In the middle of the twentieth century, American psychology was dominated by two major schools behaviorism and Freudian psychology. Increasing dissatisfaction with these two orientations as adequate approaches to the human psyche led to the development of humanistic psychology. The main spokesman and most articulate representative of this new field was the wellknown American psychologist Abraha...

Life in our social world depends on predicting and interpreting other people’s behavior. Do such inferences always require us to explicitly represent people’s mental states, or do we sometimes bypass such mentalistic inferences and rely instead on cues from the environment? We provide evidence for such behaviorist thinking by testing judgments about agents’ decision-making under uncertainty, co...

This work presents a critical analysis of Pavlov's influence that goes beyond the conventional view: that which reduces his influence in American psychology to the behaviorism of Watson and Hull. In order to understand the nature of the Russian physiologist's influence in American psychology, we propose a distinction between three approaches to it: 1) the symbolic approach, on representing a mo...

This paper describes a unifying framework for five highly influential but disparate theories of natural learning and behavioral action selection. These theories are normally considered independently, with their own experimental procedures and results. The framework presented builds on a structure of connection types, propagation rules and learning rules, which are used in combination to integra...

The dominant theory of lexical acquisition for much of the twentieth century was that of associative learning. This trend was certainly driven by the dominance of behaviorism in psychology, but also by its cousin philosophical behaviorism that pervaded the fields of philosophy of language and linguistics. However, there is also good evidence that children are not “little behaviorists.” Most of ...

Linehan’s biosocial theory (1981, 1988, 1993a) states that suicidal behavior is a learned method for coping with acute emotional suffering. Suicidal behavior is viewed as a skill deficit; i.e., people are thought to seek death as the solution for their intense suffering because they can think of no other effective options. The theory has roots in social-behaviorism (Staats, 1975) and radical be...

The perceived inability of behaviorism to deal with complex human behavior has been a recurrent theme among its critics. Although ingenious and subtle, even Skinner's Verbal Behavior (1957) is widely faulted on these grounds, in particular, for failing to explain linguistic generativity (Chomsky, 1959). In Relational Frame Theory: A PostSkinnerian Account of Human Language and Cognition, Hayes,...