John B. Watson

Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: John Broadus Watson

(born Jan. 9, 1878, Travelers Rest, near Greenville, S.C., U.S. — died Sept. 25, 1958, New York, N.Y.) U.S. psychologist. Trained at the University of Chicago, Watson taught psychology at Johns Hopkins University (1908 – 20). He is remembered for codifying and publicizing behaviourism. In his epoch-making article, "Psychology as a Behaviorist Views It" (1913), he asserted that psychology should restrict itself to the objective, experimental study of the relations between environmental events and human behaviour. In Behavior (1914) he argued for the use of animal subjects in studying reflexes and conditioned responses, and in Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist (1919) he extended the principles and methods he employed in animal experiments. In 1920 he left academia to enter the advertising business.

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Biography: John Broadus Watson

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John Broadus Watson (1878-1958) founded the behaviorist movement in American psychology. His view that only observable events, and not mental states, are the substance of psychology provided the behavioristic flavor that still characterizes much of psychology today.

John B. Watson was born on Jan. 9, 1878, on a farm near Greenville, S.C. At 16 he enrolled at Furman University and graduated 5 years later with a master's degree. He then entered the University of Chicago and in 1901 received his doctorate. His major in psychology was under J. R. Angell, his philosophy minor under John Dewey, and his neurology major under H. H. Donaldson.

Watson remained at Chicago as an assistant and instructor until 1908. During this period he married Mary Ickes. His empirical work focused on animal behavior and relied on white rats, monkeys, and birds as objects of study. In 1908 he moved to Johns Hopkins, where he remained until 1920. A widely publicized divorce action precipitated his resignation, withdrawal from academics, and a second marriage.

Watson was a highly productive scientist. During his time at Johns Hopkins, he published more than 35 papers, reports, and books. He was elected president of the American Psychological Association in 1915 and served as editor on a number of professional journals into the 1920s.

In 1913 Watson published the theoretical paper "Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It." This paper presented for the first time an articulated statement of behaviorism as a reaction to Wundtian psychology, characterized by the study of consciousness and the reliance on introspection to obtain data. For Watson, psychology was to become an "objective experimental branch of natural science." Consciousness could no longer be the substance of psychology, and introspection was an unreliable method because they both required mentalities language construction.

Watson strongly rejected any belief in instincts and indicated that it was a misnomer for early experiences. Differences in ability and talent originate in early experience in contrast to being innately determined.

In 1920 Watson went to work in advertising, where his perseverance and ability again caused him to be successful. Despite his withdrawal from professional psychology, he continued to write articles relevant to psychology for popular consumption. His second wife, Rosalie Rayner, died in 1934; Watson went into retirement in 1946 and lived in Woodbury, Conn. He died on Sept. 25, 1958, in New York City.

Further Reading

Watson's own account of his life and work appears in Carl A. Murchison, ed., A History of Psychology in Autobiography (4 vols., 1930-1952). He figures in such general works on psychology as Edwin G. Boring, A History of Experimental Psychology (1929; rev. ed. 1957), and Robert I. Watson, The Great Psychologists from Aristotle to Freud (1963).

Additional Sources

Buckley, Kerry W. (Kerry Wayne), Mechanical man: John Broadus Watson and the beginnings of behaviorism, New York: Guilford Press, 1989.

Cohen, David, J. B. Watson, the founder of behaviourism: a biography, London; Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979.

Philosophy Dictionary: John Broadus Watson

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Watson, John Broadus (1878-1958) American psychologist and founder of behaviourism. His first major work, Behavior: an Introduction to Comparative Psychology (1914), established the principles of scientific behaviourism, rejecting any reliance on introspection, consciousness, or intentionality in favour of observation and experiment in laboratory settings. His best-known textbook was Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist (1919). Watson spent the years after 1920 in advertising, perhaps appropriately as he became notorious for an anti-humanist, mechanical, and emotionally arid approach to infant nurture.

Columbia Encyclopedia: John Broadus Watson

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Watson, John Broadus, 1878-1958, American psychologist, b. Greenville, S.C. He taught (1903-8) at the Univ. of Chicago and was professor and director (1908-20) of the psychological laboratory at Johns Hopkins. Watson emphasized the study of observable behavior, rejecting introspection and theories of the unconscious mind. He originated the school of psychology known as behaviorism, in which behavior is described in terms of physiological responses to stimuli. Watson's work influenced B. F. Skinner in his groundbreaking studies of operant conditioning, and had a major impact on the development of behavior therapy. His writings include Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist (1919, repr. 1983), Behaviorism (1925, repr. 1970), and Psychological Care of Infant and Child (1928, repr. 1972).

Education Encyclopedia: John B. Watson

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(1878–1958)

John B. Watson was an important contributor to classical behaviorism, who paved the way for B. F. Skinner's radical or operant behaviorism, which has had a major impact on American educational systems.

A professor of psychology at Johns Hopkins University (1908 - 1920), Watson is often listed as one of the most influential psychologists of the twentieth century; his work is standard material in most introductory psychology and educational psychology texts. Yet his academic career was brief, lasting for only fourteen years, and his legacy has been hotly debated for nearly a century. Watson helped define the study of behavior, anticipated Skinner's emphasis on operant conditioning, and emphasized the importance of learning and environmental influences in human development. Watson's often harsh criticism of Sigmund Freud has been given credit for helping to disseminate principles of Freudian psychoanalysis. Watson is widely known for the Little Albert study and his "dozen healthy infants" quote.

Popularizing Behaviorism

John B. Watson is generally given credit for creating and popularizing the term behaviorism with the publication of his seminal 1913 article "Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It." In the article, Watson argued that psychology had failed in its quest to become a natural science, largely due to a focus on consciousness and other unseen phenomena. Rather than study these unverifiable ideas, Watson urged the careful scientific study of observable behavior. His view of behaviorism was a reaction to introspection, where each researcher served as his or her own research subject, and the study of consciousness by Freud and others, which Watson believed to be highly subjective and unscientific.

In response to introspection, Watson and other early behaviorists believed that controlled laboratory studies were the most effective way to study learning. With this approach, manipulation of the learner's environment was the key to fostering development. This approach stands in contrast to techniques that placed the emphasis for learning in the mind of the learner. The 1913 article is often given credit for the founding of behaviorism, but it had a minor impact after its publication. His popular 1919 psychology text is probably more responsible for introducing behaviorist principles to a generation of future scholars of learning. In this way, Watson prepared psychologists and educators for the highly influential work of Skinner and other radical behaviorists in subsequent decades.

The Little Albert Study

In 1920 Watson and an assistant, Rosalie Rayner, published one of the most famous research studies of the past century. Watson attempted to condition a severe emotional response in Little Albert, a nine-month-old child. Watson determined that white, furry objects, such as a rat, a rabbit, and cotton, did not produce any negative reaction in the baby. But by pairing together a neutral stimulus (white, furry animals and objects) with an unconditioned stimulus (a very loud noise) that elicited an unconditioned response (fear), Watson was able to create a new stimulus-response link: When Albert saw white, furry objects, this conditioned stimulus produced a conditioned response of fear. This study is generally presented as a seminal work that provided evidence that even complex behaviors, such as emotions, could be learned through manipulation of one's environment. As such, it became a standard bearer for behaviorist approaches to learning and is still widely cited in the early twenty-first century.

The "Dozen Healthy Infants"

To a behaviorist, manipulation of the environment is the critical mechanism for learning (e.g., the Little Albert study). To illustrate this point, Watson wrote in 1930, "Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select - doctor, lawyer, artist - regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations and race of his ancestors" (p. 104). This quote routinely appears in introductory texts in education and psychology and is used to illustrate the radical environmental views of behaviorists.

But that sentence is only the first part of the quote. In that same statement, Watson subsequently wrote, "I am going beyond my facts and I admit it, but so have the advocates of the contrary and they have been doing so for many thousands of years" (p.104). This second sentence is rarely quoted with the first sentence. In taking this quote out of context, authors have presented Watson and classical behaviorism as having an extreme perspective on the importance of environment. However, Watson was reacting to the work of other psychologists and educators who believed that heredity was solely responsible for human development and learning. Early behaviorists accented the role of environment, but their views were probably not as radical and extreme as they are often presented.

Life After the University

Following a personal scandal in 1920, Watson resigned his position at Johns Hopkins and entered advertising, where he achieved some degree of success. He also published popular accounts of behaviorism after leaving his university position. His book Psychological Care of the Infant and Child (1928) was very popular, advocating a rather detached approach to parenting, with few displays of affection such as kissing and hugging of children. Given Watson's relatively short academic career, his lasting contributions in the areas of learning, psychological methods, and behaviorism are remarkable.

Bibliography

Cohen, David. 1979. J. B. Watson, the Founder of Behaviourism: A Biography. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Todd, James T., and Morris, Edward K., eds. 1994. Modern Perspectives on John B. Watson and Classical Behaviorism. Westport, CT: Greenwood.

Watson, John B. 1913. "Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It." Psychological Review 20:158 - 177.

Watson, John B. 1919. Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist. Philadelphia: Lippincott.

Watson, John B. 1930. Behaviorism, revised edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Watson, John B., and Rayner, Rosalie. 1920. "Conditioned Emotional Responses." Journal of Experimental Psychology 3:1 - 14.

— JONATHAN A. PLUCKER

World of the Mind: John Broadus Watson

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(1878–1958). The founder of the American school of psychology known as behaviourism. The movement was launched in 1913 with his paper 'Psychology as the behaviorist views it', and was bolstered by many subsequent papers and popular articles, as well as by his four influential books: Behaviour: An Introduction to Comparative Psychology (1914), Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist (1919), Behaviorism (1924), and The Psychological Care of Infant and Child (1928). Reacting against the influential introspective psychology of his day, which even he had practised early in his career, Watson declared that behaviour should be the only subject matter of psychology. Though psychology had long been concerned with the study of mind, Watson believed that such an endeavour had proved fruitless. Psychology could become a productive science like other natural sciences only by being objective and dealing with the observable; the study of mind could never be accomplished objectively, but the study of behaviour could. The goal of psychology would become the prediction and control of behaviour. Consciousness, mind, and mental states were to be ignored.

Soon after Pavlov's reflexology became prominent in America, Watson adopted the reflex as the basic unit by which all behaviour was to be explained. He believed that all complex human behaviour was the sum of simple conditioned reflexes. So powerful did he see the conditioning process that he eventually promoted a staunch environmentalism, a philosophical belief that all behaviour is learned. In advocating this position, Watson made many extreme statements about the power of conditioning. The best known is:

Give me a dozen healthy infants ... and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select — doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors.

Though Watson qualified this statement and others like it, his qualifying statements have often been overlooked and his views simplified. For example, he is usually credited with the simplistic notion that thinking is merely subvocal speech or laryngeal movement, though he repudiated such a view on several occasions (for example, in The Battle of Behaviorism, published in 1928 with William McDougall).

Watson's work had an immeasurable impact on American psychology. The tenets of behaviourism dominated the field until perhaps the 1950s, and psychology is still often known as the science of 'behaviour' rather than the science of 'mind'. It was Watson's behaviourism that inspired B. F. Skinner's early work in psychology, though Skinner, in developing the modern version of behaviourism, abandoned Watson's environmentalism and his aversion to a consideration of mind (see behaviourism, Skinner on).

Though his impact was long-lasting, Watson only remained active in academic psychology until 1920, when, as a result of a personal scandal, he was forced to resign from his position at Johns Hopkins University. His subsequent successful career was in advertising.

(Published 1987)

— Robert Epstein

Bibliography

Bergmann, G. (1956). 'The contributions of John B. Watson'. Psychological Review, 63.
Skinner, B. F. (1959). 'John Broadus Watson, behaviorist'. Science, 129.
Watson, J. B. (1967). Behavior: An Introduction to Comparative Psychology, with an introduction by R. J. Herrnstein.
Woodworth, R. S. (1959). 'John Broadus Watson: 1878–1958'. American Journal of Psychology, 72.

Wikipedia: John B. Watson

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John Broadus Watson (January 9, 1878 – September 25, 1958) is an American psychologist who established the psychological school of behaviorism, after doing research on animal behavior. He also conducted the controversial "Little Albert" experiment. Later he went on from psychology to become a popular author on child-rearing, and an acclaimed contributor to the advertising industry.

1 Early life
2 Dissertation on animal behavior
3 Behaviorism
4 "Twelve infants" quote
5 Views on child-rearing
6 "Little Albert" experiment (1920)
7 Affair with Rosalie Rayner
8 Advertising
9 Later life
10 See also
11 References
12 Further reading
13 External links

Early life

Watson grew up in Abbotsford, British Columbia and attended Mouat. J. Secondary School there. A precocious student, hung out with a lot of punjabs at the age of 16 (he became a member of the Free Sikh Youth Club) and left with a beautiful wife, Sarah Kular. He spent a year as a principal for grade school, then entered the University of Chicago to study philosophy with John Dewey on the recommendation of Furman professor, Gordon Moore, who U.S. and a major proponent of the view that life and the behavior of living organisms could be explained entirely by chemistry and physics without recourse to a supposed "vital force". Accordingly, Loeb taught that all behavior was dictated by instinct and learned responses to stimuli.

The combined influence of Dewey, Angell, Donaldson and Loeb led Watson to develop a highly descriptive, objective approach to the analysis of behavior that he would later call "behaviorism." Watson's behaviorism is typically considered^{[by whom?]} a historical descendent of British empiricism, and particularly of the views of John Locke. However, Watson said nothing substantive about these things. Rather, his philosophy of science stems from{^{[citation needed]} the history of experimental physiology through the influence of Loeb. The reflex studies of Ivan Mikhailovich Sechenov (1829-1905) and Vladimir Bekhterev (1857-1927) were particularly influential. Later, Watson became interested in the work of Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936), and eventually included a highly simplified version of Pavlov's principles in his popular works.

Dissertation on animal behavior

Watson graduated from the University of Chicago in 1903. His dissertation "Animal Education: An Experimental Study on the Psychical Development of the White Rat, Correlated with the Growth of its Nervous System.^{[cite this quote]} "Animal Education" described the relationship between brain myelinization and learning ability in rats at different ages. Watson showed that the degree of myelinization was largely unrelated to learning ability. Watson stayed at the University of Chicago for several years doing research on the relationship between sensory input and learning and bird behavior.

Behaviorism

In 1913, Watson published the article "Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It" — sometimes called "The Behaviorist Manifesto". In this article, Watson outlined the major features of his new philosophy of psychology, called "behaviorism". The first paragraph of the article concisely described Watson's behaviorist position:

Psychology as the behaviorist views it is a purely objective experimental branch of natural science. Its theoretical goal is the prediction and control of behavior. Introspection forms no essential part of its methods, nor is the scientific value of its data dependent upon the readiness with which they lend themselves to interpretation in terms of consciousness. The behaviorist, in his efforts to get a unitary scheme of animal response, recognizes no dividing line between man and brute. The behavior of man, with all of its refinement and complexity, forms only a part of the behaviorist's total scheme of investigation.

The "manifesto" notably lacks references to specific principles of behavior. In 1913, Watson viewed Ivan Pavlov's conditioned reflex as primarily a physiological mechanism controlling glandular secretions. He had already rejected Edward L. Thorndike's "Law of Effect" (a precursor to B. F. Skinner's principle of reinforcement) due to what Watson believed were unnecessary subjective elements. It was not until 1916 that Watson would recognize the more general significance of Pavlov's formulation and make it the subject of his presidential address to the American Psychological Association. The lack of a specific mechanism of behavior caused Watson's colleagues to dismiss "Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It" as philosophical speculation without much foundation. The article only became well-known to psychologists generally after it started to be widely cited in introductory psychology textbooks in the 1950s. The article is also notable for its strong defense of the objective scientific status of applied psychology, which at the time was considered to be much inferior to the established structuralist experimental psychology.

Watson also introduced his theory of thinking as consisting of "subvocal speech" in the article. However, its addition was more of an afterthought as it appeared in a series of extended footnotes, not in the body of the article itself. Watson seems to have added the footnote because another article on subvocal speech by Anna Wyczoikowska was to appear in the same issue of the "Psychological Review." The theory of thinking as subvocal speech was not original to Watson. About 15 years earlier, H. S. Curtis had attempted to measure movements of the larynx during thinking.

With his "behaviorism", Watson put the emphasis on external behavior of people and their reactions on given situations, rather than the internal, mental state of those people. In his opinion, the analysis of behaviors and reactions was the only objective method to get insight in the human actions. This outlook, combined with the complimentary ideas of determinism, evolutionary continuism, and empiricism has contributed to what is now called radical behaviorism.

"Twelve infants" quote

“ Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select – doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors. I am going beyond my facts and I admit it, but so have the advocates of the contrary and they have been doing it for many thousands of years. [Behaviorism (1930), p. 82] ”

The quote often appears with the last sentence omitted, making Watson's position appear more radical than it actually was. Watson had, in fact, done extensive ethological studies of the instinctive behavior of animals early in his career, particularly sea birds. Nevertheless, Watson strongly sided with nurture in the nature versus nurture discussion.

Views on child-rearing

Although he wrote extensively on child-rearing in many popular magazines and in a book, Psychological Care of Infant and Child (1928), Watson later regretted having written in the area, saying that "he did not know enough" to do a good job. Watson's advice to treat children with respect, but with relative emotional detachment, has been strongly criticized.^{[by whom?]} However, this perspective was not unique to Watson. It is also associated with psychoanalytic thinkers who worried that too much emotional attachment in childhood would lead to overly dependent adults. (Watson's borrowing from Sigmund Freud and other early psychoanalysts remains an unexamined aspect of his behaviorism.) Modern critics^[who?] do not commonly mention that Watson warned strongly against the use of spanking and other corporal punishment.

