John Watson's Behaviorism
Biography: John B. Watson was born into a large family in the tiny town of Traveler’s Rest, South Carolina. His mother was deeply religious and gave him his middle name in honor of a famous Baptist minister from nearby Greenville, John Albert Broadus. Brewer (1991, p. 171) wrote, “As a youngster, Watson was called Broadus and not John B.” Watson’s father did not share his wife’s religious faith; he was a brawler and a heavy drinker.
Watson matured early and easily learned and enjoyed working with his hands. He went to several country schools before his mother moved the family to nearby Greenville because of its better schools. Watson was never an outstanding student even while attending Furman University, the local Baptist college. He spent five years there, graduating with a master’s degree. An oversight—turning in his exam incorrectly during his senior year—led to a failing grade and the need for a fifth year.The psychology professor, Gordon B. Moore, had warned the class exactly how he wanted the exams returned. They were not to be turned in “backward.” After graduating from Furman, Watson taught school in South Carolina for a year before enrolling at the University of Chicago in 1900. Three years later, he received his PhD in psychology, Chicago’s first doctorate in the new discipline (Benjamin, 2009). James Rowland Angell and H. H. Donaldson, a neurologist, jointly supervised his thesis on the learning ability of albino rats at various ages. Following the style of animal research at the time, Watson inferred what his rats might have been thinking while he subjected them to his experimental manipulations. Soon, he would cease to analyze his experiments in that introspective manner.
Contributions: After graduating from Chicago, he stayed on as a faculty member. During Watson’s tenure at Chicago (1900–1908) he was surrounded by an eclectic and exciting group of academic stars including John Dewey (although Watson later claimed he never understood anything Dewey ever told him), George Herbert Mead, the sociologist, and Jacques Loeb, the biologist. Watson himself ran the psychology department’s animal laboratory; his research concentrated on elucidating the sensory capacities of animals, especially their vision. He also conducted naturalistic observation and field experiments with the sea birds that nested in the Dry Tortugas Islands (located about 70 miles from Key West, Florida) with Karl Lashley, then a student at Chicago. Soon after, however, James Mark Baldwin persuaded Watson to leave Chicago for Johns Hopkins. Baldwin had been hired to revive the study of psychology at Hopkins, which had lain dormant since G. Stanley Hall’s departure. Baldwin had previously founded the psychology laboratories at the University of Toronto and Princeton University. He saw Watson as an energetic up and coming researcher who could help put Hopkins back on psychology’s map. Watson was reluctant to leave Chicago, but a promotion to full professor and the near doubling of his salary tipped the scales in Hopkins’s favor.
Ironically, only weeks after Watson’s arrival, Baldwin was forced to resign. He had been arrested during a raid at a brothel. But, he had given the police a false name and thus prevented an immediate scandal. Two reporters had recognized him but did not publish any stories mentioning him by name. Later, however, when he was invited to join the Baltimore School Board, news of his earlier arrest leaked out. To limit the scandal, the president of Hopkins forced him to resign immediately. Baldwin did so and moved to Mexico, his contributions to academic psychology effectively ending. Before leaving, he made Watson chair of the department and editor of the journal Psychological Review. Baldwin’s personal troubles became Watson’s gain. He, at an inordinately young age, had suddenly acquired great power and influence at Hopkins and within psychology itself. Brewer (1991, p. 177) quoted from a letter that Watson wrote to Furman University students in 1950:
"A few weeks after I began work at Johns Hopkins, Prof. James Mark Baldwin came into my office and said, “I am resigning and leaving now for the University of Mexico. You are the new editor of the Psychological Review.” . . . I was about as well prepared to undertake this work as I was to swim the English Channel."
At colleges and universities, influence and prestige to faculty largely comes from publication of articles and books. Thus, the editors of scholarly journals and publishing houses can easily become gatekeepers of new ideas, allowing some into print while excluding others. Typically, academic journal editorships fall to established scholars who are well respected by their peers. In Watson’s case though, the editorship of the most prestigious journal in psychology fell to him only through Baldwin’s personal problems. But, Watson proved to be a competent and hard-working editor; that position also allowed him later to spread more easily his radical views about psychology and its problems.
