The Genius of Dogs by Brian Hare & Vanessa Woods

Author:Brian Hare & Vanessa Woods
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781780741369
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Published: 2013-01-01T13:00:00+00:00

The Tyranny of Behaviourism

It is hard to imagine the chokehold behaviourism had on behavioural science for most of the twentieth century. Today, there is a whole range of approaches to studying cognition. There are ethologists, behaviourists, neuroscientists, and people like me who study cognition from an anthropological perspective. But in the US from 1913 to 1960, and perhaps longer, there was only one approach to animal psychology – behaviourism. If you were not a behaviourist, you could not get a job, because all of the hiring faculty were behaviourists. You could not get a grant, because everyone reviewing your grant was a behaviourist. You could not get published, because everyone reviewing your paper was a behaviourist.

Behaviourism started as a reaction against the introspective psychology championed by Freud and others. Their work is too vast to go into here, but if you ever flick through Freud’s Passing of the Oedipus Complex, you will find passages such as:

The little girl who wants to believe herself her father’s partner in love must one day endure a harsh punishment at his hands, and find herself hurled to earth from her cloud-castles.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.