm remains almost entirely unmapped. This article provides the most detailed study to date of aversion therapy literature from both sides of the East/West border. In doing so, it contributes to the project not only of ‘decentring Western sexualities’, but of decentring Western sexological knowledge. Given its Pavlovian origins, the history of homosexual aversion therapy can be fully understood only in the context of Cold War transnational sexological knowledge exchange.

MONKEYS, MIRRORS, AND ME: GORDON GALLUP AND THE STUDY OF SELF-RECOGNITION.

This article explores the work of psychologist Gordon Gallup, Jr., during the 1960s and 1970s on mirror self-recognition in animals. It shows how Gallup tried to integrate the mental "self-concept" into an otherwise strictly behaviorist paradigm. By making an argument from material culture, the article demonstrates how Gallup's adoption of a self-concept is best understood as a product of his sustained analysis of the workings of the mirror as a piece of experimental apparatus. In certain situations, the stimulus properties of the mirror changed dramatically, a shift that Gallup thought legitimated the positing of a self-concept. For this reason, Gallup supposed he could use a mirror to provide an operationalized concept of the self, that is, produce a definition that was compatible with behaviorist experimental norms. The article argues that behaviorism was more supple and productive than is often assumed, and contained resources that could align it with the "cognitive revolution" to which it is most often opposed.

Video self-modelling: an intervention for children with behavioural difficulties

There has recently been a growth in interest in the use of video technology in the practice of educational psychologists. This research explores the effects of a video self-modelling (VSM) intervention on the behaviours of a child in mainstream education using a single case study design set within a behaviourist paradigm. VSM is a behavioural intervention that requires the participant, in this instance a six year old boy, to view a short video of himself engaging in target behaviours. Baseline and post-intervention data were collected through classroom-based observations by the researcher in order to monitor the frequencies of the target behaviours and to evaluate the effectiveness of the VSM intervention. The participant demonstrated higher frequencies of target behaviours following the intervention. The results suggest that VSM is a promising method for educational psychologists to use as a proactive approach with pupils in educational settings to improve target behaviours.

Emergence of Cognition from Action.

Theories of brain function have evolved through multiple stages. The first proposition was that brain networks support a set of reflex responses, with current sensory inputs producing immediate motor outputs. The behaviorist paradigm suggested that actions can always be explained as a response to immediate external cues. In response to these views, the cognitive paradigm argued that behavior cannot be understood simply as input-output functions because the hidden layers of brain generate unpredictability. The central processing was termed "cognition." Here we propose a neuroscience-based model of cognition. Our core hypothesis is that cognition depends on internal models of the animal and its world, where internally generated sequences can serve to perform "what if" scenarios and anticipate the possible consequences of alternative actions without actually testing them, and aid in the decisions of overt actions. We support our hypotheses by several examples of recent experimental findings and show how externally guided cell assembly sequences become internalized to support cognitive functions.

Millennial Expectations and Constructivist Methodologies: Their Corresponding Characteristics and Alignment

In recent years, much emphasis has been placed on constructivist methodologies and their potential benefit for learners of various ages (Brandt & Perkins, 2000; Brooks, 1990). Although certain aspects of the constructivist paradigm have replaced several aspects of the behaviorist paradigm for a large contingency of stakeholders (particularly, schools of education and national learned societies), this large-scale shift has not been apparent among many key participants in public education. A variety of suspected reasons exist for this lack of transition, including the lack of clarity in defining constructivism (Null, 2004; Woolfolk, 2008), potential difficulties in application (Perkins, 1999), and previous generations' expectations about education (Howe & Strauss, 2000). However, this article suggests that the current Millennial Generation's expectations of learning strongly align with tenets of constructivist methodology and that these constructivist expectations (client demands) should broadly affect the educational practices of university and public school personnel in the near future.

Separation of cognition and affect in Bungakuron

One of the most striking aspects of Natsume Sōseki's Theory of Literature (Bungakuron, 1907) is the initial interdisciplinary move to generate a model of moment-by-moment literary experience, replete with graphs, formulas and tables, with reference to what was for him the latest in contemporary clinical, experimental psychology. Whatever other rhetorical, philosophical and aesthetic concerns are at issue in its sprawling length, this initial suggestion of a natural scientific account of the object remains a powerful methodological move. This paper will address the questions of why and in what sense Sōseki's theory can be considered a scientific theory and what type of psychology is at stake in the initial waveform model and (F+f) formula. With reference to William James and contemporary developments in neuropsychology, it will be argued that the rise and fall of an antithetical behaviorist paradigm as the dominant mode of psychological explanation has allowed Sōseki's theory to emerge at the other end of the twentieth century with increased relevance, in an even tighter relation to growing knowledge about the relation of thought processes to the heterogeneous architecture of the brain. By posing the problem of literature in a way that is comprehensible to the sciences that deal with related issues of the mind, Sōseki provides a model for interdisciplinary research that is still challenging today.

