The principles of CC have been applied in many therapies. Though looking into natural reflexes and neutral stimuli he managed to condition dogs to salivate to the sound of a bell through repeated associated with the sound of the bell and food. Classical conditioning involves learning by association, and operant conditioning involves learning from the consequences of behavior.Ĭlassical conditioning (CC) was studied by the Russian psychologist Ivan Pavlov. The behaviorist perspective proposes two main processes whereby people learn from their environment: namely classical conditioning and operant conditioning. The behaviorist perspective is concerned with how environmental factors (called stimuli) affect observable behavior (called the response). If your layperson's idea of psychology has always been about people in laboratories wearing white coats and watching hapless rats try to negotiate mazes in order to get to their dinner, then you are probably thinking about behavioral psychology.īehaviorism is different from most other approaches because they view people (and animals) as controlled by their environment and specifically that we are the result of what we have learned from our environment. For this reason, it is important that psychology does have different perspectives on the understanding and study of human and animal behavior.īelow is a summary of the six main psychological approaches (sometimes called perspectives) in psychology. Most psychologists would agree that no one approach is correct, although in the past, in the early days of psychology, the behaviorist would have said their perspective was the only truly scientific one.Įach approach has its strengths and weaknesses, and brings something different to our understanding of human behavior. You may wonder why there are so many different psychology approaches and whether one approach is correct and others wrong. The five major perspectives in psychology are biological, psychodynamic, behavioral, cognitive and humanistic. There may be several different theories within an approach, but they all share these common assumptions. An approach is a perspective (i.e., view) that involves certain assumptions (i.e., beliefs) about human behavior: the way they function, which aspects of them are worthy of study and what research methods are appropriate for undertaking this study.