CBT - link and response for last week

While talking about behaviorism, I was thinking about how it applies directly to our lives as psychology students. Beyond knowing about classical and operant conditioning (which helps us shape our professors to stand in corners), how can it directly help us if we decide to go into careers in psychology?

Cognitive-behavioral therapy is a type of therapy that we've all heard about. It is a combination of studying behavior (what we do) and studying the cognition that causes our behavior (what we think). It's an interesting way that we can take Watson's idea of the "prediction and control" of behavior and apply it to a theraputic, clinical practice. I think it even helps to combine the psychology of the late 19th century (before behaviorism), the study of consciousness and its processes, with behaviorism.

Going beyond that, I was thinking about a discussion question I would have liked to ask in class last week. Do you agree or disagree with the "prediction" aspect of Watson's goal of psychology? How about the "control" aspect? I think it's interesting that he lumped the two together. In earlier psychology, we were interested in reaction time, for example, which would help us to predict aspects of human consciousness. However, when did control come into the picture? When did it become desirable to control humans through the study of their mind/consciousness/behavior? This is something that I think applied psychology really influenced. Without applied psychology, we never would have thought to control aspects of people, especially not their behavior. Yet with the research produced in the subfield of behaviorism, we learned that people can be predicted, controlled, and manipulated. This is such a far cry from any ideas that the earliest psychologists had, but they are some of the most pervasive ideas to this day.