What was the historical and cultural context of the learning perspective?
The learning perspective evolved from behaviorism from influences of historical and cultural contexts of the 20th century. Behaviorism began in America with Ivan Pavlov at the turn of the century. Unlike behaviorism, the learning perspective takes in influences of the biological and cognitive perspective. The learning perspective also adopted some basic assumptions from its predecessor. The philosophy of empiricism is adopted. Empiricism argues that knowledge is gained from the environment through via senses. Learning, in the mind of learning perspective psychologist, is associating events with rewards or punishments. Watson, Thorndike, and Skinner, assumed that all behaviors are learned from the environment from birth. From Watson’s own mouth, he bragged, “give me a dozen healthy infants…I’ll guarantee to … train him to become any type of specialist I might select.” Moreover, these psychologists assumed that freewill is merely an illusion. Thus abuses of power, like inducing a fear in little Albert, in the behaviorist approach brought on ethical issues. Consequently it caused the behaviorist approach to be abandoned. As a result, picking off after behaviorism, the learning perspective aims to be more ethical through means like animal experimentation.
The world view of Americans at the turn of the century is optimistic with an idea that science can solve great problems with parsimony. The learning perspective, through psychologists like, Garcia and Seligman, focuses on scientifically experimentations. Americans in the 20th century are fond on the Occam’s razor. Occam’s razor describes that the most parsimonious solutions are the best. Consequently, Watson and others kept their explanation parsimonious by focusing on only observable stimuli and responses. As a result, thought and feelings which originated from the mind are ignored. Culturally, Americans have a guide line of “reform, efficiency, and progress.” From the start, the unconscious, from Freudian theory, cannot be observed. As a result, it cannot be scientifically studied. Little Hans’s Oedipus ‘complex’ lacks parsimony. Thus, Freud’s unfalsifiable psychodynamic approach is rejected because Freudian theory lacked efficiency and progress.