Lizzy and Alex July 19, 2015

         

John B. Watson is considered the creator of behaviorism because he formed a new, more efficient establishment of the previous ideas associated with behaviorism. When he was 16, Watson attended Furman University and graduated in five years with a Masters degree. After graduating, he went on to the University of Chicago where his interest in comparative psychology grew. In 1903 he earned his Ph.D after majoring in psychology, neurology, and minoring in philosophy. Watson taught psychology at Johns Hopkins University after spending a short period of time assisting and teaching at the University of Chicago. At Johns Hopkins, Watson developed a psychology lab where he conducted experiments on animal behavior. Watson’s first famous article was published in 1913 in Psychological Review titled “Psychology as a Behaviorist Views It”. The article described psychology as being a science of human behavior that will be benefitted by being studied in a lab. In 1914, he published Behavior: An Introduction to Comparative Psychology where he discussed the importance of animal subjects and how studying their reflexes might be useful. Watson’s most famous experiment on Little Albert also caused him the most amount of trouble when his affair with his student and assistant Rosalie Rayner was found out. Due to this affair Watson was forced to leave Johns Hopkins. He eventually moved to New York and became the vice president of J. Walter Thompson advertising agency, while continuing to publish articles and books about psychology. One year before his death, Watson received the gold medal from the American Psychological Association.

       John Watson was not satisfied with the course of psychology’s success in 1913. For this reason he decided that a new psychology should be developed that would finally permit psychology to be accepted with the other sciences. This new psychology would be the study of behavior, and called behaviorism. Watson decided that this new psychology required a new methodology using observation without scientific instruments. One of his most well known studies using a similar method was done with classical conditioning. Here he was determining if emotions of humans can be conditioned, more specifically, the emotion of fear. In 1919 Watson conducted a study of a young boy in which he was able to condition the boy to develop a new fear in rats, dogs, fur coats, and Santa Claus, as a result of presenting a loud and intimidating noise as a rat was presented to him. Although this study would now be seen as extremely unethical, because the subject was never debriefed and continued to live with the fear, the results were incredible, especially at the time. Throughout time it is clear that the foundation of behaviorism were laid before Watson made his influence, but his ability to bind the separate ideas together suggests that he deserves the title of founder of behaviorism.

 Pictured: The Elizabeth Tower

Link: http://www.simplypsychology.org/behaviorism.html

Timeline: 1919 Watson tried to condition emotion in humans through his experiment on Little Albert

Weiland, C. (n.d.). John Broadus Watson. Retrieved July 19, 2015, from http://faculty.frostburg.edu/mbradley/psyography/johnbroaduswatson.html

Benjamin, L. T. (2014). A brief history of modern psychology (2^nd ed.). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley