John Watson

Do you believe the mind is the source of our actions? A behaviorist like John Watson begs to differ because he thinks behaviors are only learned responses to our environment. Let’s find out how John Watson came to this conclusion.

• Who is John Watson?
• What was John Watson's experiment about?
• What did John Watson conclude from his experiment?
• What is John Watson's theory on behaviorism?
• What was John Watson's contribution to psychology?

John Watson: Facts

John B. Watson, commons.wikimedia.org

On the 9th of January 1878, in South Carolina, John Broadus Watson was born to Emma and Pickens Watson. Watson grew up in a low-income family, where his absentee father abandoned them when he was 13.

John Watson described himself as a complicated and lousy student growing up. He had his primary education in Travelers Rest, South Carolina. At 16, he went to Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina, and earned a master’s degree in 1899. Watson then went to the University of Chicago for philosophical studies but later chose psychology, with James Rowland Angell (a psychologist) and Henry Donaldson (a physiologist) as his advisors. His teachers made a lasting impact in shaping his views on what we now know as behaviorism, a perspective in psychology that looks at behavior objectively.

Mary Ickes married Watson in 1901, and they had two children, Mary and John. He finished with a Ph.D. in psychology at the University of Chicago in 1903, but remained at the university for his research on animal behavior. His research on animal behavior earned him a good reputation, from which he later became a psychology professor at Johns Hopkins University in 1907.

However, Watson’s academic career ended abruptly in 1920 after having an affair with his research assistant, Rosalie Rayner. At 42, he turned to the advertising industry, carrying his psychology and human behavior background with him. In 1924, John gained a vice presidency at one of the largest ad agencies in the United States, J. Walter Thompson.

John Watson: Experiment

Watson is well-known for his experiments on classical aversive conditioning, which involved an unpleasant stimulus to create a learned fear response.

White rat, pixabay.com

His famous yet controversial experiment in 1920 involved a nine-month-old infant named Little Albert. John Watson taught Little Albert to fear a white rat. He conditioned Little Albert by pairing a loud noise (steel rod and hammer) with the presentation of the white rat. After one week, Watson reintroduced the rat to Little Albert, and even without the loud noise, Albert cried and crawled away.

Through Watson’s experiment, Little Albert learned to fear white rats. The infant also feared similar furry white objects such as a fur coat and Watson’s Santa Claus beard.

While this may be one of psychology’s most famous studies, many critics consider Watson’s experiment unethical. Mainly because of the harm done to Little Albert, considering he was very young at the time of the experiment, and the failure to reverse the fear developed in Little Albert.

John Watson: Contribution to Psychology

Watson may not be the first to put forward ideas on what we now know as behaviorism, a significant proponent at that. Still, his controversial works have also been influential in psychology, such that his ideas on behaviorism dominated psychology in the United States in the 1920s and ’30s.

Through his work, John Watson contributed to the study of behavior, in which he claimed that psychology is the science of behavior. With Watson’s views on behaviorism and approach to psychology, he introduced behaviorist principles that paved the way for other psychologists, even in educational psychology.

Watson’s Little Albert experiment also showed how people can acquire fears and learn complex behaviors by controlling one’s environment.

John Watson’s Theory of Behaviorism

Watson popularized behaviorism with his 1913 article, “Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It,” also known as “The Behaviorist Manifesto.” John Watson shared in this article his views on psychology, which he developed as behaviorism.

Behaviorism, according to Watson, is the idea that the mind cannot be directly observed and therefore should focus on measuring behavior that can be directly observed. This view of behaviorism stems from the rejection of the study of consciousness, which he thinks is subjective and unscientific. To a behaviorist like Watson, psychology is purely objective in predicting and manipulating behavior.

In his behaviorism, Watson sets aside the internal mental state of a person and primarily focuses on external behavior and the environment.

Watson’s child-rearing views

In the nature-nurture debate, Watson favored nurture over nature, where he believes that parents and caregivers are entirely responsible for their children’s behavior because a child learns in which environment he is reared. Drawing from his Little Albert experiment, he also thinks that we can control stimulus-response associations to shape a child’s behavior and development.

John Watson: Accomplishments

Watson’s work proved valuable to the scientific community, such as in his study of animal behavior, which helped expand the field of animal research. His book on rat behavior earned him a reputation in animal research and even received a commendation from Donald Dewsbury, a historian of psychology. In his comprehensive study of bird behavior, he showed some of the earliest examples of the ethogram (a record of animal behavior used in ethology) and ethology (the study of animal behavior).

With his findings on animal behavior, Watson applied these same principles in studying human behavior. He promoted conditioning in his experiments, which later helped lay the foundation for today’s behaviorism approaches, such as therapy, classroom, and child-rearing. With Watson’s legacy, he helped establish psychology as a scientific discipline through objective methods and experimentation. His theory of behaviorism and the introduction of behaviorist principles prepared psychologists and educators for the work of other behaviorists in subsequent decades.

John Watson: Quotes

John B. Watson, Vaia Original

As one of the early behaviorists, Watson also fell victim to the misrepresentation of his views as being extreme in the importance of the environment due to his famous quote on “dozen healthy infants,” which he wrote in 1930 and said,

“Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in, and I’ll guarantee to take anyone at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select--doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief, and, yes, even beggarman and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors,”

The second part of Watson’s statement, which is most often left out, says,

“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.”

It is important to note that Watson said this in response to the claim that genetics is the sole determiner of human development and learning, hence, his emphasis on conditioning and the environment.