by DK
"I shall never be satisfied until I have a laboratory in which I can bring up children… under constant observation."
John B. Watson
Infinitely malleable
Watson’s career was abruptly brought to an end shortly after the Little Albert experiments when he was forced to resign his professorship amid the scandal of his affair with his researcher, Rosalie Rayner. Despite the incompleteness of his research, Watson felt vindicated in his belief in behaviorism, and more particularly the application of classical stimulus—response conditioning to humans. Perhaps because of his forced ejection from the academic world (into advertising, where he was hugely successful) he developed a tendency to overstate the scope of his findings, and with a natural gift for self-publicity continued to publish books on the subject of psychology.
Not content, for example, to claim that it is possible to condition emotional responses, he boasted that on the same principle it would be possible to control or modify almost any aspect of human behavior, no matter how complex. Just as Little Albert had been conditioned to fear certain white furry objects against his natural inclination, Watson believed that “Anyone, regardless of their nature, can be trained to be anything.” He even boasted in his 1924 book Behaviorism: “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.” In the “nature versus nurture” debate, Watson was firmly on the side of nurture.
Watson saw the child as the ultimate “blank slate.” He claimed that behaviorist principles could be used to mold children into any kind of specialist, from artist to doctor, regardless of nature.
Unemotional parenting
Unable to continue his university research, Watson popularized his ideas on behaviorism by turning his attention to the business of childcare. It was in this that his views proved to be most publicly influential, and eventually most controversial. Predictably, he advocated a strictly behaviorist approach to bringing up children, and throughout the 1920s and 30s his many books on childcare became immensely popular. In retrospect, it is easy to see that his approach, based on extreme emotional detachment, was at best misguided and potentially damaging, but his methods were adopted by millions of parents, including Watson and Rosalie Rayner themselves.
The child, Watson believed, is shaped by its environment, and that environment is controlled by the parents. In essence, he saw child-raising as an objective exercise in behavior modification, especially of the emotions of fear, rage, and love. Perhaps understandably, given his own unhappy childhood, he dismissed affection as sentimental, leading to over-dependence of the child on the parent. But he also advised against the opposite emotional extreme and was an opponent of physical punishment.
Watson’s questionable application of stimulus—response conditioning to childcare eventually drew criticism. Later generations viewed the approach as manipulative and uncaring, with an emphasis on efficiency and results rather than on the wellbeing of the child. The long-term damage to children brought up according to Watson’s behaviorist model became apparent only gradually, but was significant. The popularity of his books as childcare “bibles” meant that a whole generation was affected by what can now be seen as a dysfunctional upbringing. Even Watson’s own family suffered: Rosalie eventually saw the flaws in her husband’s child-rearing theories and wrote a critical article for Parents’ Magazine entitled “I Am the Mother of a Behaviorist’s Sons,” and Watson’s granddaughter, the actor Mariette Hartley, gave an account of her disturbed family background in her autobiographical book Breaking the Silence.
Alternative approaches to childcare soon appeared, even among committed behaviorists. While accepting the basic principle of conditioning established by Watson (despite the dubious ethics of the Little Albert experiment), and using that as a starting point for his own “radical behaviorism,” the psychologist B.F. Skinner was to apply behaviorism to the business of childcare in a much more benign (if eccentric) manner.
"Watsonism has become gospel and catechism in the nurseries and drawing rooms of America."
Mortimer Adler
Watson applied his understanding of human behavior to advertising in the 1920s, demonstrating that people can be influenced into buying products through their image, not content.
JOHN B. WATSON
Born into a poor family in South Carolina, John Broadus Watson’s childhood was unhappy; his father was an alcoholic womanizer who left when Watson was 13, and his mother was devoutly religious. Watson became a rebellious and violent teenager, but was a brilliant scholar, attending nearby Furman University at the age of 16. After gaining a PhD from the University of Chicago, he became associate professor at Johns Hopkins University, where his 1913 lecture became known as the “behaviorist manifesto.” He worked briefly for the military during World War I, then returned to Johns Hopkins. Forced to resign after an affair with his research assistant, Rosalie Rayner, he turned to a career in advertising while still publishing books on psychology. After Rayner’s death in 1935 aged 37, he became a recluse.
Key works
1913 Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It
1920 Conditioned Emotional Reactions (with Rosalie Rayner)
1924 Behaviorism
See also: Ivan Pavlov • Edward Thorndike • Edward Tolman • B.F. Skinner • Joseph Wolpe • Kenneth Clark • Albert Bandura
IN CONTEXT
APPROACH
Cognitive (“purposive”) behaviorism
BEFORE
1890s Ivan Pavlov’s experiments with dogs establish the theory of classical conditioning.
