What makes you entirely unique from any other person on this planet? Well, one might argue that every person is uniquely the sum of every experience that they've had. We have all witnessed different things, we were taught specific lessons, we experienced certain events that have shaped how we make decisions and how we display specific behaviors. Let's focus in on that last word, behaviors. This video is all about the behavioral perspective of personality.
While this view, this theory of personality, has its critics, it is the result of some of the most fascinating and well-known psychological experiments to date. So what is a behavioral perspective? Behavior perspective, or behaviorism, is a belief that personality is a result of an individual's interaction with their environment. Psychologists can actually pinpoint and connect incidents and behavior to predict how a person's personality was shaped.
These interactions might include things like traumatic life experiences, lessons that you learned from your parents or your teachers, lessons from movies or other forms of media, The relationships that you have and all the things that we have observed are great examples of ways that may contribute to the way that you behave. So taking every single interaction that a person has with the world can feel overwhelming. So let's zoom in on two ways that we might be conditioned to behave one way or behave another way.
According to behaviorism, these types of conditioning shape all of our later decisions and ultimately our personality. Psychologists have categorized behaviorism into two different processes. Classical conditioning and operant conditioning.
Now there are two important people that you should know in the world of behaviorism because they illustrate two different types of conditioning. The first one is classical conditioning. You probably already know this one.
Ivan Pavlov is the father of the now famous Pavlov's dog experiment. Now in this experiment, Pavlov set off a metronome. Click, click, click for a group of dogs. Whenever the dogs heard the bell after this metronome, they would get a treat. This is a case of classic conditioning.
Soon, the dog started to physically salivate whenever they heard that metronome because they knew that food was coming. They automatically associated two unrelated stimuli through behavioral training. And if you want a good example, there's also an episode of The Office where Jim conducts a similar experiment on Dwight. So are we like Pavlov's dogs?
Do we associate two stimuli to each other and grow to commit certain behaviors from the association? Well, there's another study. It's called the Little Albert Study, and it says that we do.
This study was led by an American psychologist named John B. Watson. Watson used a young boy named Albert as his so-called dog. Now, he exposed the boy to images of a white rat and a bunch of other items.
Anyways, whenever he showed the image of the white rat, he would make a loud and scary noise. Soon enough, the boy was literally classically conditioned to react with fear whenever he saw the image of a white rat. He showed him an image of the white rat, the boy would get scared.
Now, there's one caveat in this experiment. Little Albert also began to act in a similar manner towards other white things. Rather than associating his fear with the loud noise, with the rat for being white, Albert made other assumptions and behaved in an unpredictable manner towards objects that he personally associated with the rat. So you can keep this in mind. Can we consider behavioral perspective a comprehensive theory, unless it can really account for how we associate two separate stimuli?
Secondly, we're going to be talking about operant conditioning. The second type of conditioning is operant conditioning. This type of process can help to better predict how someone will behave. Rather than using two unrelated stimuli, operant conditioning uses rewards and punishment to shape behavior. Now, the person can predict the reaction they will get if they behave in a certain way, and that might alter their behavior based on whatever type of reaction that they want.
The man that many people associate with operant conditioning is named B.F. Skinner. You can remember that Skinner and operant go together because they both have seven letters in their name. Now, along with Freud, he is one of the top known psychologists in the world today. Skinner and Freud didn't always agree, but their theories coincide to help explain why people make decisions.
Freud believes that the unconscious mind is constantly seeking pleasure and avoiding pain in any way possible. And Skinner, he kind of agreed with this. Now, we often associate rewards with pleasure and punishment with pain.
Skinner believed that you can change a person's behavior by using a series of rewards and punishments. People are going to seek behaviors that they know will bring them pleasure, even if they're not inclined to act that way in the first place. Now, this is pretty cool.
Skinner's work led him to teach pigeons how to play ping pong. And eventually, it helped soldiers during World War II. While you might not think that pigeons are naturally sporty and patriotic creatures, operant conditioning led them to display these types of behaviors that they wouldn't have otherwise displayed.
