WATSON, JOHN B. (1878-1958)

John Broadus Watson (1878-1958), the founder of behaviorism, was born January 9, 1878, near Greenville, South Carolina. He spent his preadolescent years in a farm community, where he acquired numerous manual skills and an affectionate familiarity with the behavior of many animals. At about the time his father deserted the family, the Watsons moved into the cotton-mill town of Greenville, which his mother thought would provide a better educational and religious atmosphere for the children. Watson later characterized himself as a mediocre student and a lazy, rebellious teenager (with a couple of arrests to brag about). Nevertheless, he managed to persuade officials at Furman University in Greenville to admit him. An average student at Furman from 1894 to 1899, Watson graduated with an A.M. degree; only philosophy and psychology had interested him at all. His mother's death in 1900 removed any remaining pressure to pursue a career in theology; by then, in any case, he had become antagonistic to established religion. Gordon Moore, his professor in philosophy and psychology, had attended and favorably described the University of Chicago, so Watson wrote to its president about his ambitions to attend a "real university" and "amount to" something professionally. Persuasive once again, he started graduate work there in 1900.

Watson had expected to concentrate on philosophy, with the eminent John Dewey as his mentor. However, he "never knew what Dewey was talking about" and, despite taking a variety of philosophy courses to fulfill a minor-area requirement, he later confessed that only some of the British empiricists (who emphasized past experience and principles of association as the crucial sources of human knowledge) aroused his interest. Typically for the turn of the century, psychology was part of the philosophy department, and Watson soon gravitated toward James R. Angell as his major professor. Angell was experimentally oriented and a leader of the burgeoning school of functionalism, which tolerated differing conceptions of the field of psychology but stressed the role of evolutionary factors, environmental adaptation, objectivity, and practical matters. This outlook contrasted with that of experimental introspectionists (e.g., the "structuralists"), who used human observers reporting on their private conscious experience, without regard for biological or practical implications.

Watson felt uncomfortable when asked to introspect in the standard ways, and he did not produce consistent reports under those conditions; but he said he felt at home with animals. Working under Angell and Henry Donaldson (who along with Jacques Loeb, an extremely mechanistic and materialistic biologist, handled Watson's other minor area, neurology), he studied possible correlations between problem-solving skills and the degree of medullation (myelination) in the brains of white rats at various ages. After three years of intense dedication to university duties and various odd jobs that he took to support himself—overwork that presumably caused the relatively brief breakdown he suffered during his final year—in 1903 Watson received the first Ph.D. in psychology to be awarded by Chicago. His dissertation, Animal Education, was published in the same year.

Early Career

Watson remained at Chicago until 1908, first as Angell's assistant and then as an instructor. Even though he taught his students about orthodox introspective methods with human observers, his own research involved only animals. With Harvey Carr he carried out influential work on the sensory basis of maze learning in rats (neither vision nor audition nor smell was presumably crucial; rather, what was important was feedback stimulation from the animal's own movements: kinesthesis or the "muscle sense"); with Robert Yerkes he began studies of color vision that eventually involved several nonhuman species; and he failed to find good evidence for learning by imitation in monkeys. In addition, Watson spent the first of several summers on an island near Florida, observing the natural, instinctive behavior of birds (noddy terns and sooty terns), some of which he isolated at birth. His bird studies were thoughtful and creative; besides homing behavior, he investigated what today we would call Imprinting, instinctive drift, territoriality, and egg, mate, and nest recognition. This nonlaboratory work is particularly noteworthy because, somewhat ironically, B. F. Skinner later assessed it as Watson's best research, and the ethologist Konrad Lorenz falsely concluded that "if J. B. Watson had only once reared a young bird in isolation," he would never have stressed conditioning as much as he did.

As early as 1903-1904 Watson confided to some Chicago colleagues his growing belief that psychology could become an objective and practical science only if it rid itself of unverifiable, unreliable introspective methods and focused instead on the study of observable behavior—events that could be recorded by an outsider—rather than on inferred, private states of consciousness or experience. Associates like Angell argued that his suggestion might be appropriate for animal research but would hardly be satisfactory for human beings. Another 10 years passed before Watson publicly proposed such ideas as the main bases for the approach he called behaviorism.

In 1908 Watson became full professor of experimental and comparative psychology at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. He continued his animal research, and soon assumed the leadership of the Johns Hopkins psychology program and the editorship of several important journals in experimental psychology. With the encouragement and stimulation of Knight Dunlap and Karl Lashley, he began to concentrate on developing his behavioristic psychology, first presented to a large audience in a landmark Psychological Review article in 1913. In a radical redefinition of psychology, Watson claimed that his field, animal learning and behavior—which had generally been relegated to a minor position in psychology or had not been viewed as part of psychology at all—was the one truly objective, scientific area of psychology. Furthermore, he maintained that the techniques used in the animal laboratory could be profitably, objectively, and practically applied to human beings; the goal of psychology was to predict and control behavior, not to analyze consciousness into its elements or to study vague "functions" or processes like perception, imagery, and volition. According to Watson, psychology had not yet emancipated itself from philosophy and religion, which it must do to become a true science—the science of behavior, of stimulus (S) and response (R: movements and secretions).

