Humans seem to be an entity made up by a combination of both physical properties and mental properties. Folk psychology of soul proposed by Bering (2006) suggested “common-sense mind-body dualism” is a cognitive adaptation that evolved through natural selection. According to this quote, it is believed that individual is fundamentally constituted of body, mind and volition.
For centuries, people have tried to discover what makes an individual from philosophical, psychological and physiological perspectives. At different stages of this knowledge in understanding human beings, behaviourism, humanism and the study of consciousness will be critically evaluated in this discussion. The ontological position of behaviourism can be viewed as a materialist reductionism as it simplifies the complex behaviour into a stimulus-response model.
Pavlov (1928) introduced classical conditioning and proposed that humans could learn the new behaviour through an unconditional stimulus via a neutral stimulus as long as the two stimuli were presented close together in time. Similar to that, Thorndike (1898) developed the law of effect which stated that behaviour is more likely to be repeated if a pleasant consequence is associated with the behaviour, and behaviour is more likely to be stopped if an unpleasant consequence is produced.
This theory was further proven by Skinner (1938) by proposed operant conditioning in which the role of positive and negative reinforcements in helping an individual to learn the preferred behaviours are explored. Watson (1913) also stated that powerfully agreed that conditioning theories provide all the explanations about human beings through the observation of the behaviours, and he denied the existence of volition, consciousness and mind.
The approach strongly asserted that humans are merely a machine that react to environment and enerate the responses based on the conditioned training. However, does an individual learn solely in what the environment – stimulus has given them? If so, the different levels in the performance of the students in the same class are hard to explain while they were taught and trained under the same stimuli? Whilst behaviourism did contribute to shaping and modifying the behaviours, it has its limitations in understand humans as a whole because it has neglected the free will of an individual.
Though people learn new knowledge through observation and repeated training, however, observational learning performs parallel with cognitive processes (Bandura, 1977) in which massive information are collected and filtered, and respond only to the selected information. In addition, individuals under the same condition may not generate the same behaviour – response if the stimuli do not meaningful to them. Individuals are less likely to react to stimuli that have less relevance with innate nature determined by physiological needs or motivation drives (Maslow, 1943).
For instance, a hungry dog is very unlikely to salivate if a book was rewarded after the bell rang because it could not make any association with the book. Behaviourism, which adopts a reductionist approach of only regarding the stimulus- response processing of the environment neglects the interaction of the mind, the body and the external social environment (Bem, 2001) This phenomena increases the possibility of prejudice on objectivity, generalisation and validity of the study based on merely the researcher’s interpretation over one’s response.
It is insufficient to draw a conclusion that an individual is what they behaved with the incomplete nature of behaviourism. In contrast, Humanism views humans as a holistic unique entity with the capacity to practise of free will and is driven to actualize their potential maximally (Rogers, 1946, and Maslow, 1943). The humanists adopt an idiographic approach and non-scientific method to understand the individual experience that makes them unique.
Humanism rejects the nomothetic approach and he deterministic laws of science as they ignore that personal agency does plays a role in influencing and shaping an individual. Rogers (1951) focuses the present moment of the client as present is a production of the past and personal agency will help to determine the future. May (1976) believes the dynamic humanist approach has the power to transform an individual by means of human beings having the nature to be self-actualized with the positive attitude.
This perspective earns the agreement of Elkins (2008), he comments that humanistic psychology encourages personal growth by inserting a sense of responsibility and moral obligation in an individual to enhance the process of self-actualization. Whilst this positive dynamic approach forms a third force followed by psychodynamic and behavioural approaches in the history of psychology (Bugental, 1964), the main weakness of Humanism is its lack of empirical evidence to support the key theories due to its nature of nonscientific methodological ontology position.
It is based on the epistemological belief that the subjective concepts interpreted by the therapist would project certain levels of predisposition based on the therapist’s point of view. In addition, the study fails to consider overemphasizing of unconditional positive regards would lost the authenticity to identify the hidden characteristic of an individual, and focus on the here-and-now failing to investigate the real origin of the individual’s problem to make further prevention will cause the individual to be unable full insight about themselves.
Perhaps the most serious disadvantage of this approach is individuals in these positive atmospheres will develop adaptability and independency incompetence, eventually lead to the evolvement of discrepancies between idealism and phenomenalism (Higgins, 1989). Thus this may lead to a concern over the epistemological solipsistic approach which distinguishes the ontological position between idealism and realism.