Skinner's box, also known as an operant conditioning chamber, is a famous laboratory piece used in the study of behaviors of animals. Within the box, there's usually a small animal, it's usually a rat, and there's also a lever and a food dispenser. And they're usually hooked up together so that whenever the rat pushes the lever, a food pellet will come out. Skinner wanted to see if the rat would associate pushing the lever to dispensing food.
Well, It worked. Why did the rat push the lever in the first place though? Because it surely didn't know that that lever would actually move or that it would dispense food pellets.
Well, rats are exploratory creatures, just like us humans, and they enjoy exploring their environment. Now, this includes pushing random buttons like a lever. So, after a ton of research, Skinner realized there are four ways to encourage or discourage an- type of behavior.
And here's the definition with some examples of operant conditioning. Number one is positive reinforcement, and this is whenever you add something to increase the behavior. An example is to give a rat a food pellet whenever it pushes a lever. Now here's a real life example, paying someone for a good job.
Number two is negative reinforcement. This is whenever you remove something to try to increase the behavior. An example of this is to continuously shock the rat's feet and only stop shocking it whenever it pushes the lever.
A real life example is whenever you go to clean your room because your mom has asked you to do it over and over and over again, and eventually your mom will stop asking you after you have cleaned your room. Now, both of these reinforcement increases the behavior, right? But we go about it in two different ways. We either add a stimulus, like food, or we remove a stimulus, like stop shocking a rat.
Now, what do we want to do if we want to stop a behavior? That's when punishment comes in. So, number three is positive punishment. This is whenever you add something. to decrease a behavior.
An example would be smacking a dog whenever it barks. A real life example you might encounter would be a speeding ticket. Whenever you're going 20 miles an hour over, right, you add a ticket to decrease the behavior of speeding. Number four is negative punishment. Now this is whenever you remove something to decrease the behavior.
An example would be to stop paying attention to a barking dog. Eventually it'll stop barking. Now something in real life that you might relate to is when you go too fast over the speed limit, you'll actually be arrested and you'll actually have your license taken away. You remove a license to decrease the behavior of speeding. Now, you can remember these simply by knowing that the word positive, like in math, means to add something.
Negative, also like in math, means to take away. Then, all you have to do is remember reinforcement means to reinforce a behavior, and punishment means to discourage it. So, negative reinforcement would be to get rid of, because negative means to subtract, a stimuli, that's the negative part, with the end goal of increasing a behavior. That's the reinforcement part.
A lot of people get these words confused, so I just wanted to take some extra time in this video to help explain them. So as I end this video, how does behavioral perspective fit in with personality psychology? Behaviorism says that we and our personality can change every day. If you're trained right, you can become a person with any sort of personality trait. It certainly gives hope to people who may aspire to be more driven, more punctual, or have any other traditionally good or successful trait.
If you enjoy self-development, then you probably relate to this, because you know that you can improve yourself. Anyone who has ever successfully trained a dog to behave in a certain way knows that there is some truth to this theory. Behavioral perspective though, is rather limited when it comes to explaining the overall psychology of personality. Behaviorists don't take into account like the thoughts that people have, or the feelings behind someone's actions.
These are real things, but they don't take into account in behaviorism. A person may be on time for work every day, but not because they want to or because they are in general a punctual person, but they may just be terrified of losing their job and not having any money. Sometimes, people choose to sacrifice their values and larger personality traits for wants, their needs, and their desires.
So behaviorism is just one piece of the personality puzzle, but it's also an important one to know. We can't entirely discredit behaviorism because it really does influence how people do make decisions. So, as I end this video, think about some of your daily habits.
Why do you do some of them? Are there rewards or are there punishments? Do they reflect who you are overall as a person, or do they just reflect the values and patterns of thought that you have established over the years? What does your commitment to these types of values say about your personality? If you enjoyed this video, feel free to watch some of the other videos in this personality series.
And if you want to learn more about your own personality, I just developed a free 3-in-1 personality quiz that you can take in the description below. It basically combines three of the major personality quizzes into one test that you can take in under 10 minutes. I'm also going to try to predict some things about you.
Like your political stances, your relationship style, and even your health. So you can go ahead and take that in the description below. I want to thank you so much for spending the time to watch this video, and I hope to see you in the next one.