Why don't psychologists accept a more environmental/behavioral view of people over the usual idea of cognition causing...

Why don't psychologists accept a more environmental/behavioral view of people over the usual idea of cognition causing behavior?

I mean, there's lots of different ways to view people. It's building a useful model that matters. You could probably foster a discussion if you put some effort into the thread and gave some contrast of why it would even make a difference.

tl;dr
for what purpose

to keep the racket going, it is like drugs companies were in charge of diagnosing illness

Why view cognitions, emotions or "the mind" as causing behavior over viewing the environment as causing human behavior and emotions being biproducts of environmental events? The former is much more popular in psychology compared to the latter.

It'd be much harder to frame a psychological model around the latter. It's just about what model functions for the purpose of psychology. Philosophy might be interested in whether there's a particular truth value to either of those perspectives, or whether it's just a different frame of reference, and some psychologists might find the latter to be a useful model for their foundations of work, but the field is too broad in its applications to need global consensus on such specific things.

I really don't see what would make it more difficult. Framing "Person A fell on his face, so he got angry, which made him yell at someone" as "Person A fell on his face, then he yelled at someone and got angry" seems just as easy.

I'd argue that framing the explanation in favor of the environment allows one to explain behavior more comprehensively than using emotions.

Okay, I think I understand what you're asking now.

Well, yeah in some contexts it can explain behavior better, possibly. Other contexts it doesn't because that's just separated one extra degree from the subject matter.

It's a useful reference frame for some fields of psychology, but psychology is just too broad for it to be a staple foundation of psychology. It only has truth value in some fields of psychology anyway, the fields that are focused on that specific narrow scope.

>psychologists
not science or math

fpbp

I don't know where you are coming from with this. Behavior views such as this are much more popular in psychology nowadays than pure cognitive views though most combine the two in the which is generally seen as the most appropriate.

Emotions and thoughts are obviously a by product of a stimulus in the environment but by training people to respond and "think" differently than those thoughts we can alter behavior which means that thoughts and emotions and how the brain handles them can influence behavior independent of environment.

But isn't this obvious? Otherwise everyone would have the same reaction to every environmental stimulus.

>But isn't this obvious? Otherwise everyone would have the same reaction to every environmental stimulus.
A vast majority of psychologists consider themselves some variant of cognitive psychologist.

I'd even argue that cognitive psychology as a paradigm is useless and its application is really just the use of behavioral methods on private events.

I think this is actually a pretty deep question. Consider the following to be some random ramblings, so I would welcome any feedback.

Part of it probably has to do with the assumptions underlying the most common paradigm for understanding human behaviour (and these assumptions are rarely spoken about in my experience, because most researchers don't really care/need to know about philosophy)
What we consider to be behaviour essentially consists of muscle activity of one form or another: speech, limb movement, eye movements, facial expression, etc.
Muscular activity necessarily depends on neural impulses originating from the brain (an exception to this are spinal reflexes, like pulling your hand from a hot stove, that take place outside the brain).
So the question is, what determines these neural impulses?

Obviously, neural activity is in some sense "explained" by the environment.
Your choice of pic related is quite interesting, because Chomsky made his mark by publishing a critique of Skinner's purely behaviourist explanation of language abilities (and here "behaviourism" is a philosophically deep term, relating to questions concerning the limits of what can be empirically known, which determines what can be talked about).
For Skinner, everything we think of as the abstract concept of "language" is really just a collection of very complex behaviours that are learned in the same way that a mouse learns to solve a maze and get dat cheeze - by learning to correctly associate certain behaviours with positive outcomes. The role of the environment in shaping this process is therefore key.
Chomsky came a long and pointed out that children actually learn language a lot quicker than you would expect based on behaviourist models - they seem to be born "primed" to pick up language, so that they do so even in the absence of a good environment (you're gonna learn english regardless of whether you grown up in buckingham palace or a crack den).
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So a natural question to ask is, what is it about the brain specifically that gives us the ability to learn language so efficiently? And it's not just language, but everything we take for granted - vision, feelings, etc.

In the case of psychologists who talk about the "mind" rather than the brain, they are simply using abstractions (they talk about "mental concepts" rather than "neural activity") that make it easier to discuss the issues. It is generally assumed that this mental level of description reduces to a neural/biological level, in the same way that biological concepts depend on chemistry, but the language of chemistry is not adequate for describing our knowledge of biology.

There is also the idea that the mental does not reduce to the neural/biological/physical (e.g. see Fodor), but this is not the working assumption for most experimental psychologists.

>Chomsky came a long and pointed out that children actually learn language a lot quicker than you would expect based on behaviourist models - they seem to be born "primed" to pick up language, so that they do so even in the absence of a good environment (you're gonna learn english regardless of whether you grown up in buckingham palace or a crack den).

This part just isn't true though. Kids won't learn language if they aren't in an environment where language is present. Kids who are neglected at a young age often have problems developing language or are significantly delayed compared to their peers despite not having any neurological disorder.

>language isn't present
that's not what i meant homes. i agree "crack den" is a bad example for this reason.
My point was that teaching kids to speak actually involves far less "teaching", and simply speaking (and showing, and pointing, etc). I agree that language is not a spontaneously developing skill. But to the extent that most parents treat their kids reasonably well (or well enough), they don't need to worry too much about how to "teach" the language - it simply happens over the course of socialization (unless they have some disorder like you mentioned).

Actually they used to

Back in the first half of the 20th century the behavioral school was the dominant field of psychology. B.F. Skinner believed that if it couldn’t be quantified, it probably didn’t exist. Noam Chomsky helped persuade us in the current direction.

Basically, today’s main line of thought is that their are cognitive predeterminants that the environment acts upon. This is supported by modern neuroscience research and brain imaging techniques that did not exist in Skinner’s era.

>My point was that teaching kids to speak actually involves far less "teaching", and simply speaking (and showing, and pointing, etc)
This wouldn't contradict the behavioral theory though. A behaviorist would call this modeling, where someone performs whatever behavior you are trying to increase and then that person may be more likely to perform that behavior as well.

ok

because COMPLEX SYSTEMS

thinking in terms of cause and effect of human behavior will fail any paradigm, hence cognitive science moving way beyond that with their 4E approach

They do it's called experimental behaviour analysis, but it's not a very popular branch of psychology nowadays. It will be eventually as technology progresses.

>not mentioning schedule of reinforcement