"Little Albert" experiment (1920)

Main article: Little Albert experiment

One might consider the experiment Watson and his assistant Rosalie Rayner carried out to be one of the most controversial in psychology in 1920. It has become immortalized in introductory psychology textbooks as the Little Albert experiment. The goal of the experiment was to show how principles of, at the time recently discovered, classical conditioning could be applied to condition fear of a white rat into "Little Albert", an 11-month-old boy. As the story of Little Albert has made the rounds, inaccuracies and inconsistencies have crept in, some of them even due to Watson himself; see Harris for an analysis. The controversy about this experiment is actually a modern development. There seemed^{[original research?]} to be little concern about it in Watson's time. Dewsbury reports that Watson received greater criticism from early animal rights groups over some of his experiments with rats, particularly a 1907 study, "Kinaesthetic and Organic Sensations: Their Role in the Reactions of the White Rat to the Maze".

Affair with Rosalie Rayner

In October 1920 Johns Hopkins University asked Watson to leave his faculty position there because of publicity surrounding the affair he was having with his graduate student-assistant Rosalie Rayner and because of his refusal to send her abroad until things had quieted down. At the time, Watson was married to Mary Ickes (sister of Harold L. Ickes, who would later become Secretary of the Interior to US President Franklin D. Roosevelt).

Watson's affair had become front-page news during divorce proceedings, and Baltimore newspapers published excerpts from some of Watson's love-letters to Rayner. Mary had feigned illness during a dinner party involving the Rayner and Ickes families so that she could have unfettered access to Rayner's bedroom.

A large body of rumors circulated about Watson's dismissal from Johns Hopkins University, particularly that Watson was fired for conducting research on the human sexual response with Rayner. No evidence for these rumors has publicly surfaced. The stories can be directly traced to fanciful, anachronistic stories about Watson included by the late University of Michigan psychologist James McConnell in several editions of his Understanding Human Behavior textbook, and his Worms and Things newslette Watson and Rayner later^[when?] married.

Advertising

Thanks to contacts provided by an academic colleague, Watson subsequently began working for U.S. advertising agency J. Walter Thompson. He learned the advertising business' many facets at ground level, including a stint working as a shoe salesman in an upscale department store. Despite this modest start, in less than two years Watson had risen to a vice-presidency at Thompson. His executive's salary, plus bonuses from various successful ad campaigns, resulted in an income many times higher than his academic salary. Watson headed a number of high-profile advertising campaigns, particularly for Ponds cold cream and other personal-care products. He has been widely but erroneously credited^{[by whom?]} with re-introducing the "testimonial" advertisement after the tool had fallen out of favor (due to its association with ineffective and dangerous patent medicines). However, testimonial advertisements had been in use for years before Watson entered advertising. Watson stated that he was not making original contributions, but was just doing what was normal practice in advertising.

Later life

Watson stopped writing for popular audiences in 1936, and retired from advertising at about age 65^{[citation needed]}. He is credited^{[by whom?]} with popularizing the "coffee break" during an ad campaign for Maxwell House coffee.

Rosalie Rayner died in 1935 at age 36. Watson lived on a farm with a female companion for the last years of his life. Rumored^{[by whom?]} to be a heavy drinker, Watson actually gave up alcohol on the advice of his physician and enjoyed good health well into old age. He died in 1958 at age 80, shortly after receiving a citation from the American Psychological Association for his contributions to psychology.

Historian John Burnham interviewed Watson late in life, and portrayed him as a man of (still) strong opinions and some bitterness towards his detractors. Except for a set of reprints of his academic works, Watson burned his very large collection of letters and personal papers, thus depriving historians of a valuable resource for understanding the early history of behaviorism and of Watson himself.

References

External links

Psychology as the behaviorist views it (1913). Watson, John B., Psychological Review, 20, pp. 158–177.
Conditioned emotional reactions (The Little Albert study, 1920). Watson, John B. & Rayner, Rosalie, Journal of Experimental Psychology, 3(1), pp. 1–14.
John B. Watson. His Life in Words and Pictures - Furman University Psychology Department
It's All in the Upbringing - A biographical sketch of Watson's life and work on the website of Johns Hopkins University, where he worked from 1908 to 1920.
The Long Dark Night of Behaviorism (biased report) - An account of the consequences of John B. Watson's child-rearing methods for his own children and his granddaughter, actress Mariette Hartley.
http://www.brynmawr.edu/Acads/Psych/rwozniak/watson.html

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