Psychological Behaviorism
Looking to the Future: PB’s Heuristic Character
Personality Theory
 

These levels of development of the PB theory open vast possibilities and needs for research. For one thing, there are presently many personality theories with a variety of concepts and principles, many of them overlapping. These need to organized in an overarching personality theory. PB provides that framework. Centrally the principles of basic learning theory and human learning theory and the concepts of the BBRs and the knowledge of how they develop in childhood need to be applied to the phenomena of personality, such as individual differences in behavior, the stability of individual differences, variations in individual differences. The specific traits of personality—intelligence, self-confidence, extroversion-introversion, honesty, friendliness, shyness, and many more—need to be analyzed in terms of the BBRs of which they are composed and how they are learned.

Psychological Testing

This is a completely disorganized and isolated field. Its basis consists of methods for constructing psychological tests along with common sense notions of personality. The field does not draw from the other fields of psychology or contribute to them. PB calls for analysis of all tests in terms of the BBRs they measure. Doing that will unify the field’s knowledge indicate the relationship of the tests to each other. Those analyses will also indicate how the BBRs are learned in a way that calls for the study of that learning, just as the PB analysis of intelligence produced research showing what an aspect of intelligence was, how it was learned, and how it could be taught. There is a huge amount of research called for to do this generally for intelligence as well as the many other BBRs of personality

Abnormal Behavior

Some abnormal behaviors can be analyzed simply, in terms of basic learning principles. For example, temper tantrums in a young child can be understood in terms of the reinforcement conditions that produced the tantrums and that maintain them. But most behavior disorders involve disorders in complex BBRs. A great deal of research and theory is necessary to analyze and study the behavior disorders in terms of the BBRs . The value of doing so has already been demonstrated many times within PB and other approaches using similar concepts and principles.

Continue to Looking to the Future: Applications

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