what makes you entirely unique from any other person on this planet well one
might argue that every person is uniquely the sub of every experience
that they've had we have all witnessed different things we were taught specific
lessons or experience certain events that have shaped how we make decisions
and how we display specific behaviors let's focus in on that last word
behaviors this video is all about the behavioral perspective of personality
while this view this theory of personality has its critics it is the
result of some of the most fascinating and well-known psychological experiments
to date so what is the behavioral perspective behavior perspective or
behaviorism is a belief that personality is a result of an individual's
interaction with their environment psychologists can actually pinpoint and
connect incidents and behavior to predict how a person's personality was
shaped these interactions might include things like traumatic life experiences
lessons that you learned from your parents or your teachers lessons from
movies or other forms of media the relationships that you have and all the
things that we have observed are great examples of ways that may contribute to
the way that you behave so taking every single interaction that a person has
with the world can feel overwhelming so let's zoom in on two ways that we might
be conditioned to behave one way or behave another way according to
behaviorism these types of conditioning shape all of our later decisions and
ultimately our personality psychologists have categorized behaviorism into two
different processes classical conditioning and operant conditioning
now there are two important people that you should know in the world of
behaviorism because they illustrate two different types of conditioning the
first one is classical conditioning you probably already know this one
Ivan Pavlov is the father of the now-famous Pavlov's dog experiment now
in this experiment Pavlov set off a metronome
click-click-click for a group of dogs whenever the dogs heard the bell after
this metronome they would get a treat this is a case of classic conditioning
soon the dog started to physically salivate whenever they heard that
metronome because they knew that food was coming they automatically associated
to unrelated stimuli through behavioral training and if you want a good example
there's also an episode of the office where Jim conducts a similar experiment
on Dwight so are we like Pavlov's dogs do we associate two stimuli to each
other and grow to commit certain behaviors from the Association well
there's another study it's called the little Albert study and it says that we
do this study was led by an American ecologist named John B Watson Watson
used a young boy named Albert as his so-called dog now he exposed the boy to
images of a white rat and a bunch of other items anyways whenever he showed
the image of the white rat he would make a loud and scary noise
soon enough the boy was literally classically conditioned to react with
fear whenever he saw the image of a white rat he showed him an image of the
white rat the boy would get scared now there's one caveat in this experiment
little Albert also begin to act in a similar manner towards other white
things rather than associating his fear with a loud noise with the rat for being
white Albert made other assumptions and behaved in an unpredictable manner
towards objects that he personally associated with the rat so you can keep
this in mind can we consider behavioral perspective a comprehensive theory
unless it can really account for how we associate two separate stimuli secondly
we're gonna be talking about operant conditioning the second type of
conditioning is operant conditioning this type of process can help to better
predict how someone will behave rather than using two unrelated stimuli operant
conditioning uses rewards and punishment to shape behavior
now the person can predict the reaction they will get if they behave in a
certain way and that might alter their behavior based on whatever type of
reaction that they want the man that many people associate with operant
conditioning is named BF Skinner you can remember that Skinner and operant go
together because they both have seven letters in their name now along with
Freud he is one of the top known psychologists in the world today Skinner
and Freud didn't always agree but their theories coincide to help explain why
people make decisions Freud believes that the unconscious mind is constantly
seeking pleasure and avoiding pain in any way possible and Skinner
he kind of agreed with this now we often associate rewards with pleasure and
Punishment with pain it's gonna believe that you can change a person's behavior
by using a series of rewards and punishments people are going to seek
behaviors that they know will bring them pleasure even if they're not inclined to
act that way in the first place now this is pretty cool Skinner's work
led him to teach pigeons how to play ping-pong and eventually it helped
soldiers during World War two we might not think that pigeons are naturally
sporty and patriotic creatures operant conditioning led them to display these
types of behaviors that they wouldn't have otherwise displayed Skinner's box
also known as an operant conditioning chamber is a famous laboratory piece
used in the study of behaviors of animals within the box there's usually a
