Biography of john watson behaviorism pdf

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Web icon An illustration of a computer application window Wayback Machine Texts icon An illustration of an open book. Texts Video icon An illustration of two cells of a film strip. Video Audio icon An illustration of an audio speaker. Audio Software icon An illustration of a 3. Watson entered Furman University at 16 and then moved on to the University of Chicago.

His biographies often mention that Watson was the youngest person at the time to get a PhD at the University of Chicago—but, of course, the university had only been in operation for about ten years at that point. Watson worked at the University of Chicago for a while and was then hired by Johns Hopkins University. During his years at Johns Hopkins he served as editor of psychology journals and as president of the American Psychological Association.

Around Watson began having an affair with one of his students, Rosalie Rayner, who I mentioned before. The affair became very public there were stories about it in newspapers all over the country and led to Watson being fired from the university. It turns out, however, that advertising agencies were interested in having a famous psychologist on their team.

Watson had already been interested in advertising and media as influences on behavior when he was at Johns Hopkins, and he spent the next 25 years or so in the advertising world. Watson actually had quite a big effect on American life by bringing the techniques of experimental psychology into big business. Although Watson has become a kind of bogeyman for some recent psychologists, as far as I can tell, he had very little influence on the actual discipline of psychology.

During his own lifetime, Watson was just one of many people trying to figure out how to turn psychology into a discipline that was distinct from philosophy, on the one hand, and physiology, on the other. This may be due to the fact that Watson was forced out of academia just as he was really developing his theories and methods. Skinner and philosophers like Bertrand Russell see Russell On the negative side, most people today will find his research and writings on children and child-rearing e.

Also, depending on your position on consumerism, you may or may not like his work in advertising. But in both these areas—child-rearing and consumerism—we did not know then, in the s, what we know now. For now, I want to focus on his writings about mind. First, he thinks an investigation of consciousness cannot be made methodologically sound, that is, it cannot be made scientific in the way we think of science in physics or chemistry.

Second, he thinks it leads to insoluble philosophical problems, such as the conflict between interactionism and parallelism. A third, supporting, objection is that the dualistic concept of consciousness is religious in nature, basically a replacement for the word soul which had already been cast out of modern psychology. For Watson, however, orienting psychology around consciousness makes it unscientific.

This is because we are led into arguing over the accuracy of our introspections rather than over a particular objective experimental setup b: We are worried about our abilities to introspect so many of this or that kind of mental state rather than on whether our instruments are sensitive enough or whether our subjects are well chosen, etc. Its facts must be capable of verification by other capable investigators everywhere.

Antidualism As with the other behaviorists, Watson was reacting against dualism, the idea that there is something non-physical about the organism. He often mentions the dispute between interactionists and parallelists. Interactionism is the commonsense belief that mind and body causally influence each other; parallelism is the belief that they do not.

This is the sort of speculative argument that Watson wants to eject from psychology. Again, psychology needs to use the same material—physical material—as other sciences. Religion Let me begin pre-Watson. When cognitive science was getting established in the s and s, and reclaiming the concept of consciousness, they often looked to William James, the great psychologist and pragmatist philosopher from around the turn of the twentieth century, as an antidote to behaviorism.

The irony is that by James had also rejected consciousness in a way that foreshadows Watson. But the usefulness of this seems very slight. Consciousness, James says is the name of a nonentity, and has no right to a place among first principles. It seems to me that the hour is ripe for it to be openly and universally discarded. But untangling this issue is a topic for another day.

Conceiving of consciousness along the same lines as the soul may have been historically understandable. Watson writes that: Psychology and philosophy … in dealing as they thought with non-material objects, found it difficult to escape the language of the church, and hence the concepts of mind and soul come down to the latter part of the nineteenth century.

It was the boast of Wundt's students, in , when the first psychological laboratory was established, that psychology had at last become a science without a soul. For fifty years we have kept this pseudo-science, exactly as Wundt laid it down. Music or the spoken word seem immaterial, too, until you understand how sound waves work. So Watson rejects consciousness because, as that term was used at the time, it implied an untenable dualism with religious roots that could not be made scientific.

How, then, did he understand things like emotions and thought? All other emotions develop out of these. Fear responses include crying and jerking of the body as well as visceral changes to breathing, digestion, excretion, etc. Rage is a response to the restraint of bodily movement. There appeared to be glandular changes as well, though the ability to test such things was very limited at the time.

The responses categorized by love result from a pleasurable manipulation of the body: stroking of the skin and sex organs, gentle rocking, etc. There also seemed to be visceral changes in blood circulation and respiration, and changes to the sex organs a: These are the basic emotional responses that get conditioned by experience. That is, over time our responses get tied to particular kinds of objects, so that the sight of particular objects or people, for example, might call out fear or rage or love responses, regardless of our actual bodily circumstances.

In the famous Little Albert experiment Watson and Rayner , Watson and Rayner tried to transfer a fear response to the sight of a white rat by striking a metal bar near an infant whenever the white rat was shown. Eventually the baby had a fear reaction at the sight of the rat—but also at some other white, furry objects, such as a white rabbit and a fur coat.

As Watson saw it, the white rat and rabbit, etc. Watson thought that as we gained more experience with the world our emotions became more finely differentiated among types of objects and situations. Metropolitan Museum Cleveland Museum of Art. Internet Arcade Console Living Room. Open Library American Libraries.

Biography of john watson behaviorism pdf

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