Behaviour in the Uniformed Public Services P1 and M1

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P1 Behaviourism: This theory is the study of human behaviour by John Watson. Scientific experiments are done in order to examine behaviour after being exposed to specific situations like changes in the environment. This is possibly because the mind cannot be observed thus not being able to study on it as said in Watson’s behaviourist manifesto ‘Psychology from the standpoint of a behaviourist’. And that is why they could have turned to a person’s actual physical actions to study through instead. This theory had the concept of: •How the surrounding environment affected one’s behaviour through their response •Behaviourism is on learning. The cooperation between stimulus and response is how learning takes place •There is no fundamental difference between behaviour of humans and animals and that each of them learn through the stimulus-response method. Classical conditioning however is a principle where a stimulus which naturally does not incite a reaction or response in a person, is joined by another stimulus which does incite a reaction. They made an experiment linked to this on dogs. Generally dogs in response to a bowl of food salivated however they wanted to see if they could pair this with a bell ringing. So every time they dogs received their food the bell rang and in the end when the bell rang the dogs salivated because they already associated the bell ring with their food. Operant conditioning however is the course of altering behaviour by receiving rewards and punishments. In this experiment they made a cat learn that every time it gets out of the box that it was placed in got a reward. This means it learnt doing the same escape routine because it knew the consequences were rewarding. This argues that a particular action or behaviour is shaped by the aftermath or consequences of that action. There are however criticisms such as that humans do not respond to
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