CONCEPT
Behaviorism
The research tradition founded by John Watson in 1913 and elaborated by Skinner across six decades — the insistence that psychology is a science of behavior studied through environmental contingencies rather than mental states.
Behaviorism is the research tradition in psychology that treats behavior as the legitimate subject matter of the science and environmental contingencies as the explanatory mechanism. The tradition was founded by John B. Watson's 1913 manifesto "Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It" and developed in multiple directions through the twentieth century — the classical conditioning research of Pavlov and his successors; the methodological behaviorism of Tolman, Hull, and Guthrie; and, most consequentially, the radical behaviorism of B.F. Skinner. Radical behaviorism differs from other versions in its insistence that private events (thoughts, feelings, sensations) are themselves behavior, amenable to the same analytical framework as public behavior, rather than hidden causes of behavior requiring separate treatment. The framework was largely displaced in academic psychology by the cognitive revolution of the 1960s but has returned to theoretical prominence through reinforcement learning in AI.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The historical trajectory of behaviorism runs through three major phases. The Watsonian phase (1913–1930) established the methodological