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Behaviorism (or behaviourism) is an approach to psychology based on the proposition that behavior is interesting and worthy of scientific research. Within that broad approach, there are different emphases. Some behaviorists argue simply that the observation of behavior is the best or most convenient way of investigating psychological and mental processes. Others believe that it is in fact the only way of investigating such processes, while still others argue that behavior itself is the only appropriate subject of psychology, and that common psychological terms (belief, goals, etc.) have no referents and/or only refer to behavior. Those taking this point of view sometimes refer to their field of study as behavior analysis or behavioral science rather than psychology.
Early in the 20th century, John B. Watson argued in his book Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist for the value of a psychology which concerned itself with behavior in and of itself, not as a method of studying consciousness. This was a substantial break from the structuralist psychology of the time, which used the method of introspection and considered the study of behavior valueless. Watson, in contrast, studied the adjustment of organisms to their environments, more specifically the particular stimuli leading organisms to make their responses. Most of Watson's work was comparative, i.e., he studied the behavior of animals. Watson's approach was much influenced by the work of Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov, who had stumbled upon the phenomenon of classical conditioning (learned reflexes) in his study of the digestive system of the dog, and subsequently investigated the phenomena in detail. Watson's approach emphasized physiology and the role of stimuli in producing conditioned responses - assimilating most or all function to reflex. For this reason, Watson may be described as an S-R (stimulus-response) psychologist.
Watson's behaviorist manifesto persuaded most academic researchers in experimental psychology of the importance of studying behavior. In the field of comparative psychology in particular, it was consistent with the warning note that had been struck by Lloyd Morgan's canon, against some of the more anthropomorphic work such as that of George Romanes, in which mental states had been freely attributed to animals. It was eagerly seized on by researchers such as Edward L. Thorndike (who had been studying cats' abilities to escape from puzzle boxes). However, most psychologists took up a position that is now called methodological behaviorism : they acknowledged that behavior was either the only or the easiest method of observation in psychology, but held that it could be used to draw conclusions about mental states. Among well-known twentieth-century behaviorists taking this kind of position were Clark L. Hull , who described his position as neo-behaviorism, and Edward C. Tolman, who developed much of what would later become the cognitivist program. Tolman argued that rats constructed cognitive maps of the mazes they learned even in the absence of reward, and that the connection between stimulus and response (S->R) was mediated by a third term - the organism (S->O->R). His approach has been called, among other things, purposive behaviorism.
Methodological behaviorism remains the position of most experimental psychologists to-day, including the vast majority of those who work in cognitive psychology - so long as behavior is defined as including speech, at least non-introspective speech. With the rise of interest in animal cognitionAnimal cognition is the title given to a modern approach to the mental capacities of non-human animals. It has developed out of comparative psychology, but has also been strongly influenced by the approach of ethology and behavioral ecology. Much of what since the 1980s, and the more unorthodox views of Donald GriffinDonald Redfield Griffin ( August 3, 1915 November 7, 2003) was an American professor of zoology at various universities who did seminal research in animal behavior, animal navigation, acoustic orientation and sensory biophysics. In 1938 he began studying among others, mentalistic language including discussion of consciousness is increasingly used even in discussion of animal psychology, in both comparative psychology and ethologyEthology is the scientific study of animal behaviour (particularly of social animals such as primates and canids), and is a branch of zoology. A scientist who practises ethology is called an ethologist . Origins of the name The term ethology derives from; however this is in no way inconsistent with the position of methodological behaviorism.