From Behaviorism to New Behaviorism: A Review Study

Meisam Ziafar (Assistant Professor, Department of English Language Teaching, Ahvaz Branch, Islamic Azad University, Ahvaz, Iran)
Ehsan Namaziandost (Ph.D. Candidate in TEFL, Department of English, Faculty of Humanities, Shahrekord Branch, Islamic AzadUniversity, Shahrekord, Iran)

Loquen: English Studies Journal
Vol 12 No 2 (2019): July-December

Neobehaviorism bridges the gap between behaviorism and cognitivism. Like Thorndike, Watson, and Pavlov, the neobehaviorists believe that the study of learning and a focus on rigorously objective observational methods are crucial to a scientific psychology. Unlike their predecessors, however, the neobehaviorists are more self-consciously attempting to formalize the laws of behavior. Neobehaviorism is associated with a number of scholars such as Tolman, Hull, Skinner, Hebb, and Bandura. Neobehaviorists demand formalizing the law of behavior. Neobehaviorism takes into consideration abstraction and hidden variables, it represents a holistic approach to behavior. It can be claimed that all neobehavioristic theories have been proposed in order to put some cognition within the mechanistic nature of traditional behaviorism.