Behavioral Psychology: Understanding Human Behavior

Name: Behavioral Psychology: Understanding Human Behavior
Rating: 4.3 (252 reviews)

Learn about the fundamentals of human and animal behavior based on behaviorism or behavioural psychology.

Created byProficient Courses

Last updated 2/2025

English

What you'll learn

Understand the basic processes that motivate organisms to take actions.
Understand why we react and behave in certain ways.
Learn how to predict and control of behavior, based primarily on observable phenomena.
Explore the basic principles of behavioral psychology.
Understand how to adjust your environment in such a way that it makes it easier to adopt good habits.
Thorough dives into strategies that you can adopt to improve your self-control skills.
Get a firm grasp of the two fundamental ways of acquiring knowledge.
Learn how to create schedules of reinforcement to motivate yourself and others to adopt a desirable behavior.
Find out how the individual behavior is constructed as part of a larger social scheme.
Learn how to use classical conditioning to your benefit.
Explore the most efficient schedules to motivate and maintain behaviors.
Learn about self-control and its importance.
Learn about the origins of behaviorism.
And much more!

Course content

3 sections • 14 lectures • 1h 24m total length

When and why did behaviorism first emerge?3:36
In this lecture we will learn about the origins of behavioral psychology or otherwise known as behaviorism, as well as some of its basic principles.
Behavioral psychology origins
How do we learn to adopt behaviors?5:42
In this lecture we will learn how organisms adapt to their environment, and in particular about a fundamental learning process that assists their efforts.
Classical conditioning
How does learning by creating associations affect us?4:29
What implications does learning by classical conditioning entail? This is the question we will answer in this lecture, by exploring its advantages, disadvantages and how to use it ourselves.
Implications of classical conditioning
How do we learn to repeat or avoid behaviors based on their outcomes?4:39
Classical conditioning is a powerful means of understanding behavior, but it is limited to behavior that explains conditioned responses. How can we explain behaviors that happen in an effort to affect the surrounding environment? How do we learn to repeat behaviors that wield positive outcomes and avoid the negative ones? These are the questions we will answer in this lecture.
Law of effect
How and why do we modify our behavior depending on our environment?6:53
In this lecture we will discuss how operant conditioning works in more depth, as well as what stimuli does an organism actively seek, in other words what motivates his actions.
Operant conditioning
Can we tell the difference between the various types of stimuli?6:39
The organism throughout his life will be presented with stimuli. To some it already knows how to respond, but what happens if the stimulus is new but similar to a familiar one? This is what we are going to examine in this lecture.
Stimulus generalization and discrimination

How does a tendency to act in a certain way disappear?7:22
Behaviors after being adopted, don’t always remain the same, as our environment changes, our responses to it change too. It is even possible, under some circumstances and with time, a tendency to act in a certain way to fade away. In this lecture we will learn about the extinction of a behavior, as well as what happens if it is sporadically reinforced.
Reinforcement
How to make a behavior more persistent?6:22
In this lecture we will learn about the schedule of ratio reinforcement, as well as how interval and ratio reinforcement can be combined to create a new highly effective type of schedule.
Ratio reinforcement
What happens if our actions are met with negative consequences?8:12
Positive consequences to prior actions increase the probability that those actions will be repeated again in the future, but what happens if actions are met with negative consequences? Disapproval, criticism and rejection are only a few of them. These negative consequences are what we call punishment. In this lecture we will learn about punishment and its effect on the organism.
Aversive stimuli
Can we control our own behavior and why is this important?4:00
The environment exerts control over the behavior of individuals regularly. Education, religion, government are only a few of the controlling agencies. But to what extent does an individual control his own behavior? This is what we are going to discuss in this lecture.
Self-control
How can we become better at exercising self-control?7:31
There are a few strategies that one can adopt to improve his self-control skills. In this lecture we will learn how to limit the number of times you need to use self-control, and how to prepare for and act on challenging events. We will also discuss why it is important to get familiar with these strategies, as well as the role of the social environment in assisting the individual’s efforts for self-control.
Self-control strategies
How is our behavior affected by our social environment?5:36
There is no denying that we are social creatures, and we need to feel included and part of a group. Thus, in order to understand the individual’s behavior, we need to understand how it fits into the larger social scheme. This is what we will try to accomplish in this lecture.
Social behavior

Requirements

Willingness to enrich your knowledge.

Description

Have you ever wondered why we prefer doing certain things while avoid others?

Why do we develop these preferences?

Behavioral psychology or behaviorism is the scientific study and analysis of our behaviors.

According to behavioral psychology all our behaviors are shaped through our interactions with our environment. We learn what behaviors wield positive and negative outcomes and we respond accordingly.

With behaviorism less focus is placed on the role of internal processes, such as emotions and thinking, on motivating behavior.

This is one of the major benefits that behaviorism offers is that it pays less attention on internal processes, such as emotions and thinking but rather focuses on behaviors. Consequently it allows us to study observable behaviors in a systematic manner. By doing so we learn how to predict how one's behavior will change if we change the environment. By extension apart from predicting we can also control behavior.

Since it emerged in the early 20th century it has become a significant force in psychology, with applications on education, psychotherapy and marketing, among others.

In this course we will explore how we learn to adopt behaviors, why we react and behave in certain ways, we will discover patterns in our actions.

Everything you will learn in this course will help you predict how humans behave, it will help you shape future behavior, and build better habits.

You will also better understand your own behavior and take measures to improve it. In this course will learn about self-control and its importance, as well as strategies that you can adopt to improve your self-control skills.

We will also explore how the individual behavior is constructed as part of a larger social scheme.

Understanding behavioral psychology is imperative because it allows you to better understand why others react and behave in certain ways, and it will make it easier for you to directly influence their behaviors.

Enroll now and let's get started!

Who this course is for:

Anyone interested in behavioral psychology.

Behavioral Psychology: Understanding Human Behavior

What you'll learn

Explore related topics

Course content

Learning behaviors based on behavioral psychology6 lectures • 32min

Maintaining learned behaviors based on behavioral psychology6 lectures • 39min

Conclusion2 lectures • 13min

Requirements

Description

Who this course is for: