John B Watson

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John Broadus Watson (Greenville, South Carolina, January 9, 1878 – New York, September 25, 1958) was an American psychologist, credited with founding the school psychology of behaviorism through his Columbia University dissertation entitled Psychology as "The Behaviorist Views It", published as an article in the Psychological Review in 1913 under the name "Psychology as the behaviorist views it / La psicología tal cos la vez el conductista ". From his behaviorist approach, Watson conducted research on animal behavior (of multiple species^{[ citation required]}, including Homo sapiens, which highlights the rearing of newborns, children and advertising). He was the first graduate of the Ph.D. in psychology at the University of Chicago.

He famously quoted, which he himself admitted to be an exaggeration, in which he maintains that taking any dozen children, and applying behavior modification techniques, he could get any type of person he wanted:

"Give me a dozen healthy, well-trained children, so that I can educate them, and I commit myself to choosing one of them randomly and to train them to become a specialist of any kind that I can choose—medical, lawyer, artist, businessman and even beggar or thief—without their talents, inclinations, tendencies, skills, vocations and race of their counterparts, I go more and more Please note that when this experiment is performed, it should be allowed to specify how children are brought up and the kind of world they will live in. "

He is also known for formulating and carrying out his experiments, such as "Kerplung", with Havey A. Carr, and perhaps the most controversial one he carried out, "Little Albert", with Rosalie Rayner, among many others. He was editor of the Psychological Review from 1910 to 1915. A Review of General Psychology survey published in 2002 ranked Watson as the 17th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.

Biography

Early Life

John Broadus Watson was born in Travelers Rest, South Carolina, on January 9, 1878. His father, Pickens Butler Watson, was an alcoholic and left the family to live with two Indian women when John was 13, a transgression who never forgave His mother, Emma Kesiah Watson (née Roe), was a highly religious woman who adhered to bans on drinking, smoking, and dancing, naming her son John after a prominent Baptist minister in the hope that he would help him receive his calling. to preach the Gospel. Raising him, she put Watson through harsh religious training that later led him to develop a lifelong antipathy to all forms of religion and become an atheist.

In an attempt to escape poverty, Watson's mother sold her farm bringing Watson and his family to Greenville, South Carolina, to give him a better chance of success. Moving from an isolated rural location to the greater urbanity of Greenville proved to be important to Watson, giving him the opportunity to experience a variety of different types of people, which he used to cultivate his thinking on psychology. However, the initial transition would be a struggle for Watson, as a result of weak social skills.

Marriage and children

John B. Watson married Mary Ickes, sister of politician Harold L. Ickes while in graduate school. They had two children, also named John and Mary Ickes Watson, the latter of whom attempted suicide later in life.

He graduated from the University of Chicago in 1903. His dissertation "Animal education: an experimental study on the psychical development of the white rat, correlated with the growth of its nervous system", is the first modern scientific document on the behavior of the white rat. In the paper, Watson describes the relationship between brain myelination and learning ability in rats throughout their biological development.

Mary II and her husband, Paul Hartley, had a daughter named Mariette Hartley (Star Trek/Star Trek) who suffered from psychological problems that she attributed to her upbringing with theories of her grandfather. She would go on to become an Emmy Award-winning actress, bipolar disorder advocate, and founder of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.

Watson spent several years at Johns Hopkins University conducting research on the relationship between sensory inputs and bird learning and behavior.

In October 1920 Watson was asked to leave his professorship at Johns Hopkins University due to rumors about his relationship with his assistant Rosalie Rayner (because Watson's wife Mary discovered love letters that Watson had written to his lover. The affair became front-page news during the divorce proceedings in the Baltimore newspapers. The publicity would result in Watson being asked by Johns Hopkins University to leave his faculty position at October 1920).

After leaving college, he went into advertising, going on to work as a psychologist for The John Walter Thompson and William Esty Company.

In 1920, after the finalization of the divorce, Watson and Rayner were married in New Jersey, raising two sons, William Rayner Watson (1921) and James Broadus Watson (1924), who were raised on the behavioral principles John defended at all times. The couple remained together until Rayner's death at age 36 in 1935. After the death of his wife, he distanced himself from his social circles and went to live on his farm in Connecticut, where he spent the last years of his life dedicated to farm work. Like his half-sister, William (Bill, as his family called him, was a renowned New York psychiatrist) ended up committing suicide in 1963. Except for a set of reprints of his scholarly papers, Watson burned his extensive collection of letters and personal documents, thus depriving historians of a valuable resource for understanding the early history of behaviorism and of Watson himself.