Emancipatory Teaching-Learning Philosophy and Practice Education in Acute Care: Navigating Tensions

Much has been written in the nursing literature about the intentions and desires of a transformatory movement in nursing education. However, dialogue and critique related to actual implementation of a curriculum revolution begun in the late 1980s are lacking. The acute care context of nursing practice holds particular challenges for faculty teaching in an emancipatory curriculum. How do faculty implement a philosophy of teaching-learning congruent with the curriculum revolution, in the context of an acute care setting that privileges empirical knowledge and values a behaviorist paradigm? In this article, we provide an example of one teaching approach grounded in an emancipatory ideology: critical questioning. We also discuss some of the tensions we associate with teaching-learning in an acute care context and our experiences of navigating these tensions.

The Hegemonic Behaviorist Cycle

Values relating to technology and technology education, I will argue, can either be co-constructed or imposed. A teacher employing behaviourist methodologies in the classroom, for example, will inculcate within students, a prescribed set of values relating to technology. They can do this in many ways. In an industrial arts model of technology education, teachers will lead students towards an understanding of technology as a process of fabricating prescribed artifacts with a view to increasing their industry standard psychomotor skills. This, they will argue, will help students gain useful employment in that field of industry. At the other end of the continuum, but still set within the behaviourist paradigm, the teacher might insist that the genetic modification of food is necessary in order to create more efficient production systems in agriculture, or that the only truly sustainable way of maintaining an electricity supply to meet current demands is by nuclear power. In these models, the teacher as expert provides the correct solutions to the prescribed questions. I will argue that this model forms the basis of what I will call a “hegemonic behaviourist cycle”. By this I mean that inculcation into a behaviourist system will serve to shape the learners’ actions when setting into practice what has been learned. I will begin by considering the way values can be formed in a behaviourist setting. I will then explore how technology education set within a behaviouristic system serves to produce unthinking students. I will then go on to explore a learning paradigm in which the formation of values relating to technology is seen as a social process. I will present an argument, in line with current educational thought, that a need now exists to abandon current behaviourist pedagogies and move towards a more broad based learning environment. This, I will argue, is necessary for the development of more informed attitudes about the impact that new and emerging technologies can have on individuals, societies and the world. Values relating to technology will be seen, in this model, to be co-constructed rather than imposed.

Disavowal of the behaviorist paradigm in nursing education: what makes it so difficult to unseat?

The literature is replete with calls for disavowal of the behaviorist paradigm in nursing education, a paradigm charged with producing successive generations of passive learners who are incapable of instigating much needed and long overdue reforms within the health care system. Only rarely has this call been challenged by nurse educators. In this article, the role of a paradigm in delineating the nature of and solutions to significant problems within a scientific community is explored. I posit that the current eschewal of behaviorism by nurse educators stems not from its failure to solve significant problems in nursing education but rather from an apparent shift in value orientation--a shift from effecting learning (and health) outcomes to effecting social change. Despite this seeming shift in values, effecting learning outcomes is still held to be an essential aspect of nursing education, and it is because of this, I argue, that the behaviorist paradigm is so difficult to unseat.

Personality.

Personality psychology is as active today as at any point in its history. The classic psychoanalytic and trait paradigms are active areas of research, the behaviorist paradigm has evolved into a new social-cognitive paradigm, and the humanistic paradigm is a basis of current work on cross-cultural psychology. Biology and evolutionary theory have also attained the status of new paradigms for personality. Three challenges for the next generation of research are to integrate these disparate approaches to personality (particularly the trait and social-cognitive paradigms), to remedy the imbalance in the person-situation-behavior triad by conceptualizing the basic properties of situations and behaviors, and to add to personality psychology's thin inventory of basic facts concerning the relations between personality and behavior.

Teaching and Learning IT in Secondary Schools: Towards a New Pedagogy?