1920 John B. Watson conducts behaviorist experiments on humans, notably “Little Albert.”
AFTER
1938 B.F. Skinner’s research into operant conditioning uses pigeons in place of rats, and becomes more sophisticated.
1950s Cognitive psychology replaces behaviorism as the dominant movement in psychology.
1980s Joseph Wolpe’s behavioral therapy and Aaron Beck’s cognitive therapy merge into cognitive behavioral therapy.
Although considered one of the leading figures of US behaviorist psychology, Edward Tolman took a very different approach from that of Thorndike and Watson. He agreed with the basic methodology of behaviorism—that psychology could only be studied by objective, scientific experiments—but was also interested in ideas about mental processes, including perception, cognition, and motivation, which he had encountered while studying Gestalt psychology in Germany. By bridging these two previously separate approaches, he developed a new theory about the role of conditioning, and created what he called “purposive behaviorism,” now called cognitive behaviorism. Tolman questioned the basic premise of conditioned learning (that behavior was learned simply by an automatic response to a stimulus). He believed that animals could learn about the world around them without the reinforcement of a reward, and later use that knowledge in decision-making.
He designed a series of experiments using rats in mazes to examine the role of reinforcement in learning. Comparing a group of rats that were rewarded with food daily for successfully negotiating the maze, with another group who were only rewarded after six days, and a third group rewarded after two days, Tolman’s ideas were confirmed. The second and third groups made fewer errors when running the maze the day after they had been r
ewarded with food, demonstrating that they already “knew” their way around the maze, having learned it prior to receiving rewards. Once rewards were on offer, they were able to use the “cognitive map” they had built in order to negotiate the maze faster.
"There is more than one kind of learning."
Edward Tolman
Latent learning
Tolman referred to the rats’ initial learning period, where there was no obvious reward, as “latent learning.” He believed that as all animals, including humans, go about their daily lives, they build up a cognitive map of the world around them—the “God-given maze”—which they can apply to locate specific goals. He gave the example of how we learn the locations of various landmarks on our daily journeys, but only realize what we have learned when we need to find somewhere along the route. Further experiments showed that the rats learned a sense of location rather than merely the turns required to reach a particular place.
In Purposive Behavior in Animals and Men, Tolman outlined his theory of latent learning and cognitive maps, bringing together the methodology of behaviorism with Gestalt psychology, and introducing the element of cognition.
A cognitive map of our surroundings develops in the course of our daily lives. We may not be aware of this until we need to find somewhere that we have passed without noticing.
EDWARD TOLMAN
Edward Chace Tolman was born into a well-to-do family in West Newton, Massachusetts. He studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, graduating in electrochemistry in 1911, but after reading works by William James opted for a postgraduate degree at Harvard in philosophy and psychology. While studying, he traveled to Germany and was introduced to Gestalt psychology. After gaining his doctorate, he taught at Northwestern University, but his pacifist views lost him his job, and he moved to the University of California at Berkeley. It was here that he experimented with rats in mazes. During the McCarthy period, he was threatened with dismissal for not signing a loyalty oath that he felt restricted academic freedom. The case was overturned in 1955. He died in Berkeley, aged 73, in 1959.
Key works
1932 Purposive Behavior in Animals and Men
1942 Drives Toward War
1948 Cognitive Maps in Rats and Men
See also: Ivan Pavlov • Edward Thorndike • John B. Watson • B.F. Skinner • Joseph Wolpe • Wolfgang Köhler • Daniel Kahneman
IN CONTEXT
APPROACH
Learning theory
BEFORE
1890s Ivan Pavlov shows “classical conditioning” in dogs.
1890s Edward Thorndike designs the “puzzle box” for his experiments on cats.
1920s Edward Tolman queries the role of reinforcement in conditioning.
AFTER
1938 B.F. Skinner’s The Behavior of Organisms presents the idea of operant conditioning, emphasizing the role of consequences in behavior.
1940s Jean Piaget develops a theory of learning that claims children are naturally driven to explore and acquire knowledge.
1977 Albert Bandura’s Social Learning Theory states that behavior is learned from observing and copying the behavior of others.
By the 1920s, when American philosopher Edwin Guthrie turned his attention to psychology, the stimulus—response model of learning formed the basis of almost all behaviorist theories. Derived from Ivan Pavlov’s idea of “classical conditioning,” it claimed that repeatedly exposing subjects to particular stimuli combinations (such as being given food and ringing a bell) could eventually provoke conditioned responses (such as salivating when a bell is rung).
