Behaviorists (or experimental psychologists) were those who believed that learning occurred through the modification of behaviors, rather than through changes in mental states. They also believed that any psychological change should be observable and measurable. B.F. Skinner’s talents for self-promotion, coupled with his image of an eccentric inventor of gadgets made him perhaps the best known among them. He had a rigorous approach to science, proposing a “radical behaviorism” to test behavioral theories under strict conditions. He dismissed anything that couldn’t be observed, measured, and reproduced in experiments.
In Skinner’s radical approach, mental processes do not take place within the brain; they can only occur outside the body. He wanted to counter previous theories that thought processes play a role in stimulus-response conditioning, which were based on the work of Thorndike and Tolman. Skinner believed that free will was an illusion and that all human behavior is determined by environmental stimuli.
