John B. Watson

John Broadus Watson (born January 9, 1878 near Greenville, South Carolina; died September 25, 1958 in New York City) was an American psychologist who established the psychological school of behaviorism. He is famous for boasting, facetiously, that he could take any 20 human infants, and by applying behavioural techniques, create whatever kind of person ("beggar, butcherman, thief") he desired. Naturally, he admitted that this claim was far beyond his means--noting, merely, that earlier psychologists had made such claims for decades.

With his behaviorism, Watson put the emphasis on external behaviour of people and their reactions on given situations, rather than the internal, mental state of those people. In his opinion, the analysis of behaviours and reactions was the only objective method to get insight in the human actions.

Watson strongly sided with nature in the nature-nurture discussion, and is perhaps most well-known for the following quote:

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. I am going beyond my facts and I admit it, but so have the advocates of the contrary and they have been doing it for many thousands of years.

The last sentence is usually left out, making Watson's position more radical than it probably was. Nevertheless, Watson put a strong emphasis on nature's contribution to human development. For this reason, Watson stated that parents must train their children to instil good habits.

Watson was asked to leave the faculty position he held at Johns Hopkins University because he was having an affair with a student, Rosalie Rayner, whom he married after divorcing his wife Mary Ickes (sister of Harold L. Ickes). He subsequently began working for J. Walter Thompson, an advertising agency.

One of the most controversial experiments in psychology was performed by Watson and Rayner. It has become immortalized in introductory psychology textbooks as the Little Albert experiment. The goal of the experiment was to show how principles of, at the time recently discovered, classical conditioning could be applied to condition fear of a white rat into "Little Albert", a 9 month old boy. As the story of Little Albert has made the rounds, inaccuracies and inconsistencies have crept in, some of them even due to Watson himself; see Harris for an analysis.