BEHAVIOR. – It may be described as the practical attitude assumed by the animal and by man in the concrete situations of life. It therefore consists of a moment that may be called cognitive, whereby the agent recognizes himself in a given situation, and of an active-operational moment by which he responds to that situation and attains a new condition of equilibrium which, in man, reaches, in free actions, the level of moral responsibility and personality.
In modern psychology, theories of b. reflect the philosophical orientation of their respective proponents. Watson’s “behaviorist” school (behaviour = b.), raising Pavlov’s reflexology to the status of a psychological method, claims to explain b. through simple reflexes, disregarding any reference to the existence of consciousness and conscious processes and limiting itself to simple objective analysis, that is, of the physicochemical processes of the nervous system in relation to the physical processes of stimuli. The “psychology of form” (Gestalt), on the other hand, maintained that b. arises through a reorganization of the perceptual field as a whole; the value of the stimulus, on which Watson’s pure associationism focused, does not exist in itself but is a function of the subject’s total situation. K. Koffka therefore distinguished a geographical environment from an environment of b., just as W. Kohler distinguishes a phenomenal world (which is the object of psychology) from a real world from which stimuli proceed to consciousness. A synthesis of behaviorism and gestaltism is E. C. Tolman’s purposive behaviorism: the learning of a b., as well as its functioning, is subordinated to knowledge of a particular end, that is, to an Insight or apprehension of a dynamic principle of unity of b.; thus the originality of the psychic process seems to be preserved. The theory of b. of “hormic Psychology,” or tendency psychology (Equā = drive, impulse), of W. Mc. Dougall is also purposive. According to him, from its earliest moments the animal displays a clearly defined orientation in its actions, which therefore has its reason in an original drive preceding any cognitive process. Once the first infantile stage has been passed, human b. depends on the development of man’s higher life.