Editing Behaviorism (section)

==Respondent conditioning==
{{main|Classical conditioning}}
Although [[operant conditioning]] plays the largest role in discussions of behavioral mechanisms, [[classical conditioning|respondent conditioning]] (also called Pavlovian or classical conditioning) is also an important behavior-analytic process that needs not refer to mental or other internal processes. Pavlov's experiments with dogs provide the most familiar example of the classical conditioning procedure. In the beginning, the dog was provided meat (unconditioned stimulus, UCS, naturally elicit a response that is not controlled) to eat, resulting in increased salivation (unconditioned response, UCR, which means that a response is naturally caused by UCS). Afterward, a bell ring was presented together with food to the dog. Although bell ring was a neutral stimulus (NS, meaning that the stimulus did not have any effect), dog would start to salivate when only hearing a bell ring after a number of pairings. Eventually, the neutral stimulus (bell ring) became conditioned. Therefore, salivation was elicited as a conditioned response (the response same as the unconditioned response), pairing up with meat—the conditioned stimulus)<ref>{{Cite web |title=Ivan Pavlov |url=http://www.ivanpavlov.com/ |access-date=16 April 2012}}</ref>  Although Pavlov proposed some tentative physiological processes that might be involved in classical conditioning, these have not been confirmed.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Bitterman |first=M. E. |year=2006 |title=Classical conditioning since Pavlov |journal=Review of General Psychology |publisher=SAGE Publications |volume=10 |issue=4 |pages=365–376 |doi=10.1037/1089-2680.10.4.365 |issn=1089-2680 |s2cid=144362212}}</ref> The idea of classical conditioning helped behaviorist John Watson discover the key mechanism behind how humans acquire the behaviors that they do, which was to find a natural reflex that produces the response being considered.

[[John B. Watson|Watson]]'s "Behaviourist Manifesto" has three aspects that deserve special recognition: one is that psychology should be purely objective, with any interpretation of conscious experience being removed, thus leading to psychology as the "science of behaviour"; the second one is that the goals of psychology should be to predict and control behaviour (as opposed to describe and explain conscious mental states); the third one is that there is no notable distinction between human and non-human behaviour. Following Darwin's theory of evolution, this would simply mean that human behaviour is just a more complex version in respect to behaviour displayed by other species.<ref>Richard Gross, Psychology: The Science of Mind and Behaviour</ref>