Watson’s years at Hopkins were productive. He published a textbook, Behavior: An Introduction to Comparative Psychology (Watson, 1914) and expanded upon his earlier research with animals. He was also elected president of the American Psychological Association in 1915. All of these accomplishments followed his famous speech at Columbia University in 1913. That speech and its subsequent publication (Watson, 1913) in Psychological Review pitted his Behaviorism against two of the original schools of thought in psychology: Structuralism and Functionalism.
Behaviorism was not original to Watson. Earlier trends in psychology—animal psychology, testing, applied psychology, and clinical psychology—had already demonstrated the utility of focusing on behavior while either minimizing or ignoring consciousness and introspective reports. Animal researchers had laid an impressive foundation by emphasizing the relationship between environmental events and behavior (Loeb, 1911) and the behavioral complexity of the minutest of creatures (Jennings, 1906). Pavlov’s research on conditioning was also instrumental because it provided a mechanism to explain how associationism worked. Thorndike’s (1898) pioneering experiments with puzzle boxes were also highly influential. Galtonian style testing was also well underway, although the results had not yet panned out in terms of predicting future success in school or on the job. Applied psychology was making headway in education and reforming classroom practice. In clinical psychology, James had long led the effort to include psychopathology and its treatment as part of psychology. The Johns Hopkins Hospital psychiatrist Adolph Meyer, who would later become instrumental in Watson’s career, while still in New York had “turned the state’s insane asylums into modern mental hospitals” (Boakes, 1984, p. 168). Watson’s contribution was to meld these disparate streams into one and to propose a radically new approach for psychology, one which severed it nearly completely from its past. In short, he argued for a completely new psychology, one that dispensed with introspection and consciousness in a single stroke. He called his approach Behaviorism.
Watson delivered his famous speech at Columbia University. He argued that psychology “has failed signally . . . to make its place in the world as an undisputed natural science” (Watson, 1913, p. 163). He claimed that neither Structuralism nor Functionalism had made much progress in advancing psychology because both were wedded to consciousness, albeit in different ways, and neither could provide a coherent scientific account of the discipline. He wished to “never use the terms consciousness, mental states, mind, content, introspectively verifiable, imagery” (p. 166) again. In their place he proposed the study of behaviors only. He noted that there was already a history of success of such research using animals (p. 176):
"Psychology, as the behaviorist views it, is a purely objective, experimental branch of natural science which needs introspection as little as do the sciences of chemistry and physics. It is granted that the behavior of animals can be investigated without the appeal to consciousness . . . The position is taken here that the behavior of man and the behavior of animals must be considered on the same plane; as being equally essential to a general understanding of behavior. It can dispense with consciousness in a psychological sense."
He also warned, “Should human psychologists fail to look with favor upon our overtures and refuse to modify their position, the behaviorists will be driven to using human beings as subjects and to employ methods of investigation which are exactly comparable to those now employed in animal work” (p. 159). In short, Watson was rejecting the methodology of the structuralists and functionalists, although his greatest fire was reserved for the latter, “I have done my best to understand the difference between functional psychology and structural psychology. Instead of clarity, confusion grows upon me” (p. 165).
Watson was not entirely negative, however. He cited examples within human psychology where the behavioral approach had already led to success. Specifically, he mentioned educational psychology, psychopharmacology (but did not use that yet-to-be-invented term), advertising, forensics, and testing. He favored the adoption of uniform experimental procedures, writing, “The man and the animal should be placed as nearly as possible under the same experimental conditions” (p. 171). He hoped that, eventually, nearly all of the “really essential” problems of psychology would be approachable through Behaviorism. Twenty years later, most American psychologists were following his lead. By and large they were not converted structuralists or functionalists. Instead, they were younger scientists attracted to Watson’s ideas. However, the idea that Watson initiated a sudden change in how psychologists conducted their business is wrong. It took a while because neither structuralism nor functionalism would die easily (Samelson, 1981).