Historians of psychology have had no difficulty tracing possible antecedents for virtually all of Watson's specific ideas and arguments. Among others, they have cited views of philosophers (empiricistsassociationists, materialists, positivists, pragmatists), biologists (evolutionary theorists, naturalists, objectivists, reflexologists), and early psychologists (nonmentalistic students of animal and human sensation, learning, memory, and intelligence—as well as functionalists like Angell). However, the direct influence on Watson of most of these views is unclear. In any event, his approach was original because of how it combined a variety of emphases, dissatisfactions, and opinions in a unique, revolutionary way. He offered a straightforward, bold program that was easy to understand (and easy to attack).

Generally favorable opinions about Watson's approach (as well as his established reputation as a researcher, administrator, and editor) led to his election as president of the American Psychological Association (APA) 2 years after the publication of his behaviorist manifesto. Many psychologists correctly believed that institutional and societal support for independent departments of psychology and new research facilities would be increased by redefining psychology along practical and objective lines like those offered by Watson.

Human Learning Research

In his APA presidential address (1915) Watson described research with both animals and humans, but for the first time in his career he stressed the latter. The talk offered a specific positive alternative to the techniques for studying human psychology that he had condemned in print two years before. Such an extension of his approach would presumably help convert to behaviorism those psychologists who believed that animal studies could not be of great significance for human affairs. The new method was essentially the conditioned-reflex procedure of Ivan Pavlov and Vladimir Bekhterev, which Watson had only recently begun to examine and appreciate. (Previously he had stressed the associationist laws of frequency and recency; he frowned on Edward L. Thorndike's law of effect because the notion of strengthening or weakening S-R bonds by means of subsequent satisfaction or discomfort seemed subjective to him, although it is the forerunner of Skinner's law of operant reinforcement.) From his own studies with human beings Watson illustrated a variety of Pavlovian conditioning phenomena that seemed relevant for everyday human behavior. He boasted, "We give no more instruction to our human subjects than we give to our animal subjects."

Except for a minor study with rats, the rest of Watson's academic career (suddenly aborted within 5 years) involved work with humans, especially young infants in the Phipps Psychiatric Clinic directed by Adolf Meyer. There was one brief interruption, when Watson served in the army during World War I (1917-1918) as a psychologist concerned mainly with aviation skills. Despite his irritation with the military establishment, Watson's views on the technological potential of psychology were bolstered.

Immediately after the war, Watson worked with a graduate student, Rosalie Rayner, on his most famous single study. It originated from his claim that emotional behavior in human infants was based on three fundamental types of unlearned, well-defined stimulus-response (S-R) patterns: fear, rage, and love. More complex emotional reactions, to specific objects and situations, arose through associative learning and transfer—and supposedly could not be attributed to hereditary predispositions. Primarily by means of Pavlovian procedures adopted directly from animal research, 11-month-old Albert B. was conditioned to fear a white rat by associating presentations of the rat with a very loud noise. Soon the mere sight of the rat caused Albert to whimper, cry, and move as far away as he could. This fear reaction transferred to other furry objects, like a rabbit or a Santa Claus mask. Unfortunately, Albert left the nursery too soon for Watson to attempt to eliminate the child's newly acquired habits. A few years later, Mary Cover Jones, whose research at Columbia University was unofficially supervised by Watson, compared various methods for removing children's fears of animals. Some treatments worked better than others. This research, along with Watson's and Jones's comments about its practical implications, marks the beginning of the fields of behavior modification and behavior therapy.

Watson denied any significant initiating or mediating role for the brain, and he would not consider possible cognitive processes intervening between the external S and the subject's R. His approach was thus peripheralistic in its focus on movements and secretions, and not on changes in the central nervous system. He worried that serious consideration of the existence of such intervening, unobservable processes would be subjective and unscientific; in any case it was unnecessary for behavioral prediction and control. But Watson did include implicit or covert behavior and "verbal reports" within his behaviorism. For example, he viewed thinking as basically silent speech, talking to yourself, that was potentially measurable by means of sensitive recording instruments attached to appropriate muscles (of the lips, tongue, larynx)—a general idea, not really original with Watson, that stimulated much research. Also, a person's regular, overt utterances could be objectively recorded as a form of behavior. Still, Watson was accused of making an alarming concession: of retaining introspection under another guise, the verbal report.

In 1920, while engrossed in his work with infants and other experiments involving adult human learning, Watson was faced with divorce proceedings initiated by his wife, who had discovered his love affair with Rayner. The participants were so well known (the Rayner family was politically and socially prominent in Maryland) that the case became a local and national sensation. Although Watson had probably believed that he was too important a figure at Johns Hopkins and in American psychology to lose his job over such a personal matter, he was forced to resign from the university in 1920. He never again held any official academic position. He and Rayner were married as soon as the divorce was final.

From Science to Advertising

Resilient and self-reliant, Watson began an entirely new career at the J. Walter Thompson Agency, viewed by its president, Stanley Resor, as a "university of advertising." Watson started at the bottom, surveying the demand for different kinds of rubber boots along the Mississippi River and acting as a salesman in Macy's department store to observe consumer reactions. He eventually became a vice president and was directly involved in many campaigns for specific products. He favored emotional over rational appeals but contributed no strikingly novel methods to the field of advertising, as some writers have claimed. Financially successful compared with his academic years, he asserted, "It can be just as thrilling to watch the growth of a sales curve of a new product as to watch the learning curve of animals or men."

After his dismissal from Johns Hopkins, Watson continued to write and lecture about behaviorism, but the books, radio broadcasts, and magazine articles were directed mainly at a popular audience. Aside from Freud, he was probably the psychologist best known to the American public in the first half of the twentieth century. Unfortunately, his views became progressively more simplistic, dogmatic, brash, and extreme. Still, his book Behaviorism (1924), though hastily written, was favorably received; a New York Times reviewer said it marked a new "epoch in the intellectual history of man," and the New York Herald-Tribune declared that "perhaps this is the most important book ever written." Even Bertrand Russell said it was "massively impressive."

In this and later writings Watson repudiated his earlier acceptance of the existence of certain human instincts and instead presented an extremely environmentalist, learning-based point of view. A widely cited passage, usually quoted without some qualifications that he did add, claimed that with the right kind of early experience and training, one could make any healthy infant into a "doctor, lawyer, artist … even beggar-man and thief, regardless of the talents … abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors." Such a democratic view, combined with Watson's optimistic vision of psychology's general role in transforming society, was attractive to the American public, which was becoming more urbanized and seemed to recognize the need for an effective technology of behavior (for example, in education and retraining). Interestingly, behaviorism never gained strong support in Europe, perhaps because traditional values there were more intellectual, philosophical, and abstract; democratic, practical ideals were not so prevalent.

Watson's popular book Psychological Care of Infant and Child (1928), dedicated to "the first mother who brings up a happy child," had a definite influence on American child-rearing practices in the 1930s. Some writers have described Watson as the Dr. Spock of his day, but unlike Spock he maintained that the up-bringing of children should be quite objective and routinized, with minimal affection and sentimentality. His own children said that he was "all business," believing that tenderness would have a harmful effect on their independence and emotional control. In Watson's autobiographical sketch (1936) he apologized for the infant-care book, admitting that he had insufficient knowledge to write it. He did not, however, retract any of its specific advice.

Different varieties of behaviorism had emerged almost as soon as Watson proposed his own brand, but in the 1930s to 1960s more sophisticated "neobehaviorists" (e.g., Edwin Guthrie, Clark Hull, B. F. Skinner, and Edward Tolman) flourished during the so-called golden age of learning theory. These persons and their current impact are discussed elsewhere in this volume, along with views of contemporary cognitive psychologists, who generally reject many of behaviorism's assumptions and emphases—but not its objective methodology.

Rosalie Watson's death in 1936 left her husband depressed for a long time. Although he worked at an advertising firm for another decade, he preferred the isolation of his rural Connecticut home and farm, part of which he had built himself, to social and intellectual activities. The APA presented Watson with a special award in 1957, the year before his death on September 25, 1958, and almost 40 years after he left academia. He was honored as the initiator of a "revolution in psychological thought" and a person whose work was a vital determinant of "the form and substance of modern psychology."

See also:BEHAVIORISM; CONDITIONING, CLASSICAL AND INSTRUMENTAL; GUTHRIE, EDWIN R.; HULL, CLARK L.; LEARNING THEORY: A HISTORY; LEARNING THEORY: CURRENT STATUS; PAVLOV, IVAN; SKINNER, B. F.; THORNDIKE, EDWARD; TOLMAN, EDWARD C.

Bibliography

Boakes, R. A. (1984). From Darwin to behaviourism: Psychology and the minds of animals. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

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

Cohen, D. (1979). J. B. Watson: The founder of behaviourism. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Harrell, W., and Harrison, R. (1938). The rise and fall of behaviorism. Journal of General Psychology 18, 367-421.

O'Donnell, J. M. (1985). The origins of behaviorism: American psychology, 1870-1920. New York: New York University Press.

Watson, J. B. (1913). Psychology as the behaviorist views it. Psychological Review 20, 158-177.

—— (1914). Behavior: An introduction to comparative psychology. New York: Henry Holt.

—— (1919). Psychology from the standpoint of a behaviorist. Philadelphia: Lippincott.

—— (1924). Behaviorism. New York: W. W. Norton.

—— (1928). Psychological care of infant and child. New York: W. W. Norton.

—— (1936). John Broadus Watson (autobiographical sketch). In C. Murchison, ed., A history of psychology in autobiography, Vol. 3, pp. 271-281. Worcester, MA: Clark University Press.

EliotHearst