by Morton Hunt
From such research and from his knowledge of the work of Thorndike and other objectivists, Watson, rejecting all conjectures about invisible mental processes, began to formulate a new psychology based entirely on observable behavior. He first voiced these views at psychological meetings in 1908 and 1912 (in the latter year he and James R. Angell independently coined the term “behaviorist”), and in 1913 wrote an article, published in the Psychological Review and often called “the behaviorist manifesto,” that formally inaugurated the era of behaviorism in psychology.23
The manifesto, “Psychology As the Behaviorist Views It,” started off with a declaration of independence from all schools of psychology that dealt with mental processes:
Psychology as the behaviorist views it is a purely objective experimental branch of natural science. Its theoretical goal is the prediction and control of behavior. Introspection forms no essential part of its methods, nor is the scientific value of its data dependent on the readiness with which they lend themselves to interpretation in terms of consciousness.
In three sentences, he had proclaimed three revolutionary principles: first, the content of psychology should be behavior, not consciousness; second, its method should be objective rather than introspective; and third, its purpose should be “prediction and control of behavior” rather than fundamental understanding of mental events.
Watson charged that psychology had failed to become an undisputed natural science because it was concerned with conscious processes that were invisible, subjective, and incapable of precise definition. He jettisoned the psychologizing of the Greek philosophers, the medieval scholars, the rationalists and the empiricists, and such greats as Kant, Hume, Wundt, James, and Freud, all of whom had been, in his view, misguided.
The time seems to have come when psychology must discard all reference to consciousness; when it need no longer delude itself into thinking that it is making mental states the object of observation. We have become so enmeshed in speculative questions concerning the elements of mind, the nature of conscious content… that I, as an experimental student, feel that something is wrong with our premises and the types of problems which develop from them.
As some wit said later, “Psychology, having first lost its soul to Darwin, now lost its mind to Watson.”
His assault on introspection as a method of research was based on its failure to yield objective data. It so often led to endless debates about subjective and undecidable issues, like the number of sensations, their intensity, or what any individual meant by his report of what he was experiencing, that the method itself had to be judged defective and a hindrance to progress.
For good measure, Watson also dismissed all dualist discussions of mind and body, whether couched in metaphysical terms or modern ones. These concepts, “time-honored relics of philosophic speculation,” were of no use either as guides to psychological problems worth studying or as solutions of those problems; he himself would prefer, he said, to bring up his students in total ignorance of such hypotheses.
In place of the psychology he junked, he proposed a new one free of all such terms as “consciousness,” “mental states,” and “mind.” Its sole subject matter would be behavior. Based on the premise that all organisms adjust to their environment and that certain stimuli lead them to make the necessary responses, psychology would study the connections between stimuli and responses, that is, the ways in which rewarding responses are learned and unrewarding ones are not. Since consciousness would be ignored, much of this study could be carried on with animals; indeed, “the behavior of man and the behavior of animals must be considered on the same plane as being equally essential to the study of behavior.”
Watson’s manifesto was actually less original than it seemed; it presented ideas that had been germinating for fifteen years. But it did so in an audacious, forceful, and crystallizing way; it was, in short, a sales pitch. Watson’s ideas did not sweep the field overnight, but over the next half-dozen years behaviorism became an important topic at meetings and a formative influence on the thinking of psychologists. By the 1920s it had begun to dominate psychology, and was the ruling paradigm in American psychology and an important one in Europe for well over four decades.
Popular accounts of Watson’s life say that the manifesto catapulted Watson to the presidency of the American Psychological Association in 1915, but a careful review of the evidence by the social psychologist Franz Samelson finds it more likely that he was elected because he was highly visible as the editor of the Psychological Review, was well known to and on good terms with the three members of the nominating committee, and was a representative of the new generation of genuinely experimental psychologists.24
Whatever the reason, he was flying high, but he knew that he had not yet suggested a specific method by which behaviorists could pursue research, and in his presidential address to the APA he addressed this problem.25 He now had something to offer: the conditioned reflex method. Though he knew only the bare outlines of Pavlov’s work, he presented it as a model for behaviorist experimentation not only with animals but with humans. He noted that his student Karl Lashley (who had disproven Pavlov’s physiological theory), had already made a removable fistula that could be installed inside the human cheek; with it, he had successfully measured both unconditioned and conditioned salivary reflexes in human volunteers.
Watson himself began to study conditioned reflexes in human beings, although, not surprisingly, he did so with infants rather than adults. The psychiatrist Adolf Meyer, head of the Phipps Psychiatric Clinic at Johns Hopkins, had invited him to set up a laboratory there, and in 1916 Watson began observing infants from birth through much of their first year. World War I interrupted the work, but he got back to it in late 1918.
