FOUNDATION OF EDUCATION

ESEM5113

TITTLE: COMPARE AND CONTRAST HUMANISTIC PSYCHOLOGY

AND BEHAVIOURISM AND THEIR IMPLICATION IN EDUCATION

Name

Matric No :

Shellney @ Veronica Sadom

KS1405MD0027

CHECKED BY:
DR. ABDUL AZIZ MD NOR
UNITAR KENINGAU LEARNING CENTRE

Introduction
Behaviourism is primarily concerned with the concepts of stimulus and replication and
conditioning. For example, whenever I sit down in my adjustable seat, my canine gets
exhilarated and runs in a circle around it. That's because I often play fetch with him while
sitting in the chair. So the stimulus is the chair, the replication is him running in a circle. He
has been "conditioned" to respond this way due to past events. While humanism takes a
different approach to understanding human behaviour. It optically canvasses motivations,
desires, purport, and other existential concepts to expound why we feel or act a certain way.
Humanism often referred to as positive psychology because rather than emphasising
abnormalities, humanism preoccupy on what makes individual routine. It then utilizes this as
a base for availing the person to overcome their defective characteristics
They both seek to explain why humans do things. They also both consider related to mental
activity processes that lead to behavioural outcomes. That's scarcely a stretch. It's more that
they both acknowledge that prior experiences form our prospects about our actions and that
we act according to our prior experiences, behaviourism considering it to be a biological
function and humanism considering it to be a form of cognition.
They differ much more than they are similar since humanism is more focused on the
cognitive experience and behaviourism often only looks at physical behaviours that can be
observed. We will explore the differences between humanism and behaviour also it
implication in education.
Differences between Behaviourism and Humanism
Humanism transcends deportment and additionally fixates on the emotions of human beings.
The humanistic approach to educational is one that is centred on the student. How the student
feels and how able they are to relate to what is being educated is most important. This theory
believes that if a student can understand how they learn and their behaviour in cognation to it,
and that the classroom can strengthen this comportment, they are more motivated to learn
(Biehler and Snowman, 2006, p. 372).
The humanistic approach is one that avails students believe in themselves and their
potential; it encourages compassion and understanding that fosters self-reverence and
reverence for others. As human beings we all have an innate desire to procure our full
potential and achieve what we can to the best of our abilities. This approach shows the

appealing conception that students can teach on their terms, or the way they choose to, as the
ordinate dictation in the classroom is geared towards their desiderata.
Behaviourism is the school of mentally conceived that fixates on the external demeanour of
individuals whereas humanism fixates on the individual holistically. According to B.F
Skinner, behaviourism is naturalistic. This means that the material world is the ultimate
authenticity, and everything can be explicated in terms of natural laws. Man has no soul and
no mind, only a brain that responds to external stimuli. Behaviourists use two processes to
explain how people learn: classical conditioning and operant conditioning.
In classical conditioning, people learn to relate two stimuli when they occur together,
such that the copying perfectly elicited by one stimulus is transferred to another. The person
learns to prompt a subsisting replication to an early stimulus. In operant conditioning,
people learn to perform incipient deportments through the consequences of the things they
do. If a manner they produce is followed by reinforcement then the likelihood of that manner
being repeated increases in future (the deportment is fortified). A consequence can be
reinforcing in two ways: either the person gets something good (positive reinforcement) or
they avoid something lamentable (negative reinforcement). Conversely, if a manner or
conduct is followed by a penalization then the likelihood of that manner being repeated in
future decreases. Whereas classical conditioning only sanctions the person to engender
subsisting replications to incipient stimuli, operant conditioning sanctions them to learn
incipient replications. By controlling rewards and penalizations, we can shape the
comportment of another person.
Behaviourism has a very scientific basis and uses experimentation as a means of
understanding behaviour. Much behaviourist research involves studying learning in animals
under laboratory conditions, utilizing experimental methods. Animals are utilized because
behaviourists postulate they learn in the same way as people but are more convenient to
study. Laboratory settings are favoured because they allow researchers to control very
precisely the conditions under which learning occurs (e.g. the nature and availability of
reinforcement and penalization). Experimental methods are utilized because they sanction
inferences to be drawn about cause and effect relationships between the variables studied.
Behaviourists withal study human learning in the laboratory (as in the study of Little Albert)
but more often behaviourist research utilizing humans is centred on endeavours deliberately
to change behaviour in an authentic-world setting (e.g. the behaviour of children in a school

