Final answer:
Behaviorism is the school of psychology that eschewed the study of the mind in favor of a focus on how specific stimuli can produce specific responses in an organism. It emphasized observable behavior over internal mental processes and was pioneered by key figures like Watson and Skinner. The cognitive revolution eventually challenged behaviorism's dominance by reviving scientific interest in mental processes.
Step-by-step explanation:
Behaviorism in Psychology
The school of psychology that focused on how a specific stimulus evoked a specific response, bypassing the study of the mind, is known as behaviorism. This approach was pioneered by figures like Ivan Pavlov, John B. Watson, and B.F. Skinner. Pavlov is renowned for his work on classical conditioning, exemplified by his experiments with dogs and the salivation response. Meanwhile, Watson championed psychology as a pure scientific discipline that should exclusively concentrate on observable behavior and treat behavior as a stimulus-response reaction. Skinner further developed these ideas, focusing on operant conditioning and reinforcement principles.
Behaviorism posited that studying internal mental processes was not scientifically viable because such processes could not be directly observed or measured. Instead, behavioral psychologists argued that psychology should prioritize measurable behaviors that could be studied objectively. Notably, this school of thought stood in sharp contrast to other psychological perspectives of the time that sought to understand internal experiences, such as structuralism and Freudian psychoanalysis.
The dominance of behaviorism persisted until the advent of the cognitive revolution in the mid-20th century, which redirected attention towards mental processes and cognition, aided by advances in neuroscience, linguistics, and computer science. Cognitive psychology rose to prominence, marking a shift back to exploring the mind scientifically. This exemplified the dynamic evolution of psychological theories and practices over time.