Philospopjer
Approaches to Psychology in the workplace
According to Miller(1996),psychology is “the science of mental life”, which concerned with behaviours, thoughts as well as emotions. In the field of psychology, various approaches are introduced by different theorists. The main purpose of this essay is to look at psychology from the angle of its application in two workplaces: education, business. In the first section of this essay, the identification of the two employment organisations will be made. In the following part, I will describe in details of the application of four psychology approaches(behaviourism,humanism,cognitive,psychoanalytic) within the two areas and compare them.Thirdly,Finally, a simple conclusion about the evaluation and the expectation will be made.
Basically, the psychology in education field is often concerned with understanding and improving how students acquire a variety of capabilities though formal instruction in classroom settings. As for business area, the psychology could be related to study consumer behaviours or staff management.
I will begin with behaviourism, since it is different from most other approaches that it regard human beings as controlled by their environment and specifically that man are the product of what they have experienced from the environment(McLeod,2007). By definition, behaviourism is “a theory of animal and human learning that only focuses on objectively observable behaviours and discounts mental activities” (Phillips & Soltis, 1998:381). McLeod (2007) observes that the behaviourist approach proposes two main processes whereby people learn from their environment: namely classical conditioning and operant conditioning. And the theorist will be illustrated is B.F. Skinner who developed the ideas of "operant conditioning" which based upon the work of E. L. Thorndike and Ivan Pavlov and more specifically from the theories of classical conditioning and law of effect respectively. Skinner's theory can further be
According to Miller(1996),psychology is “the science of mental life”, which concerned with behaviours, thoughts as well as emotions. In the field of psychology, various approaches are introduced by different theorists. The main purpose of this essay is to look at psychology from the angle of its application in two workplaces: education, business. In the first section of this essay, the identification of the two employment organisations will be made. In the following part, I will describe in details of the application of four psychology approaches(behaviourism,humanism,cognitive,psychoanalytic) within the two areas and compare them.Thirdly,Finally, a simple conclusion about the evaluation and the expectation will be made.
Basically, the psychology in education field is often concerned with understanding and improving how students acquire a variety of capabilities though formal instruction in classroom settings. As for business area, the psychology could be related to study consumer behaviours or staff management.
I will begin with behaviourism, since it is different from most other approaches that it regard human beings as controlled by their environment and specifically that man are the product of what they have experienced from the environment(McLeod,2007). By definition, behaviourism is “a theory of animal and human learning that only focuses on objectively observable behaviours and discounts mental activities” (Phillips & Soltis, 1998:381). McLeod (2007) observes that the behaviourist approach proposes two main processes whereby people learn from their environment: namely classical conditioning and operant conditioning. And the theorist will be illustrated is B.F. Skinner who developed the ideas of "operant conditioning" which based upon the work of E. L. Thorndike and Ivan Pavlov and more specifically from the theories of classical conditioning and law of effect respectively. Skinner's theory can further be