Psychology is the science of behavior. Psychology is not the science of the mind. Behavior can be described and explained without making reference to mental events or to internal psychological processes. The sources of behavior are external (in the environment), not internal (in the mind). Behaviorism is a doctrine, or a set of doctrines, about human and nonhuman animal behavior. An important component of many psychological theories in the late nineteenth century were introspection, the …showed first 75 words of 1794 total…

…showed last 75 words of 1794 total…over all the noise. Shaping is a critical process to operant conditioning. Throughout this process there is a positive reinforcement of successive approximations. The basic assumptions of behaviorism are that psychology's task is to study behavior, or the responses an organism makes to the stimuli in its environment; that psychological research should be empirical, based on measurement; that behavior can be controlled and predicted, and that the major component of behavior is learning. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ **Bibliography**