What is a key limitation of the Behaviourist approach?

• A. It overemphasizes cognitive factors.
• B. It ignores internal mental processes and cognitive factors; can be reductionist and lacking ecological validity.
• C. It cannot be tested in laboratory settings.
• D. It cannot be studied with animals.

Answer: (B)

Behaviourism is often criticised for ignoring internal mental processes and cognitive factors. It explains behaviour through observable stimuli and learned associations, but it treats thoughts, memories and expectations as irrelevant. This makes the approach reductionist, since it reduces behaviour to basic conditioning, and it also risks lacking ecological validity because laboratory tasks can be artificial and not reflect real-world thinking. Those points explain why that limitation is highlighted. The other options misstate what behaviourism emphasizes or its methods—it does use laboratory experiments and has studied animals extensively.