Behaviorism (English behavior — behavior) in a broad sense — a direction in psychology that studies the behavior of humans and animals as objectively observed reactions of the body to environmental stimuli.
Behaviorism distinguishes between classical behaviorism and neobehaviorism. Classical behaviorism studies only externally observable behavior and does not distinguish between the behavior of humans and other animals. Neobehaviorism, in addition to the study of externally observed behavior, recognizes «intermediate variables» — internal factors of the body that serve as an intermediary link between the impact of stimuli and response muscle movements.
For classical behaviorism, all mental phenomena are reduced to the reactions of the body, mainly motor ones: thinking is identified with speech-motor acts, emotions — with changes within the body, consciousness is not studied in principle, as it does not have behavioral indicators. The main mechanism of behavior is the connection between the stimulus and the response (S->R).
The main method of classical behaviorism is the observation and experimental study of the reactions of the body in response to environmental influences in order to identify correlations between these variables that are accessible to mathematical description.
Representatives: Edward Thorndike, Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, John Brodes Watson, Edward Chase Tolman, Burres Frederick Skinner.