1. Describe the three basic paradigms of contemporary psychology. Which of these paradigms, any or all, do you think will stand the test of time?
Psychology is the theoretical and applied science of behavior and mental processes. Through the largest part of the early 20th century the psychological science was dominated by the behaviourist paradigm. Most of its research was performed through experimentation, as a general rule on animals. Ivan Pavlov, John B. Watson, and B.F. Skinner developed this paradigm with the focus on classical conditioning. According to behaviorists, a man is predisposed by the environment to behave this way or another. Thus, this paradigm tended to consider all actions of humans as a learned behaviour, in such a manner ignoring emotional factors of individual traits. Despite the numerous critical remarks as to this paradigm, it is obvious that behaviorism gave impetus to the development of major contemporary paradigms in psychology. Noam Chomsky’s criticism of the language acquisition model, suggested by behaviorists, was one of the factors of this paradigm’s decline. Although behaviorism did not cease to exist, perhaps due to its successful practical applications, it was no more an overarching model in psychology. Instead, the cognitive paradigm came to the foreground.
Cognitivism had become the dominating paradigm in psychology by the late 20th century. Noam Chomsky was one of the pioneers of the “cognitive revolution”. Chomsky argued that the behaviorist notions of “stimulus”, “response” and the like, taken from animal experiments, were too superficial to provide the understanding of the humans. Cognitive paradigm in psychology places an emphasis on the mental processes, such as memory, perception, attention, logical thinking, imagination, and learning; it also introduces the elements of linguistics into psychology. The human cognitive system is considered as a system of devices responsible for input, storage, and output of information in terms of its throughput capability. In the course of the so-called “Chomsky’s Revolution” the concept of transformational grammar was introduced. The theory considers any expression (sequence of words) as abstract “surface structures”, which, in turn, correspond to even more abstract “deep structures”. According to Chomsky, all languages have the same underlying logic (“deep structure”), and the acquisition of language is genetically determined process. Thus, the ability to structure the expressions is an inherent part of the human genetic blueprint.
Other two contemporary paradigms – the existential psychology and the humanistic psychology – focus primarily on the importance of the individual features over the generalized rules and tendencies. The humanistic psychology was developed by Abraham Maslow in the early 1960’s also as a protest against the dominance of behaviorism. The main subject of this paradigm is the identity as a unique integrated system which is a kind of “open opportunity” of self-actualization. Humanistic psychology investigates such concepts as creativity, love, freedom, responsibility, autonomy, mental health, and interpersonal communication. Humanistic psychology is opposed to the construction of the psychology’s model by the example of natural sciences. It postulates that a man, even if regarded as an object …