Behavioral theory

all right the behavioral theory is what we're going to be talking about next and the behavioral theory says that personality is a result of the interaction between an individual and their environment so here's our person and then this is the environment whether it's society will draw a few houses here there you go get the picture so basically what I've drawn here is one island in another island and a bridge connecting both and you'll see why I did that in a second okay so the behavioral theory says that we interact with our environment and it's also focused on observable and measurable behavior rather than mental or emotional behaviors there's different types of behaviors and different theories focus more on one type of behavior over the other so when looking at this if this is the behavioral theory is this island right here I guess we can say the psychoanalytic theory over here would be the most opposite because this theory focuses on mental behavior rather than observable behavior and behavioral theorists don't care for theories that take thoughts and feelings into account so let's talk about two important theorists of the behavioral theory and the first is Skinner so Skinner was a strict behaviorist and he's associated with the concept of operant conditioning which you may have heard of before so operant conditioning uses rewards and punishments to increase or decrease a behavior and another behaviorist Pavlov who is a Russian physiologist and he's also considered by many as the father of behaviorism he's associated with classical conditioning and he used his famous dog example the Pavlov dog experiment to show what classical conditioning was it basically places a neutral stimulus with an unconditional stimulus to trigger an involuntary response so in the case of the dogs ringing a bell in the presence of food is what caused the dogs to begin celebrating triggered that involuntary response so these theorists Skinner and Pavlov believe that the environment determines the behavior so that's why I put ourselves in our environment we're shaped by the environment and people have consistent behavior patterns because we have particular kinds of response tendencies but these responses can change if we encounter new situations and that's why our personality develops over our entire lifespan it's constantly evolving and changing now what is this bridge in the middle connecting one extreme of behaviorism to the other the mental approach to the observable approach now it's not to say one is right over the other there's just two different approaches of personality okay so back to this the bridge the bridge in the middle is what we're going to call the cognitive theory and the cognitive theory is considered a bridge between classic behaviorism and other theories that emphasize thinking and behaviors such as the psychoanalytic theory and it's because the cognitive theory treats thinking as a behavior and has much in common with the behavioral theory so Albert bandura combines the concepts of observing thinking and behaving in the social cognitive theory which we'll take a look at next