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This groundbreaking book presents a brief history of behaviorism, the dominant movement in American psychology in the first half of the 20th Century. It then analyzes and criticizes radical behaviorism, as pioneered by B.F. Skinner, and its philosophy and applications to social issues. This second edition is a completely rewritten and much expanded version of the first edition, published nearly 15 years earlier. It surveys what changes have occurred within behaviorism and whether it has maintained its influence on experimental cognitive psychology or other fields. The mission of the book is to help steer experimental psychology away from its current undisciplined indulgence in "mental life" ...
This ground-breaking book presents a brief history of behaviorism, along with a critical analysis of radical behaviorism, its philosophy and its applications to social issues. This third edition is much expanded and includes a new chapter on experimental method as well as longer sections on the philosophy of behaviorism. It offers experimental and theoretical examples of a new approach to behavioral science. It provides an alternative philosophical and empirical foundation for a psychology that has rather lost its way. The mission of the book is to help steer experimental psychology away from its current undisciplined indulgence in "mental life" toward the core of science, which is an econom...
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First published in 2001. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
The colleagues and former students of John Staddon, the last of the Skinnerian behavourists, discuss topics that have been important in his work: behavourial ability and choice, memory, time and models, and behaviourism. Contributor R.H.I. Dale from Macquarie University.
In this book J.E.R. Staddon proposes an explanation of behavior that lies between cognitive psychology, which seeks to explain it in terms of mentalistic constructs, and cognitive neuroscience, which tries to explain it in terms of the brain. Staddon suggests a new way to understand the laws and causes of learning, based on the invention, comparison, testing, and modification or rejection of parsimonious real-time models for behavior. The models are neither physiological nor cognitive: they are behavioristic. Staddon shows how simple dynamic models can explain a surprising variety of animal and human behavior, ranging from simple orientation, reflexes, and habituation through feeding regulation, operant conditioning, spatial navigation, stimulus generalization, and interval timing.
Science is undergoing an identity crisis! A renown psychologist and biologist diagnoses our age of wishful, magical thinking and blasts out a clarion call for a return to reason and the search for objective knowledge and truth. Fans of Matt Ridley and Nicholas Wade will adore this trenchant meditation and call to action. Science is in trouble. Real questions in desperate need of answers—especially those surrounding ethnicity, gender, climate change, and almost anything related to ‘health and safety’—are swiftly buckling to the fiery societal demands of what ought to be rather than what is. These foregone conclusions may be comforting, but each capitulation to modernity’s whims thre...
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WHAT’S THE MATTER WITH WALL STREET? And How Do We Fix It? Even after the global financial meltdown of 2008, economists have clung to Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand” theory of an always selfregulating market that benefits private and public interests alike. But Duke University professor John Staddon is here to tell that there’s also another, darker force at work on Wall Street—a “Malign Hand” that guides all human interactions, including our finances. Combining psychology, behavioral economics, and other sciences, Staddon’s explosive new theory reveals the underlying principles behind the economic crisis, exposing the invisible mechanisms that drive our markets today. You’ll...
Limits to Action: The Allocation of Individual Behavior presents the ideas and methods in the study of how individual organisms allocate their limited time and energy and the consequences of such allocation. The book is a survey of individual resource allocation, emphasizing the relationships of the concepts of utility, reinforcement, and Darwinian fitness. The chapters are arranged beginning with plants and general evolutionary considerations, through animal behavior in nature and laboratory, and ending with human behavior in suburb and institution. Topics discussed include operant conditioning; the principle of diminishing returns; and issues in relation to mating strategies. Biologists, sociologists, economists, and psychologists will find the book interesting.