In 1917, the United States entered World War I and many psychologists were called into the United States Army to help with the war effort. While psychologists such as Robert M. Yerkes worked to solve the problems surrounding the mobilization and subsequent classification of recruits, Watson’s expertise lay elsewhere. Eventually, he, too, was drafted and served in the Signal Corps. By and large, however, he found his wartime experiences exasperating. He especially chafed being under the command of army officers he thought were incompetent and rebelled against their decision making. For that he was nearly court martialed. Fortunately for him, however, the war ended and he once again returned to Hopkins.
Over the course of ten years (1914–1924) the Johns Hopkins University had moved from its original downtown location to the uptown neighborhood where it now stands. After the move, the psychology department ended up with less laboratory space. So, when Adolph Meyer offered Watson some space in the newly built Phipps Clinic at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, he eagerly accepted it. Watson, apparently following his own advice, was beginning to research human psychology. At first, he wanted to study psychopathology, but Meyer thought Watson lacked the necessary clinical experience. Instead, Watson began to study the newborn babies at the nearby Harriet Lane Home for Invalid Children near the Phipps Clinic “where Watson’s Infant Laboratory was housed. A corridor connected the two buildings, which allowed the baby to be brought into the laboratory without exposing him to the winter air” (Beck, Levinson, & Irons, 2009). One of those babies, of course, was Little Albert. Watson’s research with him became the high point of his career as well as the beginning of the end of it.
When Watson resumed work at the Phipps Clinic following the war, he and his students became interested in studying emotional behavior in humans. At first, they could only identify three instinctive emotions (e.g., unlearned behaviors): fear, rage, and love. After further work though, they began to realize that the repertoire of unlearned behavior (e.g., reflexes) in babies was much larger than they had originally supposed. They also discovered that many of those behaviors, such as the strong grasp reflex, disappeared with advancing age. Another finding was that some infants were afraid of stimuli such as white laboratory rats, dogs, or masks while others were not. Such observations led them to hypothesize that children exhibiting such fears must have learned conditioned emotional responses (Watson & Rayner, 1920) during the course of their “early home life” (p. 1). To test their hypotheses, they selected “Albert B.,” today known as “Little Albert” who was “healthy from birth and one of the best developed youngsters . . . He was on the whole stolid and unemotional. His stability was one of the principal reasons for using him as a subject in this test” (p. 2). Later they wrote (original italics) “At no time did this infant ever show fear in any situation” (p. 3).
Their stated goals were to determine whether they could condition him to be afraid of a white rat, whether the fear would transfer to other objects, what effect time might have on conditioned emotional responses, and if emotional responses could be removed following their acquisition. Watson and Rayner used a loud noise sounded from behind the infant in order to cause a fear response. “The sound was that made by striking a hammer upon a suspended steel bar four feet in length and three-fourths of an inch in diameter” (Watson & Rayner, 1920, p. 2). In the experiment, the bar was struck as soon as Albert touched the white rat. After only two trials Albert showed a fear response. A week later, Albert was subjected to five more trials. At the end of those and when presented with the rat alone (original italics):
"The instant the rat was shown the baby began to cry. Almost instantly he turned sharply to the left, fell over on left side, raised himself on all fours and began to crawl away so rapidly that he was caught with difficulty before reaching the edge of the table (p. 6)."
Albert showed fear of the white rat that had not scared him previously. Five days later, they showed him a rabbit. Again, he showed fear and burst into tears. He also showed fear (but not as much) to a white seal fur coat and to cotton wool. The conditioned emotional response transferred. Watson and Rayner waited a month to see if Albert’s fears disappeared over time. They did not. The researchers never had a chance to attempt to decondition or extinguish Albert’s fears as he left the hospital to go home. A few years later one of Watson’s students, Mary Cover Jones (1924) was the first to demonstrate that it was possible to extinguish conditional emotional responses.
Watson and Rosalie Rayner soon became more than collaborators in research. They fell in love and eventually married. The problem was that Watson was already married when their romance sprouted and grew. Watson’s marital problems with his wife, Mary Ickes, had developed long before his liaison with Rayner. Both women came from prominent families and both had originally been students of his; Ickes at Chicago and Rayner at Hopkins. Watson’s marriage to Ickes might have ended in a mutually agreed upon divorce except for two circumstances. The first was that Ickes managed to steal some of the love letters Watson had written to Rayner. The theft took place at the house of Rosalie Rayner’s parents during a dinner party (the Watsons and the Rayners were friends). Ickes excused herself to the bathroom feigning discomfort and instead found the letters in Rosalie Rayner’s room. The second was that she later showed the letters to her brother, an attorney.