small animal it's usually a rat there's also a lever and a food
dispenser and they're usually hooked up together so that whenever the rat pushes
the lever a food pellet will come out Skinner wanted to see if the rat would
associate pushing the lever to dispensing food well it worked why did
the rat push the lever in the first place though because it surely didn't
know that that lever would actually move or that it would dispense food pellets
well rats are exploratory creatures just like us humans and they enjoy exploring
their environment now this includes pushing random buttons like a lever so
after a ton of research Skinner realized there are four ways to encourage or
discourage any type of behavior and here's the definition with some examples
of operant conditioning number one is positive reinforcement and this is
whenever you add something to increase the behavior an example is to give a rat
a food pellet whenever it pushes a lever now here's a real-life example paying
someone for a good job number two is negative reinforcement this is whenever
you remove something to try to increase the behavior an example of this is to
continuously shock the rats feet and only stop shocking it whenever it pushes
the lever a real-life example is whenever you go to clean your room
because your mom has asked you to do it over and over and over again and
eventually your mom will stop asking you after you have cleaned your room now
both of these reinforcement increases the behavior right but we go about it in
two different ways we either add a stimulus like food or
remove a stimulus like stop shocking a rat now what do we want to do if we want
to stop a behavior that's when punishment comes in so number three is
positive punishment this is whenever you add something to decrease a behavior an
example would be smacking your dog and whenever it barks a real-life example
you might encounter would be a speeding ticket whenever you're going 20 miles an
hour over right you add a ticket to decrease the behavior of speeding number
four is negative punishment now this is whenever you remove something to
decrease the behavior an example would be to stop paying attention to a barking
dog eventually it'll stop barking now something in real life that you
might relate to is when you go too fast over the speed limit you'll actually be
arrested and you'll actually have your license taken away you remove a license
to decrease the behavior of speeding now you can remember these simply by knowing
that the word positive like in math means to add something negative also
like in math means to take away then all you have to do is remember reinforcement
means to reinforce a behavior punishment means to discourage it so
negative reinforcement would be to get rid of because negative means to
subtract a stimuli that's the negative part with the end goal of increasing a
behavior that's the reinforcement part a lot of people get these words confused
so I just wanted to take some extra time in this video to help explain them so as
I in this video how does behavioral perspective fit in with personality
psychology behaviorism says that we and our personality can change every day if
you're trained right you can become a person with any sort of personality
trait it certainly gives hope to people who may aspire to be more driven more
punctual or have any other traditionally good or successful trait if you enjoy
self-development then you probably relate to this because you know that you
can improve yourself anyone who's ever successfully trained a dog to behave in
a certain way knows that there is some truth to this theory behavioral
perspective though is rather limited when it comes to explaining the overall
psychology of personality behaviorists don't take into account like the
thoughts that people have or the feelings behind someone's actions these
are real things but they don't take into account in behaviorism a person may be
on time for work every day but not because they want to or because they are
in general a punctual person but they may just be terrified of losing their
job and not having any money sometimes people choose to sacrifice their values
and larger personality traits for wants their needs and their desires so
behaviorism is just one piece of the personality puzzle but it's also an
important one - no we can't entirely discredit behaviorism because it really
does influence how people do make decisions so as I in this video think
about some of your daily habits why do you do some of them are there rewards or
are there punishments do they reflect who you are overall as a person or do
they just reflect the values and patterns of thought that you have
established over the years what is your commitment to these types of values say
about your personality if you enjoyed this video feel free to watch some of
the other videos in this personality series and if you want to learn more
about your own personality I just developed a free three-in-one
personality quiz that you can take in the description below it basically
combines three of the major personality quizzes into one test that you can take
in under 10 minutes I'm also going to try to predict some things about you
like your political stances your relationship style and even your health
so you can go ahead and take that in the description below I want to thank you so
much for spending the time to watch this video and I hope to see you in the next
one