Watson, John B. (1876–1958)

John Broadus Watson was born a poor rural boy from Traveler's Rest, South Carolina, raised by his mother in urban Greenville, at a time when American Progressivism was making a university education and graduate specialization a means for individual, social, and cultural advancement. He received a master's degree in philosophy from Furman University (1899) and achieved the University of Chicago's first PhD in psychology (1903). He was then an instructor at Chicago (1903–1908) and a professor at Johns Hopkins University (1908–1920), but a scandal forced him to leave academe. Undeterred, he became the first “pop” psychologist and a successful advertising executive in New York City (1921–1945).

Watson began as an animal and comparative psychologist, where some of his research was the earliest and best work in ethology. For this, experimental psychology had to be the study and science of behavior, not the then-standard introspection of conscious contents (“Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It,” 1913). The former became Watson's classic behaviorism, which was taken seriously because of the high regard in which his research was held. Indeed, his stature was such that he became the editor and founder of prestigious journals (e.g., Psychological Review, Journal of Experimental Psychology) and president of the American Psychological Association.

As a systematist, Watson held that psychology's goal was to formulate the laws and principles of human behavior through systematic observation and experimentation (Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist, 1919, 1929). For this, he advanced prediction and control as a means for understanding behavior, promoting behaviorism, and advancing cultural change. He adopted the conditioned reflex as a basic principle of behavior. He analyzed thinking, feeling, and imagining as implicit responses, not as independent mental processes. And, he viewed anatomy and physiology, not instincts, as the biological basis of human behavior (Behaviorism, 1924, 1930).

In extending his science to human development, Watson focused on infancy and early childhood. He made groundbreaking observations of normative emotional development. He pioneered in studying conditioned emotional reactions and their elimination. Watson published articles in the popular press on childrearing (e.g., Cosmopolitan), culminating in Psychological Care of Infant and Child(1928). Here, he was an early opponent of corporal punishment and[Page 1318] an advocate for sex education, but advised unwisely about emotional attachment. His advice, though, was not based on classic behaviorism, but was more personal. Empirically validated child-rearing advice would await the emergence of human development as a science.