What was the historical and cultural context of the learning perspectives?
*****Analyzing the history and culture of the 20th century enables us to understand about the learning perspective. The learning perspective experiments with stimuli and observes responses, working toward theories that will interpret the human behavior.
*****With the three guiding principles of efficiency, reform, and progress, Americans turned toward new explanations for the human behaviors during the 1950s, science. Under the new wave of scientific theories, psychology study fields such as the unconscious mind and introspection method couldn’t compete with science since they couldn’t be studied scientifically. This was the time a new method called behavioralism is introduced. In the early 1900s, psychologists like Ivan Pavlov, John Watson, and Edwin Thorndike shaped the basic structure of behavioralism. As more researches are being done, more perspectives were being built on the basic concepts, and developing the theory. During the 1960s, as more ideas were added, behavioralism was known as the learning perspective.
*****The US culture has a very optimistic view of the future, and that each person can overcome challenges. Understanding that the society is ever-progressing, the world thinks that humans have to adapt to that changes. Behavioralism is popular because it also supports social changes, saying that behavior changes according to the environment. The US culture likes the “can do” idea. Because behavioralism tries to use the simplest explanation to support its theory (very “can do”), that’s it is widely accepted in the US. Unlike psychodynamic approaches, behavioralism relies on behavioral (how environmental stimuli causes responses in behavior) evidences, which can be scientifically observed and analyzed.