Historian John Burnham interviewed Watson late in his life, presenting him as a man of (still) strong opinions and some bitterness towards his detractors. In 1957, shortly before his death, Watson was awarded a Gold Medal of the American Psychological Association for his contributions to psychology.

Watson lived on his farm until his death in 1958 at the age of 80. He was buried at Willowbrook Cemetery, Westport, Connecticut.

Watson and behaviorism

Watson's influence on the history of psychology is undeniable. His article "Psychology as seen by the Behaviorist" (1913) is considered the current founder of the behaviorist school. However, behavioral psychology -as a psychological current- would not have been possible without the work of authors such as the Russian physiologist Iván Pávlov (father of classical or respondent conditioning, who established the stimulus-response scheme) and the American Edward Thorndike (father of operant conditioning, who formulated the law of effect and the law of repetition and whose influence on B. F. Skinner will be decisive).

Watson's merit will be to start a school through a manifesto in which he will explicitly include a series of points that those who consider themselves behaviorists are supposed to follow:

Watson popularized and disseminated behaviorism as no other behaviorist of the time, however, his influence seems to come more from his excellent communicative skills than from his research [...]. One of his biggest fans, Herrmestein, makes the following comment in the introduction to Watson's posthumous work Comparative Psychology: "The importance of Watson for behavioral psychology is more sociological than substantial."

Behaviorism places emphasis on observable behavior (both human and animal), which it considers to be the object of study of Psychology, and the relationships between stimulus and response, rather than on the internal mental state of the person. people (although Watson never denied the existence of any of the private or intimate world). In his opinion, the analysis of behavior and relationships was the only objective method to gain insight into human actions and to extrapolate the method of Natural Sciences (the scientific method) to Psychology.

The Little Albert Experiment

Main article: Little Albert

Watson went down in the history of Psychology for the experiments carried out together with Rosalie Rayner to demonstrate their theories about the conditioning of the fear reaction in a nine-month-old child and that has gone down in history with the name of Little Albert.

In it, Watson intended to demonstrate how the principles of classical conditioning, which in those years had just been proposed by Ivan Pavlov, could be applied to a child's fear reaction to a white rat.

Little Albert was chosen as an experimental subject due to his great emotional stability in the hospital where he was admitted. Through the experiment, Watson wanted to demonstrate how he could condition Albert's fearful reaction towards a white rat, which initially did not cause any aversive reaction in the boy, how he could generalize this behavior to other similar stimuli, and finally, how to eliminate this behavior..

As described by Watson and Rayner (1920), the objectives they pursued with their experiment were to answer the following questions:

Can a child be conditioned to fear an animal that appears simultaneously with a strong noise?
Will such fear be transferred to other animals or inanimate objects?
How long will such fear persist?

The procedure followed was as follows: A healthy nine-month-old boy, Albert, was selected for the experiment. He was examined to determine if he had a previous fear of the objects that were going to be presented to him (animals with hair), an examination that was negative. A fear of loud sounds (such as hitting a sheet metal hard with a hammer) was identified.

The experiment began when Albert was 11 months and three days old. It consisted of presenting the child with a white rat while making a loud noise (which was achieved by hitting a metal bar behind the child's head). After several trials, the boy sobbed in the presence of the rat and subsequently generalized its response to other stimuli: a dog, wool, a fur coat, etc.

The experiment could not come to an end, not reaching the deconditioning phase, because Albert was removed from the hospital unit where he was before its conclusion.

Ethical Implications

Selected works

1907. "Kinaesthetic and Organic Sensations: Their Role in the Reactions of the White rat to the Maze."
1908. "The Behavior of Noddy and Sooty Terns."
1913. "Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It."
1914. "Behavior: An Introduction to Comparative Psychology."
1915. "Recent experiments with homing birds."
1920. "Conditioned emotional reactions," with Rosalie Rayner - "The Little Albert"
1924. "Behaviorism."
1928. "Psychological Care of Infant and Child."
1936. "John Broadus Watson" In C. Murchison The international university series in psychology. A history of psychology in autobiography Vol. 3 (p. 271–281)