A Revisit of Behaviorism

The first time I heard about behaviorism was in an undergraduate class. It was an introductory course about educational technology. In that class, I feel the reason why we mentioned about behaviorism was to land on constructivism, which was very confusing to me. I feel we were like on a high-speed train departed from nowhere to some promising future. We quickly passed by a lot of big stations like behaviorism, cognitivism, and so forth but there was no time for us to stop at any of them. Now as a doctoral student, I am privileged to have the resource to learn in depth of some of them. I expect that this revisit of behaviorism through this course can help me understand social cognitive theory from its origin all the way to the latest research. Here are my takeaway statements from the first meeting and the first two chapters of Sutherland (2009).

1. Self-efficacy is based on behaviorism

"Behaviorism is too simple because it ignores how unique humans are compared to animals." This is what I understood before about behaviorism. I had a hard time connecting self-efficacy to behaviorism due to the critiques. Now, I've started to debunk of my myth about the simplicity of behaviorism. Early behaviorist theories simplified the interaction between human and environment, however, it was not fair to say that behaviorism only focuses on behavioral changes. Self-efficacy is a development based on early behaviorist theories.

My further question would be: what exactly are the limitations of early behaviorist theories? What theoretical problem did social cognitive theory solved?

2. Training happens everyday every moment

I feel the same way as the book author, somehow people are uneasy with the the idea of training when it comes to humans. Today in an era when constructivism has its big role in education, people are also uneasy with the idea of training when it comes to education. What's wrong with training? What's wrong with behaviorism?

One obvious answer to me is that behaviorism and training are more complicated then we think. It's not only about the moment giving a mackerel to a dolphin. It's not only about the intentional ignoring of crying kid. It's not only about using hot sauce to wean a baby. The interaction in everyday life is so tedious between humans/animals and the environment. Each interaction, no matter it is intentionally done or not, can be a training session. Not only humans can train others, humans ourselves are trained by others and the environment.

If we think about training in a more broad sense and decentralize the role of humans, we can be more observant and care more about the interaction between environment and us than simply our thoughts.

3. Human is more complicated than animals but not as much as we think

This takeaway gives me an alternative way to analyze a complicated case sometime. I can't agree more with what the author said, "Humans are so sloppy, I think, because we can later explain ourselves, put it another way, or apologize to our fellow higher primates. There's no explaining anything to an animal...That animals take the world literally, connect the behavioral dots on the spot, and respond so clearly, drives home this fact: what you do is communication." (p. 48) I think humans are good at lying. Those lies can protect our feelings but create distance with our heart. Thinking about the animals makes me be true to my feelings.


References

Sutherland, A. (2009). What Shamu taught me about life, love, and marriage: Lessons for people from animals and their trainers. New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks.