AP PSYCHOLOGY

Detailed explanation-1: -Behaviorism is a study of how controlled changes to a subject’s environment affect the subject’s observable behavior. Teachers control the environment and use a system of rewards and punishments in an effort to encourage the desired behaviors in the subject.

Detailed explanation-2: -Reinforcement theory is a psychological principle suggesting that behaviors are shaped by their consequences, and that individual behaviors can be changed through reinforcement, punishment and extinction. Behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner was instrumental in developing modern ideas about reinforcement theory.

Detailed explanation-3: -Developed by B.F Skinner, operant conditioning is a way of learning by means of rewards and punishments. This type of conditioning holds that a certain behavior and a consequence, either a reward or punishment, have a connection which brings about learning.

Detailed explanation-4: -Behaviourist psychology should concern itself with the observable behaviour of people and animals, not with unobservable events that take place in their minds. The main influences of behaviourist psychology were Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936), Edward Lee Thorndike (1874-1949), John B. Watson (1878-1958), and B.F.