ASSOCIATIONISM: ORIGIN, THEORY, CONTRIBUTIONS TO PSYCHOLOGY - CULTURE VOCABULARY - 2025

The association is a school of psychology that aims to explain mental phenomena of humans from the connection of ideas, images or representations.

This movement analyzes the way in which thoughts combine by virtue of their similarity, proximity or contrast, giving rise to creative behavior and reasoning.

Associationism seeks to explain mental phenomena from the connection of ideas. Source: pixabay.com

Associationism emerged in the United Kingdom in the 19th century. However, the empirical philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had already reflected on this concept, laying the foundations of psychological behaviorism.

According to this movement, the ability to think is based on mental association, either by joining similar ideas, connecting contiguous elements, or from a cause and effect relationship.

Among the main thinkers of associationism are the philosophers John Locke (1632-1704) and David Hume (1711-1776), and the psychologists Iván Pavlov (1849-1936), John Watson (1878-1958) and Burrhus Skinner (1904 -1990).

Origin of associationism

Associationism has its origin in empiricism, a philosophical theory that highlighted the role of experience in learning and the induction of knowledge.

This current, opposed to rationalism, emerged and developed between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the United Kingdom. Its main theorists were:

John Locke (1632–1704)

Following the postulates of Aristotle (384 BC-322 BC), this thinker affirmed that people were born without any innate ability and that they learned to form representations based on experience and not from reasoning.

According to his vision, simple ideas came from sensations and complex ones from the association of ideas.

David Hume (1711-1776)

He believed that all human knowledge had its origin in perceptions. Within these he distinguished two categories: impressions, made up of sensations of pleasure and pain coming from everything seen, heard, and experiencing; and the ideas, which arose from the reflection on these sensations, which generated emotions.

David Hartley (1705-1757)

Like the previous ones, he considered that the human mind was born blank and that ideas arose from experience, but also from associations, senses, imagination and reason.

In addition, he believed that in the nervous system there were vibratory actions that corresponded to thoughts and images, where the most intense alluded to sensations and the least accentuated to ideas.

James Mill (1773-1836)

He postulated that consciousness was the result of the law of association, combining simple elements that were captured through the senses. In turn, he pointed out that emotions were the result of simple feelings joined by new links, which gave rise to more complex ones.

Theory of associationism

Associationism aims to explain the mental phenomena and psychic issues of human beings from the association of ideas and representations captured by the senses.

According to this theory, knowledge is acquired by experience, linked to the different sensations produced by stimuli. In turn, as new connections are added, thinking becomes increasingly complex.

This association of ideas can take place in 3 ways: by similarity, contiguity or from a cause and effect relationship.

Likeness

According to this theory, representations and ideas of a similar nature come together in the mind that make it possible to relate and link stimuli.

Contiguity

In this case, different elements are connected but that occur in a close manner at a certain time and place, creating new ideas.

Cause and effect relationship

Finally, in this third category, sensations, ideas, images and reasoning are associated based on the cause and effect relationship that exists between them.

Contributions of associationism to psychology

The psychologist Iván Pávlov, one of the referents of associationism. Deschiens

Associationism was mainly linked to the field of philosophy until the arrival of behaviorism in the early 20th century.

This current of psychology based its analyzes on the study of people's behavior in relation to the environment, leaving aside mental processes, emotions and feelings.

By seeking to investigate human behavior from the observable, the association theory became one of his main pillars for his experiments and empirical tests. Following their reasoning, they considered that exposure to two contiguous stimuli produced a link between them.

Within this framework, two concepts stood out: classical conditioning and operant conditioning.

Classical conditioning

It was developed by Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936) based on his experiments with dogs. This Russian psychologist detected that, after bringing food to the animals' mouths, they began to secrete saliva through their mouths.

Then he noticed that, even without the presence of food, its mere appearance in the laboratory caused salivation, since the dogs associated it with the reception of it.

Later he began to apply different auditory and visual stimuli, such as playing a campaign before giving them food. After several repetitions, the dogs also began to salivate upon hearing this noise, which was termed the "experience-conditioned reflex."

Human research

The psychologist John Watson (1878-1958) decided to apply the same research methodology as Pavlov in humans. To do this, he carried out an experiment with an 11-month-old child, to whom he sought to associate a stimulus of a frightening noise, caused by a hammer blow on a metal plate, with the presence of a rat, which until then was a neutral element..

After a series of repetitions, the mere appearance of the rat already caused fear in the child, even when the noise was not present.

In this way, it was discovered that certain stimuli were capable of generating a direct response in people, such as pain, fear or pleasure, in a physiological way. This learned behavior is the most common mechanism for acquiring phobias.

Operant conditioning

This concept, developed by Burrhus Skinner (1904-1990), is based on the idea that people learn by associating what they do with the consequences of their actions.

As an experiment, he put a hungry rat in a cage and rewarded it with food each time he pushed a mechanical lever. In this way, they found that they were more likely to repeat behaviors that generated a positive stimulus and less likely to repeat those that brought negative consequences.

This theory was later used in the field of pedagogy and learning.

References

1. Editors of Springer. Associationism. Encyclopedia of the Sciences of Learning. Available at: link.springer.com
2. Associationism, Collins dictionary. Available at: collinsdictionary.com
3. Campos, L. (1972). Dictionary of Learning Psychology. Editorial Science of Behavior. Mexico.
4. Skinner, B. (1974). On behaviorism. Editorial Fontanella. Barcelona. Spain.
5. Watson, J. (1961). Behaviorism. Editorial Paidós. Buenos Aires. Argentina.
6. Garcia-Allen, Jonathan. Classical conditioning and its most important experiments. Available at: psicologiaymente.com
7. Associationism, Wikipedia. Available at: wikipedia.org