or psychiatric patients in a hospital). As with the laboratory research, an endeavour is made to

control the conditions that influence learning, some of which are deliberately manipulated in
order to assess their effect on a particular set of target comportments.
Humanism, on the other hand, is rather subjective and does not have a very scientific
basis as behaviourism. According to humanistic approach to learning, self-motivation can
result better learning. In this approach every individual develops his natural own way of
learning thus student takes more responsibility for determining what they are learning.
Humanistic approach believes in co-subsistence. Humanistic psychology fixates on subjective
experiences as opposed to fine-tuned, coerced, definitive factors that determine demeanour.
This sanction for a personality concept that is dynamic and fluid and accounts for
much of transmute a person experiences over a lifetime. Personality development is thought
to be predicated on interactions in the phenomenal field or convivial and physical
environment. The inclusion of the subjective field of authenticity sanctions for variation
among people who would otherwise act or comport similarly. Humanistic psychology stresses
the consequentiality of free will and thus, personal responsibility for decision-making. This
view gives the conscious human being some obligatory autonomy and liberates him/her from
deterministic principles. .
Humanism rejects the behaviourists assumption of determinism and believes that
humans are agents of free will. The determinist approach proposes that all demeanour is
caused by preceding factors and is thus prognostic able. The causal laws of determinism form
the substructure of science. For example, Bandura, A., Ross, D. and Ross, S. (1961) showed
that children with violent parents will in turn become bad-tempered parents through
observation and imitation. While free will is the conception that we are able to have some
choice in how we act and postulates that we are in freedom to opt our deportment, in other
words we are self-determined.
Personal agency is the humanistic term for the exercise of free will. Personal agency
refers to the choices we make in life, the paths we go down and their consequences. To take a
simple example, when two chemicals react there is no sense in imagining that they could
comport in any other way than the way they do. However when two people meet they could
agree, fall out, come to a compromise, start a fight and so on. The changes are unlimited and
in order to understand their manner we would require to understand what each party to the
relationship opts to do.

Implication in Education
Behaviourism fixates on one particular view of learning: a
vicissitude in external deportment achieved through a
substantial amount of repetition of desired actions, the reward
of good habits and the dismay of lamentable habits. In the
classroom this view of learning led to a great deal of perpetual
actions, a great compliment for correct outcomes and
immediate rectification of mistakes. In the field of language
learning this type of edifying was called the audio-lingual
method, characterised by the whole class utilizing choral
chanting

of

key

phrases,

dialogues

and

immediate

rectification.
Within the project-based learning (PBL) environment, students may be inspirited
to engage with the cognition process and their peers within the group by positive
reinforcement from an adroit facilitator to increment positive actions of engagement,
contributions and querying. Negative deportments e.g. lack of engagement, negative
contributions, could be minimized through an absence of reinforce e.g. No excitement or
attention. Within the behaviourist view of cognition, the "teacher" is the ascendant person in
the classroom and takes skilful control; evaluation of learning originates from the edifier who
decides what is right or wrong.
The learner does not have any opportunity for evaluation or reflection within the
cognition process. They are simply told what is right or wrong. The conceptualization of
learning utilizing this approach could be considered "superficial" as the focus is on external
alterations in behaviour i.e. lackadaisical towards the internal processes of learning leading to
behaviour change and has no place for the emotions involved the process.

In the other hand, the

role

of

humanistic

teachers is to organise
the classrooms so that
students will wish to
learn, want to grow,
seek to ascertain, hope
to master, and desire to
create (De Carvalho
1991).