New Technologies, particularly Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs), have caused profound changes throughout society. A generation of children is emerging already immersed in a multimedia 'data storm' (Moshell, 1995). Their understandings and expectations of the world are mediated through their experiences of multimedia and ICTs and these differ from those of preceding generations nourished on linear technologies. Educating these children using models of teaching and learning that are grounded in concepts of knowing and understanding that are linear and finite will not help them succeed in a technological, global future where multi-disciplinary, holistic approaches predominate. The conflict between the traditional and the new in English secondary schools is particularly intense in the teaching and learning of Information Technology (IT). Teaching and learning IT are inherently constructivist activities, and IT teachers who attempt to implement learning programmes designed from predominantly behaviourist perspectives quickly find that these are less effective. A new pedagogy is needed that is theoretically sound, that goes beyond a cookbook approach, and that guides teachers in using constructivist approaches within an education system grounded in an inimical behaviourist paradigm. This paper takes some tentative steps in this direction. © 1999 IFIP, published by Kluwer Academic Publishers

The Moral Economies of Homeless Heroin Addicts: Confronting Ethnography, HIV Risk, and Everyday Violence in San Francisco Shooting Encampments

Ethnographic immersion among homeless heroin addicts in San Francisco documents far more risky practices than the public health literature routinely reports. The logics of street-based income-generating strategies and the moral economy of social networking among self-identified “dope fiends” results in almost daily shares of drug preparation paraphernalia. Public health researchers need to reconceptualize their psychological behaviorist paradigm of “individual health risk behavior” because the pragmatics of income-generating strategies and the social symbolic hierarchies of respect, identity, and mutual dependence shape risky behavior. The explanatory potentials and the applied interventions that participant-observation anthropological approaches could bring to epidemiological public health research have not been utilized effectively in the field of HIV prevention and substance use. The accuracy of quantitative public health databases and our understanding of the who/why/ how/where of HIV infection could be improved by a cross-methodological dialogue with participant-observation fieldworkers and by a greater theoretical sophistication with respect to power, violence, and extreme social marginalization.

Of landscapes, anchors, and tools: on learning with multimedia computer programs

Under the cognitive paradigm human learners are portrayed as information processing systems. The idea of looking upon human beings as computers certainly seems to be progressive if one bears in mind that under the behaviourist paradigm, human learners are treated as black boxes, but it still leaves something to be desired. In recent instructional studies, the capacity of this approach to account for learning outcomes has therefore been questioned, arguing that processes of cognition and learning are basically situated, i.e. are based on an individual's activities in a social situation. The idea of cognition being situated has had some influence on theoretical approaches that have been developed in the field of learning and instruction with multimedia computer programs. Interestingly, a number of images or metaphors can be found in the writings of the respective authors that are used to characterise certain aspects of knowledge and knowledge acquisition processes: landscapes, anchors, and tools. I would like to have a closer look at these metaphors and then use them to help charter the territory of learning and instruction with multimedia computer programs.

Ethics, or issues in methodology?

Abstract Intrusion upon people rendered relatively helpless, withholding of information and abuse of confidentiality, are examples of behaviour by psychologists which point to an element of presumption in their manner of operating. The rights of clients are not respected by this type of professional practice. In both research and professional work, psychologists have employed techniques involving coercion, deception, concealment and stress. Such practices have been perpetuated by psychologists' concern with status, by their allegiance to institutions as clients, in a word, by the professionalization of psychology. The remnants of the classical behaviourist paradigm, with its emphasis upon behaviour under exclusive external control, continues to produce serious limitations in contemporary psychological theorizing. As a result, problems arise concerning the “ethics” of psychologists' conduct. But because the behaviourist paradigm is arguably at the base of this problem it may be better to conceive the issue...

Behavior Modification and Operant Psychology: An Anthropological Critique

Operant behaviorism is, in today's United States, a major branch of academic and of applied psychology. Yet I shall argue that its cross-cultural application (by Anglos, whether to minority enclaves or overseas) is fallacious. Incidental to or excluded from this discussion are its application to (1) subhuman animals, where I gladly concede its efficacy; (2) humans handicapped in or related to the brain/the emotions: and (3) Anglos (Yankees), because such programs tend to be designed by the same (Anglo) ethnicity. The human unsuitability of behaviorism has been noted at least since the pre-World War I criticisms of early behaviorist John Watson. Such objections have, however, been leveled from philosophical or humanistic bases (e. g., Chomsky 1959). The behaviorist paradigm has received scant attention from the discipline most concerned with that essence of humanity, culture-namely, cultural anthropology. Hence, as a member of that discipline who has been encountering increasingly more of behavioristic craft, I believe the time is over-ripe to indicate some problems both in its theory and in its application.