John Watson Championed Behaviorism and Founded Behaviorist School of Psychology

John B. Watson, Founder of Behaviorism

John B. Watson (1878-1958), American Psychologist

John Watson (1878-1958), American psychologist, is often referred to as father of behaviorism.  In founding the concept of behaviorism, he argued that all animals, including human beings, were complex machines that respond to situations according to the way the brains are wired and the accompanying experience that has conditioned their minds.

In rejecting introspection, Watson advocated a purely objective psychology that solely concerned with observable behavior.  He took his ideas of behaviorism into the advertising industry after being forced out of academia. And how did he do this? As executive of one of the largest advertising agencies in the U.S., he tried to move advertising away from its main preoccupation of merely presenting information about products into becoming a media that appeal to non-rational emotions.

Brief Profile of John B. Watson

The founder of behaviorism, John Broadus Watson, was born on January 9, 1878, in Greenville, South Carolina. His teenage life was not a happy one.  He was 13 years of age when his father left home after a string of extra-marital affairs that left him and his deeply religious mother to fend for themselves.

He received his PhD in psychology from the University of Chicago in 1903.  In 1905, he married Mary Ickes. The couple had two children and divorced in his early 40s. He left the academia after an affair with one of his research students, Rosalie Rayner, who he eventually married, and they had two sons.

After leaving the academia, Watson continued his career in the advertising industry, however, bringing along his behaviorism ideas  and trying to implement it.

Watson Detracts Sigmund Freud’s Psychoanalysis

At the advent of the 20th century, Sigmund Freud was creating his idea of psychoanalysis, the process of introspective questioning in which a person reveals deeply-hidden damaging experiences. Freud’s idea was that a kept issue can be dealt with once identified. Despite Freud’s highly acclaimed concept of introspection and psychoanalysis, John Watson detracted it.

Birth of John Watson’s Behaviorism

Five years after getting his PhD, Watson was appointed professor of comparative and experimental psychology at John Hopkins University. During this time, he had also developed the foundation of his concept of behaviorism.

In his concept of behaviorism, John Watson argued that all animals, including human beings, were complex machines that respond to situations according to the way their brains were “wired” along with the experiences that conditions their minds.  With his concept, Watson believed that this understanding of behavior could lead to ways of treating people suffering from mental disorders.

In 1913, Watson presented his “Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It” in his presidential address to the American Psychological Association (APA). He offered an alternative definition of psychology as the “science of behavior” in review of the failings and/or limitations of Freud’s introspective analysis. This year marked the birth of a more scientifically sound psychological school as outlined in his address to the APA.

John Watson’s Experiment of Little Albert

In 1919, Watson began to test his theories in humans, looking at conditioning and controlling people’s emotion. One of the experiments he conducted involved a baby known as Little Albert, he conditioned to have a fear of white rats. His test convinced him that human beings had three basic emotional reactions: fear, rage, and love – that such emotions could grab people’s attention that force them to respond.

Despite criticisms that he made no attempt to explain the physical processes in the brain where his findings of behavior underlie, through behaviorism, he worked relentlessly towards making psychology into a true science.  His ideas continued in the works of fellow American psychologist, B.F. Skinner.

John Watson’s works include Behaviorism (1925) and a book on child-rearing, Psychological Care of the Infant and Child (1928).

Sources:

• McGovern, Una, Ed. Chambers Biographical Dictionary. Edinburgh: Chambers Harrap Publishers (2002).

• Moore, Pete. E= MC²: London: Quintet Publishing Ltd. (2002).

• Steer, M. (Dr.), H. Birch and Dr. A. Impney, Gen. Eds.  Science. Cassell Ilustrated, Octopus Publishing (2008).