John B. Watson

John B. Watson was an American psychologist who founded the school of the behaviourism. He is known for the study of the conditioning of the emotions and for his influence on the development of the psychology.

Early Life and Education

Watson was born in 1878 in Travelers Rest, South Carolina. His father abandoned the family and the household was poor.

He studied at Furman University and took his doctorate at the University of Chicago in 1903. He studied the behaviour of the rats and the learning.

He taught at Johns Hopkins University and became the professor of psychology. He was the editor of the Psychological Review.

The Founding of the Behaviourism

Watson published the article Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It in 1913. The article is regarded as the manifesto of the behaviourism.

He argued that the psychology should study the observable behaviour rather than the consciousness. The approach rejected the introspection.

He held that the behaviour could be explained by the stimulus and the response. The goal was the prediction and the control of the behaviour.

He published the book Behaviorism in 1925. The book set out the principles of the new school.

The Little Albert Experiment

Watson conducted the experiment with the infant known as Little Albert in 1920. He conditioned the child to fear the white rat.

The child was shown the rat and then the loud noise was made. The child learned to associate the rat with the fear.

The experiment demonstrated that the emotions could be conditioned. The work became one of the most famous and the most controversial of the psychology.

The ethics of the experiment have been criticised. The child was not desensitised and the long-term effects are unknown.

The Later Career and the Legacy

Watson left the academia after the scandal of the divorce. He worked in the advertising industry and applied the psychological principles to the marketing.

He wrote the books on the child rearing and the psychology. The works promoted the behaviourist approach to the education.

He died in 1958 in New York. He was one of the most influential of the psychologists of the twentieth century.

He is regarded as the founder of the behaviourism. His work shaped the development of the psychology in the United States.

Behaviourism and the Little Albert Study

Watson's behaviourism rested on the claim that psychology could become a true natural science only if it abandoned the study of consciousness and confined itself to observable behaviour. Two elements were indispensable: behaviour must be analysable into stimulus-response units, and the environment must be shown to be sufficient to shape those units. This led him to investigate whether emotional reactions, which were assumed to be innate, could also be conditioned — a question that produced the most famous study in the history of behaviourism.

In the winter of 1919–1920 Watson, with his graduate student Rosalie Rayner, presented an eleven-month-old infant known as "Albert B" with a white rat. Albert initially showed no fear. When the rat was paired repeatedly with a loud hammer stroke, the child began to cry at the sight of the rat alone, and the fear generalised to a rabbit, a dog, a fur coat and a Santa Claus mask. The experiment, published in 1920, demonstrated that emotional responses can be conditioned and can spread through similarity.

The Little Albert study was methodologically rough by modern standards and would not pass contemporary ethics review; the infant's fear was never deconditioned, and his later fate is unknown. Its importance lies in the proof of principle it offered. If fear could be conditioned into a healthy child, then phobias could be understood as learned habits and, in principle, unlearned. That inference, though too simple, opened the clinical path later followed by behaviour therapy.

Environmentalism and Public Influence

Watson pushed his environmentalism to its logical extreme. In Behaviorism (1924) he wrote that he could take any healthy infant and train it to become any type of specialist — doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant or thief — regardless of its talents, tendencies or ancestry. This celebrated boast expressed his conviction that heredity counts for little compared with the systematic control of learning. The claim was widely quoted, equally widely attacked, and became a rallying point for the nurture side of the nature-nurture debate.

As a populariser, Watson had no equal among psychologists of his generation. Magazine articles, radio addresses and two best-selling books carried his message into the American home. His advice on child-rearing, however, was famously austere: he warned against displays of affection and urged parents to treat children as young adults, scheduling their feeding and sleeping rigidly. These recommendations, later shown to be misguided, illustrate how a scientific theory can outrun its evidence when applied to real families.

Watson's career was cut short by scandal. His divorce in 1920, following an affair with Rosalie Rayner, forced his resignation from Johns Hopkins University. He spent the rest of his working life in advertising, where he applied his understanding of conditioned emotional responses to campaigns for toothpaste, gloves and coffee. His second career anticipated the modern field of consumer behaviour and demonstrated, if controversially, the practical reach of psychological ideas.

Assessment and Lasting Influence

Watson left an ambiguous inheritance. His methodological demand for objective, observable data is now a permanent feature of psychology, and his stimulus-response framework influenced later theories of learning, including Hull's drive-reduction theory and the social learning theory of Albert Bandura. The concept of conditioned emotional responses, derived directly from his work, underlies modern treatments of anxiety and the technique known as exposure therapy.

At the same time, Watson's most sweeping claims have not survived. Research on temperament, behavioural genetics and cognitive development has shown that heredity and internal mental processes play substantial roles that his framework could not accommodate. The cognitive revolution of the 1950s and 1960s restored attention, memory and language to the centre of psychology, and Watson's ban on the study of mind was quietly lifted. Behaviourism became one major perspective among several rather than the whole of the discipline.

Even so, no history of psychology can be written without him. He founded a school, trained a generation of researchers, and made psychology a public science. His insistence that behaviour be studied with the methods of the natural sciences set the agenda that produced behaviour therapy, behavioural medicine and, indirectly, contemporary cognitive-behavioural therapy. Watson is best understood as the theorist who gave psychology its behaviourist vocabulary — a vocabulary the field has refined rather than abandoned.

See also

• Behaviourism
• Stimulus and response
• Conditioning
• Little Albert