Watson first sought to discover what unconditioned reflexes infants possess, that is, what stimuli would produce reflexes without any learning process. From simple experiments with infants in the clinic he concluded that there are only a few instinctive reflexes in humans, among them sucking, reaching, and grasping. (A famous photograph shows Watson holding a rod from which a newborn is hanging by one hand like a little monkey.) He also found that infants have three innate emotional responses to certain stimuli: fear at hearing a loud sound or at suddenly being dropped (the infant catches its breath, puckers its lips, and then cries); rage when its arm or head movements are forcibly restrained (it stiffens its body, makes thrashing arm movements, holds its breath, and turns red in the face); and love when stroked, rocked, gently patted, and the like (it gurgles, coos, or smiles).26
But since these, in his opinion, made up the sum total of innate human responses—later research would find otherwise—his larger aim was to show how virtually all other human behaviors and emotional reactions were built up of conditioned reflexes. He began by enunciating a Pavlovian hypothesis about emotional responses:
When an emotionally exciting object stimulates the subject simultaneously with one not emotionally exciting, the latter may in time (often after one such joint stimulation) arouse the same emotional reaction as the former.27
To verify this hypothesis, in the winter of 1919–1920 Watson and a student of his, Rosalie Rayner, conducted what became one of the most famous experiments in the history of psychology, an attempt to produce a conditioned fear response in an eleven-month-old boy they called, in their report of the work, Albert B.28 When Albert was nine months old, they placed a white rat near him, and he showed no fear; he did, however, react with fear when a steel bar was banged with a hammer just behind his head. Allowing two months to pass so that the experiences would fade, Watson and Rayner then began the experiment. A rat was put down in front of Albert, who reached for it with his left hand; just as he touched it, the steel bar was struck behind him, and he jumped violently, fell forward, and buried his face in the mattress. On a second trial, Albert reached for the rat with his right hand, and as he touched it the bar was struck again; this time Albert jumped and fell forward and began to whim
per.
Watson and Rayner delayed further trials for a week “in order not to disturb the child too seriously,” as they wrote—a curious comment, since they intended to and did disturb him seriously when they continued. In the course of half a dozen more pairings in which the rat was placed close to Albert and the bar hit behind his head, Albert developed a full-fledged conditioned fear response to the sight of the rat:
The instant the rat was shown the baby began to cry. Almost instantly he turned sharply to the left, fell over on his 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.
Still more experiments showed that Albert had generalized his fear to other furry things: a rabbit, a dog, a seal coat, cotton wool, and Watson sporting a Santa Claus mask. After a month’s layoff, Albert was tested again, and, as Watson and Rayner reported with apparent gratification, he cried and was afraid of a rat and a number of furry stimuli shown him without any accompanying clanging of the steel bar.
Shockingly—by today’s ethical standards of research—Watson and Rayner made no effort to decondition Albert, who left the clinic several days after the final tests. They did say in their report that “had the opportunity been at hand we should have tried out several methods [of deconditioning],” which they outlined. They then jested that twenty years hence some Freudian analyst might extract from Albert a pseudo-memory of having tried to play with his mother’s pubic hair at age three and been violently scolded for it.
Watson paid a high price for what he had done in the course of the collaboration, though not what he had done to Albert. He developed a mad passion for beautiful young Rosalie Rayner and began an affair with her. He was seen around town with her, was away from home a great deal, and carelessly (or perhaps by unconscious design) left in a pocket a passionate note from Rosalie that his wife, Mary, found. He had been unfaithful on previous occasions and Mary had known about some of the episodes and weathered them, but this involvement was far more threatening to her and she felt compelled to take action.
She thought up a way to get damning evidence of his involvement, hoping to use it to force him to give up Rosalie instead of risking a scandal that would cost him his professorship. The Watsons dined at the home of Rosalie’s parents one evening, in the course of which Mary said she had a headache and would like to lie down for a while in Rosalie’s room. Alone and with the door shut, she searched the room and found and made off with a batch of love letters from Watson, who had been uncharacteristically expressive in them and rather explicit about his and Rosalie’s lovemaking.
But when she confronted Watson and threatened to expose him, he refused to break off with Rosalie. Mary decided to sue for divorce, and either she or her brother, to whom she had lent the letters and who had made copies of them, sent them to Frank Goodnow, president of the university. At that time and in that place, such conduct by a professor was utterly impermissible. In late September 1920, Goodnow summoned Watson to his office and demanded his resignation; Watson hotly defended himself but had no choice except to comply. When he left the office, he went home, packed a bag, and headed for New York, his dazzling career in psychology abruptly and permanently ended just as the movement he had spearheaded was succeeding.
