JOHN BROADUS WATSON- 1878 -1958
John Watson was born to a large, rural family in South Carolina. With connections, he was able to study and teach at the University of Chicago and John Hopkins University in the field of psychology. He was widely believed to be the founder of the school of behaviourism, based on the belief that behaviours can be measured, trained and changed. His classic paper, “Psychology as the Behaviorist Views it,” published in 1913 marked the establishment of “behaviourism.” He worked and published his research in academia from 1913-1929. This career was short lived because of a sex scandal. By 1930, his career changed to applied work in advertising and marketing research of which he is perhaps better known. He continued his research on using the basic emotional reactions of fear, rage, and love on how to influence the “consumer.”
"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. [p. 82]" -John Watson, Behavorism, 1930
Watson believed the traditional methods of animal psychology to be true methods of scientific psychology and that the principles governing behavior of humans and other animals were essentially identical. He was influenced by Pavlov’s work on conditioned reflexes of animals. In 1903, his dissertation described the neurological and psychological development of the white rats. He then applied his studies on human beings. Watson is remembered for his controversial experiment on a small child, the “Little Albert’ study (1920) in which he demonstrated that emotional responses could be conditioned. In this study, fear of white rats and other items that looked similar was developed by pairing a white rat with a loud clang.
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(1) <http://psychology.about.com/od/behavioralpsychology/f/behaviorism.htm>
(2) <http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Watson/intro.htm>
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(1) <http://psychology.about.com/od/behavioralpsychology/f/behaviorism.htm>
(2) <http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Watson/intro.htm>