ENGLISH 1

Choose one of the following questions and answer it in an essay developed by analyzing causes or effects. The question you decide on should concern a topic you care about so that the examples are a means of communicating an idea; not an end in themselves.

People and Their Behavior

• How does a person’s alcohol or drug dependency affect others in his or her family?
• Why is a particular television show so popular?
• Why is a college education important?
• Why do marriages between teenagers and those in their early twenties fail more often than marriages between people in other age groups?
• Does the Internet divide people instead of connecting them?

Length: no less than 1,000 words, double-spaced, Times New Roman, 12 pt font size

This essay is to consist of your own thoughts, words, and ideas. No secondary sources are to be used in this essay.

Create a 8 pages page paper that discusses behaviourist approach in psychology. Behaviourism is the approach to psychology that is based on the assertion that behaviour can be researched from scientific point of view without any recourse to inner mental state. This is a form of materialism that denies any objective significance for a mind. Its importance for psychological cure has been stark and made it one of the major bases of pharmacological therapy. One of the postulates of behaviourist conception is that free will is illusory, that all behaviour is defined by a set of forces comprised of environment and different genetic factors, either through reinforcement or association.

The behaviourist school of thought competed with the movement of psychoanalysis in psychology during the 20th century. Its main representatives were Ivan Pavlov, who researched classical conditioning, John B. Watson who declined introspective methods and looked for to limit psychology to experimental methods. Skinner B.F., tried to provide ethical basis to behaviourism by relating it to pragmatism.

There are different emphases within that broad approach. Some behaviourists dispute that the observance of behaviour is the most suitable way to investigate mental and psychological processes. Other scholars consider that it is the only way of examining such processes, while others still disagree that behaviour itself is the sole appropriate psychological subject, and that general psychological terms, such as belief, objectives, etc. have no referents and simply refer to behaviour.