Behavioral Psychology

Discuss your answers to these questions with your classmates:

• What is the relationship between behaviorism and learning?
• What is an example of an observable and measurable behavior related to the use of technology? Choose an example you would like to study.
• What research methods would you use to study this behavior? Why?

Discussion

Behaviorism is the scientific study of observable behavior. Learning is the observable behavior that is of interest to the science of behaviorism. Albert Bandura distinguishes learning from performance. Thus, someone can learn something and never use what has been learned. Also, people can act on information learned in the past. In one of Bandura’s observations, some children were shown a video of adults hitting a bobo doll. Later, some of the children imitated the adults and hit the bobo doll whereas other children did not hit the doll until they were bribed with candy.

A lot of people use YouTube and other social media and internet platforms for learning and other observable behavior. People chat and debate, and even create their own content. The internet has changed the way people behave in so many ways.

I know that a lot of people make money from YouTube. I am interested in the concept of a social media persona. I am also interested in determining whether there are common personality traits among those who have achieved success on YouTube. Good note taking and reasoning would be a good method to use. For example, I have noticed more extroversion among many people I see on YouTube. Unfortunately for me, I am an intro