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This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

This book examines psychology in the context of behaviorism and reports upon those things that any properly trained individual can observe. Behavior psychology has been called physiology, muscle-twitch psychology and biology, but if it helps to rid us of the constraints of present-day conventional psychology and teaches us to face the human being more directly, what name it is given is not a matter of much consequence. Behavior psychology has had a rapid development and is a direct outgrowth of work on animal behavior. While behavior psychology borrows from conditioned reflex methods and psychopathologists, it is neither an objective psychology nor a modified system of psychoanalysis. The present volume disrupts the traditional classification of psychological topics and their conventional treatment. Terms such as consciousness, sensation, perception, attention, will, image and the like are avoided by the author due to his belief that they are used inconsistently and have unclear meanings. Terms such as thinking and memory have been redefined to conform with behavioristic psychology. Also, in this text the author has clung to the genetic method rather closely in hopes that students grasp the genesis of the various types of organization. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2004 APA, all rights reserved).

This Is A New Release Of The Original 1919 Edition.

This groundbreaking book presents a brief history of behaviorism, the dominant movement in American psychology in the first half of the 20th Century. It then analyzes and criticizes radical behaviorism, as pioneered by B.F. Skinner, and its philosophy and applications to social issues. This second edition is a completely rewritten and much expanded version of the first edition, published nearly 15 years earlier. It surveys what changes have occurred within behaviorism and whether it has maintained its influence on experimental cognitive psychology or other fields. The mission of the book is to help steer experimental psychology away from its current undisciplined indulgence in "mental life" toward the core of science, which is an economical description of nature. The author argues that parsimony -- the elementary philosophical distinction between private and public events, even biology, evolution and animal psychology -- all are ignored by much contemporary cognitive psychology. The failings of radical behaviorism as well as a philosophically defective cognitive psychology point to the need for a new theoretical behaviorism, which can deal with problems such as "consciousness" that have been either ignored, evaded or muddled by existing approaches. This new behaviorism provides a unified framework for the science of behavior that can be applied both to the laboratory and to broader practical issues such as law and punishment, the health-care system, and teaching.