Loquen: English Studies Journal DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.32678/loquen.v12i02 Available online http://jurnal.uinbanten.ac.id/index.php/loquen/index © 2019 Faculty of Education and Teacher Training Universitas Islam Negeri Sultan Maulana Hasanuddin Banten From Behaviorism to New Behaviorism: A Review Study Meisam Ziafar 1 , Ehsan Namaziandost 2* 1 Assistant Professor, Department of English Language Teaching, Ahvaz Branch, Islamic Azad University, Ahvaz, Iran 2 PhD Candidate in TEFL, Department of English, Faculty of Humanities, Shahrekord Branch, Islamic Azad University, Shahrekord, Iran Article History: Received: October 17, 2019 Revised: November 30, 2019 Accepted: December 01, 2019 Published: December 12, 2019 Keywords: Neo-behaviorism, behaviorism, cognitivism *Corresponding Author: e.namazi75@yahoo.com Abstract: Neo-behaviorism bridges the gap between behaviorism and cognitivism. Like Thorndike, Watson, and Pavlov, the neo- behaviorists believe that the study of learning and a focus on rigorously objective observational methods are crucial to a scientific psychology. Unlike their predecessors, however, the neo-behaviorists are more self-consciously attempting to formalize the laws of behavior. Neo-behaviorism is associated with a number of scholars such as Tolman, Hull, Skinner, Hebb, and Bandura. Neo-behaviorists demand formalizing the law of behavior. Neo-behaviorism takes into consideration abstraction and hidden variables; it represents a holistic approach to behavior. It can be claimed that all neo-behavioristic theories have been proposed in order to put some cognition within the mechanistic nature of traditional behaviorism. INTRODUCTION According to Weidman (1999) ―the second phase of behaviorism, Neo- behaviorism, was associated with Edward C. Tolman, Clark Hull, and B. F. Skinner. In another attempt to introduce neobehaviorists Simon (1999) introduces Hebb, Hull, and Bandura as the major neobehaviorists. Like Thorndike, Watson, and Pavlov, the neobehaviorists believed that the study of learning and a focus on rigorously objective observational methods were the keys to a scientific psychology. Unlike their predecessors, however, the neobehaviorists were more self-consciously trying to formalize the laws of behavior. They were also influenced by the Vienna Circle of logical positivists, a group of philosophers led by Rudolph Carnap, Otto Neurath, and Herbert Feigl, who argued that meaningful statements about the world had to be cast as statements about physical observations. Anything else was metaphysics or nonsense, not science, and had to be rejected. Knowledge, according to the logical positivists, had to be built on an observational base, and could be verified to the extent that it was in keeping with observation (Weidman, 1999). Behaviorism was intended to make psychology a natural science. During the years when behaviorist ideas were being developed, they were in harmony with the philosophical position of logical positivism being championed in physics and elsewhere. Concepts should be defined by the operations used to measure them, to keep science tightly grounded to observable data and to remove flights of speculative fancy. The decades that followed revealed behaviorism in ascendancy, and the animal learning laboratory was the hotbed of study, the white rat and the pigeon the organisms of choice (with an