Behaviorism is an epistemology that proposes that everything we know about living and nonliving things comes from how they act.  All behavior is a reaction to environmental factors.  Animals and humans can be “classically” conditioned to respond to a neutral stimulus by pairing that stimulus through association with another stimulus that naturally produces the desired behavior.  Furthermore, since some behaviors influence or “operate on” the environment, these behaviors can be strengthened or extinguished through positive or negative reinforcers or punishments in a process called “operant conditioning”.