What is the behaviourism?

The behaviourist perspective became prominent in the early 1900s, predominantly with John Locke who argued that the human mind was a blank slate, "tabula rasa", meaning that all behaviours and personality traits are learnt through experiences. Watson in 1913 also said he could take any child at birth and "train him to become any type on specialist i might select", reiterating the idea that humans are products of thier learning experiences. There are two main types of behaviourist learning, which are classical conditioning and operatn conditoning. The Pavlov's dogs experiement introduced classical conditioning, where a response oringially elicited by stimulus A is elicited by stimulus B. This was furthered by Skinners operant conditoning, which argued that "response tendencies" shape our behaviour: if we get positive outcomes we continue the behaviour, and if we get negative outcomes we stop the behaviour, thus suggesting that society can shape our beaviour which was seen as a radical view. Furthermore, Bandura's learning and conditoning argued that we learn behaviours by watching role models and learning from their triumphs and mistakes.  Thus, behaviourism suggests that human behaviour can be modified by teaching people new behaviours and attempting to modify old behaviours. The congitive behavioural perspective on mental illness is one of the most prominent nowadays, suggesting that our expectations and thoughts interact with learning and the environment to affect how we behave. This led to the development of CBT, cognitive behavioural therapy, which is boradly used in therapy (25% of practitioners). However, there are limits to behaviourism, such as its lack of accountability for genetics in our behaviours, as well as its deterministic viewpoint.