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J.B. Watson (1878-1958)

J.B.Watson

J.B. Watson is regarded as the founder of the school of behaviorism. He was born in 1878 and died in 1958. He began as a student of philosophy at the University of Chicago, but later turned to psychology. He taught for a number of years at Johns Hopkins University at Baltimore USA, where he set up his animal laboratories. Later he shifted to the corporate world and offered advice to industry relating to advertising and marketing.

Watson taught that psychology should ignore consciousness and concentrate on concrete facts: psychology. This was one of the founding principles of the behaviorists’ approach. He further said that psychologists must discard all reference to consciousness and must only look at behavior of animals and man. Because of his stress on behavior to the neglect of consciousness, he called himself a behaviorist. He was the first one to proclaim himself as a behaviorist. His methodology revolutionized the subject of psychology giving a new outlook to it. As consciousness was no more regarded as the concrete method of gaining knowledge, therefore, psychology focused merely on factual evidences and observable phenomena after the advent of this school. A measure of how seriously his appeal was taken by his professional colleagues is that he was elected as the President of American Psychological Association.

In one of his books, entitled “Behavior,” he enumerated what behaviorism is all about in psychology. As the functionalists and the structuralists had defined psychology as the study of consciousness, Watson defined, as opposed to them, psychology as the science of behavior. Behavior of animals and humans was in his view what needed to be studied for an understanding of psychology.

Furthermore, Watson asserted that psychologists should use only objective, experimental methods and should not use introspection as a method. He said that the aim of the study of psychology should be to provide prediction and control of behavior. This is the basic aim of behaviorism. Behaviorists tend to develop methods and techniques to control and predict human behavior in order to get the most out of them. Behaviorism emerged in times when the industrial revolution took place. At that moment in the history of mankind, the focus was on increasing the productivity of workforce.

According to Watsonian behaviorism, behavior can be studied in terms of stimulus-response patterns. This means, that a stimulus is received by organism and it responds. For example, when someone touches a hot object, he immediately withdraws his hand from the object. In other words, the hotness of  the object serves as the stimulus while the withdrawing action of the individual is his or her response to the stimulus. Watson therefore stated that there is nothing mysterious in this action and reaction and all of it could be explained in simple physiological terms.

Watson denied the value of introspection as data for psychology but said that a “verbal report,” may be obtained from the subject after the experiment. For example, if an individual is placed in a series of experiments, he may then be asked about the feelings and the emotions that he faced during the experiments. It is different from introspection in the sense that here the report is based on the circumstances that have been artificially created for the experiment. Therefore, verbal report, in view of Watson may be a source of information for psychologists, but he clearly denied the introspection as a means.

One of the important contributions of Watson is that in his opinion, thinking is nothing but “implicit behavior.” For example, when an individual manipulates images in his mind, thinking takes place. The individual relates these images together forming an explanation for the phenomenon that he is trying to study. Therefore thinking is also a kind of behavior. Watson agreed with the viewpoint of Ivan Pavlov about learning and said that we learn according to the laws of conditioning as given by Pavlov.

Watson suggested that memory and images are nothing but sensory activities in the brain. This again refers to the study of behaviorism as a physiological phenomenon rather than a mysterious one. He said that the sensory activities of the brain can be classified as “molecular behavior.”

Watson further proclaimed that by controlling the environment of an organism we could control and predict its behavior. This is known as environmentalism, that organism is affected by its environment. It is similar to the idea of Tabula Rasa given by John Locke. According to Locke, the mind of a new born baby is like a clean slate which is written upon by the surrounding environment. Watson’s contribution to psychology was one of the major developments in the study of psychology.