What was the historical and cultural context of the learning perspective?

Learning perspective is the new field of psychology developed to challenge the old psychodynamic theory. It emerged at the beginning of the 20th century and continue to dominate psychology in US until 1950s. During this time, people came to belive that science will be able to solve great questions of the day. This believe led to the discovery of the learning perspective where human’s behaviors can be explain simply by using enviromental stimulus and observing their responses. Behaviorism argued that the old psychodynamic theory view of observing the unconscious is too vague and can not be study scientifically because there are no reliable evidences. However this new learning perspective concentrate their observation on human’s behaviors in different situation and stimuli therefore it is possible to obtain a scientific data. This learning perspective became very popular especially in US as it is a new country and they seek for the disovery of new knowledge. Americans have a very optimistic view of the future and belived that individuals that can overcome barriers and adapt to the changing business situation will be successful. Another reason that behaviorism was very popular among the Americans was because it promised a social reform by stating that behaviors can change depeding on the situation. This idea is very appealing to the Americans mentality as it is a “can do” approach.

Behaviorism was first introduced in 1900s by Pavlov, Watson and Thorndike. These behaviorist focused on the scientific way of studying human behaviors. They study human behaviors by focusing on how the stimuli in the enviroment produced response. However during the 1960s, behaviorism was modified by Skinner, Garcia and also Seligman. They add new insights from the cognitive and biological perspective to the original behaviorism, changing it to the learning perspective.