Within

classroom, teachers can definitely utilize the humanistic theory of learning to their advantage.
A classroom that emphasizes a positive environment, individual attention, and achieving
productive levels of self-esteem will naturally be a place where students are more delighted
and feel more inspired to learn. A child with low self-esteem, who has been made to believe
he or she is brainless or unintelligent, will not feel like there is any point in putting forth the
compulsory effort to learn. He or she might even actively rebel against an environment that
feels threatening, purport less, or doomed to failure.
We visually see this in cases of students who are failing in school skipping or
dropping. But in a school in which every child is focused upon and encouraged to optically
tell the difference of his or her own strengths, the chances are much more dominant than
learning will seem similar to a worthwhile and achievable goal. Additionally, I believe that
the expectation that children want to learn can act as a scarcely self-consummating
prediction. Teacher that is over the moon about the material he or she is using and expects
students to be as well is customarily greeted with much more enthusiast than teacher who
treats learning as unpleasant work (i.e., assigning extra math questions as a penalization for
misconduct).
Both behaviourism and humanistic psychology are very unique in their studies.
Behaviourism fixates on the individuals attitude and believes that our childhood shapes the
way that we act in adulthood. Humanistic psychology transmuted the focus yet again to the
self in general. They relied on the individual to rectify themselves and established a
psychology of empowerment, self-actualization and free will. Humanistic and behaviourism
are two different approach in educational but both of it harmonize each other as to shape
students to be a great person either in their study or future career undertakings.

Summary
Humanistic psychology focuses on human behaviour not only through the eyes of the
observer but also through the eyes of the person being observed. Humanistic psychology
believes that person behaviour is strongly connected with his or her inner feelings and selfimage. Humanism promotes a healthy respect for the crowning glory of God's creation. It
encourages us to use our God-given gifts of reason and observation to become co-Creators
with God, by making the world the best it can be.
Humanistic Psychology has been criticised because its theories are not possible to
falsify (Popper, 1969) and lacks analytical power and therefore is not a science. The effort of
many humanistic and positive psychologies to explain all of human behaviour often means
that these theories can actually never be proved wrong, which does not mean that they are
correct.
While, behavioural perspective is defined as perspective that focuses on observable
behaviour. Perhaps the best known experiment that exhibits this is Pavlovs dogs. By
observing response in the dogs and creating a controlled experiment was able to teach and
the dogs learned the behaviour of salivating when the dinner bell rang. (Davis, &
Palladino, 2010). To bring this into a more human example, there is a stereotype that says
that criminals are the product of their environments. For instance, if a parent is a drug dealer
who does time in prison or jail then the children will follow in their footsteps and because
they have learned that behaviour, and will demonstrate these behaviours in their own lives.
Behaviourists tend to focus on the external behaviour of people while disregarding the
internal functions which produce this behaviour. To me, we need to focus on both aspects. We
need to analyze external behaviour, of course. But, we also need to repeatedly analyze the
workings of the mind and the predictive quality that comes from this understanding.

Both theories have pros and cons and it is up to us to apply which is the best approach
to suit the circumstances.

REFERENCES
1.

Bandura, A. Ross, D., & Ross,S.A (1961). Transmission of aggression through the
imitation of aggressive models. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 63, 575582

2.

Rostami K., Khadjooi K., The implication of Behaviourism and Humanism theories
in medical education.

3.

Stahl R.J, Hunt B.S, Matiya J.C. Humanism and Behaviourism is there really a
difference?

4.

Mergel, Brenda. (1998) Instructional Design and Learning Theory. Educational

Communications and Technology, University of Saskatchewan

5.

Standridge, M. (2002) Behaviorism. In M. Orey (Ed.), Emerging perspectives on

learning, teaching, and technology

6.

DeCarvalho, R. (1991). The humanistic paradigm in education. The Humanistic

Psychologist, 19(1), 88-104.

7.

Lora Mathews, Behaviourist Theory of Childhood Education, Demand Media