Talk:Functional psychology

Is functionalism dead or just common sense?

Functionalism seems so natural that I wonder if it simply represented a mainstream "real world" rejection of lab psychology. It served as a justification for the kind of studies that governments, businesses, and foundations might fund. If I say it, based on my impressions, it is NPOV. Is anyone familiar with sociological or history of psych literature that bears on this point, one way or the other ? DCDuring 18:45, 4 October 2007 (UTC) Functionalism is best understood as a reaction against structuralism, the school of psychology associated with Wilhelm Wundt and Edward L. Titchener. That concentrated on the structure of the mind; functionalists wanted to look at the functions of the mind, and were influenced by the evolutionary theory of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace. ACEOREVIVED (talk) 21:12, 11 May 2009 (UTC)

September 25, 2013- Structuralism didn't look at the structures of the mind (like that means anything). They took a mental process and broke it down into the smallest processes possible to try to understand it. They looked at how a mental process was built brick by brick to see how it was structured. Functionalism again doesn't look at the functions of the mind, (like that means anything). They looked at the same mental processes and said "What's the point of breaking them down when we probably will never know how it works. We should look at how the process is being used". They explained what function the mental processes (or behavior) was playing in the person's life and environment.

Behaviorists

B.F. Skinner shouldn't be the example for Behaviorist. John Watson was the one who developed the school of thought, partially based on Pavlov's experiments with dogs, developed his theory as more of a reaction to functional psychology and structural psychology in 1913 with Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It. B.F. Skinner developed Operant Conditioning, and was only 9 in 1913. B.F.Skinner was really involved in psychology until about 1945. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 162.58.82.135 (talk) 20:10, 25 September 2013 (UTC)

4/25/2017: Fact check to the above: Skinner was involved in behaviorism and psychology much earlier than the above stated- his publications go back to 1930 in behaviorist research (webSource: http://www.bfskinner.org/publications/full-bibliography/)

Argument- While Watson originally published his "Behaviorist Manifesto" in response to functionalism, behaviorism as it is conceptualized today is much more in line with the expanded theoretical framework of Skinner. In addition to identifying the mechanisms responsible for operant conditioning, B.F. Skinner was more importantly the individual responsible for the philosophy of "Radical Behaviorism." Unlike much of the article describes, Skinner fully imagined a world where cognitive neuroscience and behaviorism would be synonymous and interchangeable (remember, this theoretical concept was developed before modern imaging techniques). In fact, Skinner never rejected that humans would act in a "spontaneous, erratic, willful" manner; he just stated that this perceived randomness was due to our inability to identify discrete stimuli ("covert stimuli") which were present in neural activity. In other words, your thoughts, emotions, memories, and perceptual "coloring" all are stimuli contributing to behavior we can observe ("overt behavior"). Source: Verbal Behavior (Skinner,1957); About Behaviorism (Skinner, 1974). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:196:8702:F150:3C9D:2883:6450:D9E1 (talk) 03:09, 26 April 2017 (UTC)