Watson later married Rosalie and had two sons with her. He landed a job in New York, which eventually earned him a very large salary, as resident psychologist to the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency. There he combined his knowledge of psychology and his gift of salesmanship to conceive some of the firm’s most successful campaigns for deodorants, cold cream, Camel cigarettes, and other products. Among his triumphs: a campaign for Pond’s Cold and Vanishing Creams using testimonials from the Queens of Spain and Romania, one for Johnson & Johnson convincing mothers that it was important to use baby powder after every diaper change, and one for Maxwell House that helped to make the “coffee break” an American custom in offices, factories, and homes.
During the first decade of his banishment from the academic world, Watson continued to write books and magazine articles about behaviorism and child rearing. (He advocated strict behaviorist methods, with all emotionality and affection banned.) But he did no more psychological research and no longer played a role in the field, although his expanded thoughts about behaviorism, presented in his books, were adopted by some of his former colleagues and entered behaviorist thinking.
And popular thinking. Watson’s psychology, attributing almost all human behavior to stimulus-response conditioning, was a simple, convenient rebuttal of the hereditarian views of Galton’s followers and appealed broadly to liberals and egalitarians—an irony, since Watson was politically conservative. In his popular writings, he waxed messianic: behaviorism could create a better world by scientifically engineering the development of personality. In 1924, in Behaviorism, he made what is probably his most famous and often-quoted statement:
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.29
From 1930 on, Watson had nothing to do with psychology except as it applied to advertising. He and Rosalie settled into the good life on a large estate in Connecticut, where in his leisure hours he played gentleman farmer. But after some tranquil years tragedy struck: Rosalie contracted dysentery, grew steadily worse despite treatment, and died in her mid-thirties. Watson, fifty-eight, was shattered. He continued to work in advertising (he had recently moved to the William Esty agency), but his only real interest lay in puttering about on his farm. There were always women in his life, but he never came close to marrying again. As he aged, he became careless about himself, dressed poorly, grew fat, and was something of a solitary.
In 1957, when Watson was nearly eighty, the American Psychological Association notified him that it was awarding him its gold medal for his contributions to psychology. Astonished and pleased, he went to New York with his sons to receive the award, but at the last moment, afraid that after almost forty years of exile he would burst into tears at the ceremony, he sent one of his sons to stand in for him. The citation accompanying the medal read:
To John B. Watson, whose work has been one of the vital determinants of the form and substance of modern psychology. He initiated a revolution in psychological thought and his writings have been the point of departure for continuing lines of fruitful research.
It was a gracious tribute. But in fact Watson had oversimplified or overstated many issues, and other behaviorists later had to elaborate on and qualify them. Almost no one today holds as extreme an environmental position as he did, nor does anyone now recommend withholding affection from children and rearing them by frigid behavioral rules. The Pavlovian conditioning that he made the keystone of his system proved not to be the only significant kind; later behaviorists added to it another major model called “operant” conditioning. Most important, at the very time that Watson received the gold medal it was becoming clear that chains of S-R units (series of linked conditioned stimulus-response connections), no matter how long, could not adequately explain complex and sophisticated kinds of behavior.
For all that, Watson was the first and most important spokesman of a radical theory and practice that dominated American psychology for nearly half a century. Raymond Fancher, in his Pioneers of Psychology, writes that although many of the developments of behaviorism might have happened without Watson, “he certainly hastened their occurrence, and lent a vitality and power to the objective psychology movement that it might otherwise have lacked.”30
Watson died in 1958, the year after he received the gold medal. To the end, he believed that the revolution he had started, and which had so long been the leading school of psychology in America, was also the psych
ology of the future. He was wrong. But we’ll come to that.
The Triumph of Behaviorism
After a slow start, behaviorism rapidly gained favor among psychologists in the 1920s, particularly in America; it soon became the ruling view and, after a while, almost the only acceptable one, at least in academic circles.
The main reason for its popularity was its claim to be the first truly scientific psychology. Until the nineteenth century, psychology had consisted largely of philosophic speculation, not science. In the nineteenth century, adherents of the New Psychology had sought to turn psychology into a natural science but got no further than explaining a few simple reflexes and perceptions in physiological terms—and even to achieve that much, they had had to rely on unverifiable introspections.
Behaviorists, in contrast, said they could construct a psychology entirely from visible, measurable events—the causally connected stimulus-response units of which, they maintained, the whole range of animal and human behavior was assembled. Such a psychology would be based on reactions as specific and unvarying as those of chemistry or physics, and should enable the psychologist, in Watson’s words, “given the stimulus, to predict the response—or, seeing the reaction take place, to state what the stimulus is that has called out the reaction.”31