Before long portions of the letters were published in the newspapers. One letter read in part, “every cell I have is yours, individually and collectively. My total reactions are positive and towards you. So likewise each and every heart reaction. I can’t be any more yours than I am even if a surgical operation made us one” (Buckley, 1994, p. 24). The letters caused a scandal but they also revealed Watson’s nearly total commitment to his behaviorist tenets. Watson (1928) later revealed a similar commitment in a book on childcare when he argued that children should be treated like little adults and never be kissed or hugged. Moreover, Watson refused to be discreet in his relationship with Rayner while he was still married. Although their affair was no secret to some of his friends and colleagues, it rapidly developed into a major scandal, one mostly unanticipated by Watson himself. The president of Johns Hopkins asked for Watson’s immediate resignation. Soon, he and Ickes divorced. Less than a week after the final divorce decree, he married Rayner. However, his career in academic psychology had come to an abrupt end.
Watson’s Career after Hopkins:Watson felt adrift immediately after his dismissal from Hopkins. Few of his former colleagues came to his support and there was no possibility of his obtaining another academic position. Stanley Resor, head of the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency, decided to take a chance on hiring Watson, and using his behaviorist methods, bring a scientific approach to the manipulation of consumer behavior through advertising. Before hiring Watson, he sent him to Mississippi to investigate the rubber boot market. At that time, very few of the roads in Mississippi or other nearby states were paved, so rubber boots were practically a necessity.
After hiring Watson, Resor put him through the agency’s internal training process so that Watson could learn all the aspects of the advertising business from working as a clerk at Macy’s to writing and editing copy to actually running an account. Resor saw Watson’s role at J. Walter Thompson as “ambassador-at-large” (Kreshel, 1990, p. 52). Watson became a vice-president of the agency four years after being hired and earned a salary astronomically higher ($70,000 per year equivalent to about $910,000 today) than anything possible at that time in an academic setting. Watson directly managed accounts such as Baker’s Chocolate and Coconut, Johnson and Johnson Baby Powder, and Pond’s extract. He also brought his earlier ideas about the biological primacy of love, rage, and fear to advertising. He saw his job as the attempt to stimulate one of those basic impulses through advertising.
His position at J. Walter Thompson, while not leaving him much time to pursue original research, did allow him the opportunity to spread his ideas about Behaviorism to a new audience: business leaders. He also had time to write popular books and articles on a wide variety of topics, including “childrearing, sex, marriage, the role of women, how to succeed in business” (Kreshel, 1990, pp. 55–56) just to name a few. His audiences: business people and the public avidly harkened to his ideas. It is likely that Watson’s vision of Behaviorism spread more quickly into the culture through his popular writings than it would have had he remained at a university. At any rate, the academic community continued to shun him and would do so until late in his life, when the American Psychological Association awarded him its second Gold Medal for lifetime achievement in 1957. Watson eventually left J. Walter Thompson to become vice-president at another agency. After his retirement, he lived a spartan existence on Long Island, his wife Rosalie having died young.
In addition to founding Behaviorism, Watson also contributed much to the establishment of applied psychology. That his success in doing the latter only came after his involuntary separation from academic psychology is telling. He helped move psychology away from philosophy toward biology and, later in his life, opened a conduit between psychology and the business world. After Watson, and on the academic side of psychology, Behaviorism slowly but inexorably became the leading school of thought in American psychology. The path to its eventual dominance of American psychology was not smooth. Birnbaum (1955) analyzed Behaviorism’s appeal to the newly emerging mass markets and how Watson’s late career expertise in advertising helped him sell Behaviorism to the public. Watson published several books, wrote many articles in the popular press, made movies, and spoke to countless groups to promote his ideas. But, Birnbaum also detailed how members of the intelligentsia opposed Watson. They included religious leaders and theologians, philosophers, newspaper columnists, and academics.