Behaviorism is a branch of psychology that deals with actions of people based on external environmental influences, whereas cognitive psychology is based on the mental thought process that alters a person’s behavior.perant conditioning is partly based on rewarding desirable behaviors and partly on punishment for behavior which needs to be curbed. Cognitive psychology, on the other hand, says actions are based on the mental processes of reasoning, logical thinking, memory, motivational thoughts, positive and negative thoughts, etc.