Although Guthrie was a strict behaviorist, he did not agree that conditioning needed reinforcement to be successful. He believed that a full association between a specific stimulus and response is made in their very first pairing. Guthrie’s theory of one-trial learning was based on a study in which he observed cats trapped in “puzzle boxes.” The cats, once they had discovered the mechanism for escape, made the association between escape and their action, which they would then repeat on subsequent occasions. In the same way, Guthrie said, once a rat has discovered a source of food, it knows where to come when it is hungry.
Guthrie expanded his idea into a theory of “contiguity,” stating that “a combination of stimuli, which has accompanied a movement, will on its reoccurrence tend to be followed by that movement.” A movement, not behavior, is learned from stimulus—response association. Related movements combine to form an act; repetition does not reinforce the association but leads to the formation of acts, which combine to form behavior.
"We expect one quarrel to change attitudes."
Edwin Guthrie
See also: Ivan Pavlov • Edward Thorndike • Edward Tolman • B.F. Skinner • Jean Piaget • Albert Bandura
IN CONTEXT
APPROACH
Behavioral epigenetics
BEFORE
1874 Francis Galton addresses the nature–nurture controversy in English Men of Science: Their Nature and Nurture.
1924 John B. Watson makes his famous “dozen infants” boast that anyone, regardless of their basic nature, can be trained to be anything.
AFTER
1938 B.F. Skinner in The Behavior of Organisms explains his radical behaviorist ideas, claiming that circumstances, not instinct, govern behavior.
1942 Edward Tolman publishes Drives Toward War, which examines whether aggression is conditioned or instinctive.
1966 Konrad Lorenz publishes On Aggression, explaining aggressive behavior as an innate response.
In the 1920s, behaviorist John B. Watson was claiming that even innate behavior could be altered by conditioning. But it was the Chinese psychologist Zing-Yang Kuo who took the behaviorist idea to its extreme, denying the existence of instinct as an explanation for behavior.
Kuo felt that instinct was just a convenient way for psychologists to explain behavior that did not fit current theory: “Our behavior researches in the past have been in the wrong direction, because, instead of finding how we could build nature into the animal, we have tried to find nature in the animal.” Kuo’s most well-known experiments involved rearing kittens—some raised from birth in cages with rats, others introduced to rats at later stages. He found that “if a kitten was raised in the same cage with a rat since it was very young, it, when grown-up, became tolerant of rats: not only would it never attack a rat, but it adopted the rat as its ‘mate’, played with it, and even became attached to it.” Kuo’s work was cut short by political events in China, which forced him to flee first to the US, then Hong Kong. His ideas only became known in the West as behaviorism was beginning to wane and cognitive psychology was in the ascendant. However, his theory of ongoing development without innate mechanisms was influential as a counter to the instinct-based psychology of Konrad Lorenz.
Harmonious relationships, Kuo proved, can exist between animals that are traditionally regarded as enemies. He concluded that there is no “innate mechanism” driving them to fight.
See also: Francis Galton • John B. Watson • Edward Tolman • Konrad Lorenz • B.F. Skinner
IN CONTEXT
APPROACH
Neuropsychology
BEFORE
1861 French anatomist Paul Broca locates the area of the brain responsible for speech.
1880s Spanish pathologist and neuroscientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal develops the theory that the body’s nervous system is made up of cells, which German anatomist Heinrich Waldeyer-Hartz later calls “neurons.”
AFTER
1949 Donald Hebb describes the formation of cell assemblies and phase
sequences in the process of associative learning.
From 1980 Modern brain-imaging techniques such as CT, fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) and PET (positron emission tomography) scanning allow neuroscientists to map specific brain functions.
American physiologist-turned-psychologist Karl Lashley was interested in what happens physically in the brain during the learning process. Pavlov and other behaviorists had suggested that conditioning causes chemical or electrical changes in the brain, and Lashley wanted to pinpoint exactly what these were.
In particular, Lashley wanted to locate the memory trace, or “engram,” the specific place in the brain responsible for memory. Like many behaviorists, he used rats in mazes as the basis of a learning experiment. First, the rats learned to find their way through the maze to reach a food reward. Then, Lashley performed surgery on them to remove specific but different parts of the cerebral cortex from each one. After this, the rats were replaced in the maze to test their memory and learning abilities.
"There is no great excess of cells which can be reserved as the seat of special memories."
Karl Lashley
No place for memory