The concepts of behaviorism are very convincing in explaining human behavior (and even animal!). Stimulus, response, rewards, punishment, reinforcements, chaining, generalization, and so on are all concepts that are easy to follow and observe. They explain a lot.

 

However, these concepts of behaviorism don’t seem to explain everything. Too ignore all internal processes and thinking also seems a bit too extreme and restrictive. Learning occurs through many mechanisms in real life which are not all observable behaviors. These theories seem to be coming from individual silos, but don’t seem to be universal or unifying.

 

The fact that behaviorism, cognitivism and social learning theory completely reject each other makes all of them incomplete in my opinion. Trying to explain certain behaviors through behaviorism may seem appropriate, but there will always be many aspects of learning that behaviorism would have a hard time to explain.