It’s a very important term in psychological field.
According to behaviorism, your behavior is not according to your thought, but all the things happen around you, now and all previous days in your life. (However, most psychologists still admit the effect of genes.)
It might sound ridiculous at first, “what I do is what my mind intend to do” is our belief in daily life.
But how you prove that feeling is not a psychological illusion?
Once in the psychological history, psychologists hold the principle of structuralism, which is, the study of the structure of the mind, particularly sensations, feelings, and images.
However, psychologists abandoned this principle after some research, because the study of the mind is impossible. (For example, I’ll say that I’m surprised when my classmate yells at the back of me. But how you determine whether I’m really surprised? If yes, does the feeling of surprise is very strong? How strong? These questions are unanswerable.)
Then is the rise of the behaviorism, which is still the mainstream of the psychology today. Instead of studying what is going on in the mind, behaviorism study what is observable, the behavior.
Behaviorists have been accused of believing that the environment controls practically all aspects of behavior. The most extreme statement of environmental determinism came from John B. Watson, one of the founders of behaviorism, who said,
Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select—doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief, and yes, even beggarman thief—regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors. I am going beyond my facts and I admit it, but so have the advocates of the contrary.
