Psychology is the science of the mind; the human psyche is the most complex subject in science. It gives us the understanding of behaviour and thoughts. Psychologist focus their interest on researching human behaviours, they do this by analysing human development and social behaviours, this can be relatively difficult because we cannot observe an individual’s thoughts, dreams, emotions or memories. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/mind/articles/psychology/what_is_psychology.shtml)
The behaviourist perspective
Theories must be supported by the empirical data collection, this is the "research based on experimentation or observation (evidence)’’ (https://explorable.com/empirical-research))
Behaviourist say that people are born with the ‘’tabula rasa’’ this means a clean slate and we are influenced by the environment we are brought into. There are 3 types of learning classical conditioning, operant conditioning and social learning theory.
…show more content…
Pavlov learned the dogs to associate a bell with food which resulted with the dogs salivating to a bell, this behaviour was learned and this was called a conditioned response.
Operant conditioning is learning through a positive strength of a behaviour is adapted by reward or