Critically contrast the behaviourist approach to psychology with the Essay

Critically contrast the behaviourist approach to psychology with the cognitive approach. You should refer to primary sources w - Essay Example Along with some similarities, there are fundamental contrasts of the behavioral and the cognitive approaches to psychology. First of all, both psychological schools follow different points of view as for the subject of psychological science. Behaviorists consider person’s behavior,  reflected in  the available  objective  observation of  physical processes, as  the only subject of  psychology.  Ã‚   Mental processes, as factors influencing behavior, are not taken into consideration by the behavioral concept. Hempel (1949), for example, claims that â€Å"all psychological statements †¦ are translatable into statements that do not involve psychological concepts,† but only concepts for physical behavior (p. 18). The behavioral theory assumes that after birth all human beings are similar. Thus, the formation of personality is greatly related to the surrounding environment, which is to shape and bring up a future individual. â€Å"Give me a dozen health y infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select†. (John Watson, 1930, p. ... avior, cognitive psychology focuses on internal considerations such as patterns of thoughts, obsessive preoccupations, or the manifest content of one's  dreams. The cognitive approach views the processes of thinking and cognition as the determinant of human behavior. Cognition is the act or process of knowing. It refers to the mental processes of an individual and includes attention, perception, memory, reasoning, judgment, imaging, thinking, and speech. Cognitive psychology states that human behavior is not merely the product of interaction with outward reality. It explicitly acknowledges the existence of internal mental states (such as  belief,  desire  and  motivation), â€Å"Not stimuli and responses, not overtly observable behavior, not biological drives and their transformation, but meaning†¦by adding a little  mentalism  to it.   It focused on the symbolic activities that human beings employed in constructing and making sense not only of the world, but of themselves.† (Jerome Bruner, 1990, p.  2) The cognitive  approach spread  also  to  the study  of emotional and   motivational  areas of  personality. In fact, the behavioral approach is based on the mechanistic materialism, considering human consciousness as an artificial analogue of religious notion of ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’, and it is absolutely rejected by behaviorists. Mental processes also seem mostly as some concomitant inner factors, which are not included in the causal relationships between an individual and actuality.   Only in the world of physical phenomena there are causal links, through which one of the events serves as a reason for another one, being its consequence.  From this point of view, the relationship of stimulus and response (S - R) is accepted as the basic mechanism of the