It is known as current behaviorism that within psychology was first developed by the psychologist John B. Watson towards the end of the 19th century and that consists of the use of strictly experimental procedures to study observable human behavior, that is, plain and simple. the behavior that a person displays and will do so by understanding the environment of this as a set of stimuli-responses.
The origin of this current, which is not considered as a school, but rather a type of clinical orientation, can be found in the so-called associationism proposed by the English philosophers, in functionalism and in Darwin's theory of Evolution. , since the aforementioned held a conception of the individual as an organism that adapts to the environment that touches it.
When behaviorism came to light, I quickly sought to minimize and displace the type of introspective study of mental processes, emotions and feelings that prevailed until then and replaced it with objective study of human behavior and their relationship with their environment through the use of experimental methods. A notable repercussion awakened behaviorism in its wake. since it mainly promoted the relationship between animal and human research and the approach of psychology with natural sciences such as physics, chemistry and biology.
So, it can be said that behaviorism made three fundamental contributions to today's psychology, on the one hand discovered that the individual is certainly influenced by stimulus conditions, popularized the use of the experimental method for the study of individual cases and demonstrated conclusively that behaviorism is a useful current to use when solving some practical problems that are arouse within psychology.
Likewise, behaviorism will introduce the concept of basic repertoires of conduct, as the main construct to explain human behavior. For this module, the learning process that takes place throughout individual history is cumulative and hierarchicalThis means that the learned behaviors tend to accumulate over time and are organized in such a way that some will have more preeminence over others.
Among the personalities that were key at the time of its study and development, in addition to the aforementioned Watson, we find Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, Burrhus Frederic Skinner and Albert Bandura.
