Assignment task:
YouTube Video: Behaviorism: The Beginnings - Ch10 - History of Modern Psychology - Schultz & Schultz
1) In his 1913 article, what criticisms did Watson make about structuralism and functionalism? On what basis did he argue that applied psychology could be called scientific? Do you agree with him? Why or why not?
Remember that the word count for your response should be 200.
THIS IS A LONG CHAPTER: There is a lot of personal info on Watson, because his personality is, more than most theorist (except for Freud), very relevant to his theories.
Now to the American who took Pavlov's ideas and ran with them.
John Broadus Watson was born in 1878 in rural S.C. His intensely religious mom named him after well-known Baptist minister, which is the career she had planned for him. She shaped him in this direction for many years and at one point, he even applied to Princeton Theological Seminary.
His dad, however, was another story. The son of 'local gentry' but the family had lost their money. Nowadays, Watson's father would be considered an abusive alcoholic with explosive anger issues.
Watson's dad spent most of his time drinking and brawling and as the years went on, he spent less and less time with his family, finally abandoning them completely. It's worth noting that, decades later, when Watson became famous his father came to New York to see him. Watson refused to meet with him, instead sending him a suit of clothes as a sort of insult.
Both of the families had ostracized Watson's parents. The father's family because they thought he'd married beneath him and the mom's because of Watson's drinking and brawling.
Watson grew up in rural poverty but mom's religious faith pretty much sustained the family. Unfortunately, Watson's dad had left his mark on his son. He fought his way all through school (nickname was 'Swats') and took out his anger on those who couldn't fight back - he had a couple of teenage arrests for fights and brawling in the Greenville, S.C. African-American community
This angry-stubborn streak continued to haunt him. In 1894, he entered Furman University. It took him 5 years to graduate because apparently in his senior year, one of his professors told them the he wouldn't grade the final exam if they reversed the pages. Watson promptly reversed his pages and failed the course, meaning he had to repeat his senior year. Note though that while Watson told this story about his own life, the historical data doesn't support this anecdote. But true or not, is gives us insight into how Watson saw himself - and it is very typical of Watson.
This type of thing would mark his entire life - he constantly strove for fame and success, and then constantly sabotaged it by sheer stubbornness or impulsive acts.
As I said, he had applied to the seminary, but his mother died, and his plan to go to the seminary died with her. He finagled a scholarship to University of Chicago and began to study 'animal model' experimental psychology. He was a star student but was working several jobs and juggling a busy love life.
While finishing up his degree, he secretly married one of his students, 19-year-old Mary Ickes - a society girl from a prominent family. In the year before they went public with the marriage, Watson had an affair with someone else. Mary forgave him, but her brother Harold Ickes, a prominent attorney, did not. He developed an intense hatred for Watson.
Watson graduated and taught at Chicago for a few years, where he published an article calling for a new type of psychology, one that emphasized behavior over mental processes and stressed the importance of standard, uniform research procedures. This was pretty much ignored, but he made these points more forcefully in 1919, in his book, 'Psychology From the Standpoint of a Behaviorist', which had a great impact on the field.
Based on the success of that book, Watson negotiated a deal with Johns Hopkins that paid him an amazing amount of money for that time. So, he and Mary went to Baltimore, where Watson taught and began setting up his lab. He also returned to his wicked, wicked ways of cheating on his wife, but more about that later.
It was at Johns Hopkins that Watson tried to use science to question issues of morality, making administrators nervous. He proposed studies on the impact of "sexual hygiene" education movies, and the effects of alcohol-- both positive and negative. Under Prohibition, Watson needed a permit for 10 gallons of bonded rye whiskey, which he got. In July 1920, Hopkins administrators ordered him to halt such experiments, calling them "dangerous".
It was also at Hopkins that he did the work that produced one of the most famous research projects in psychology history - the Little Albert experiment.
Go to text for details of this famous experiment and his concurrent romance with his young lab assistant, Rosalie Raynor.
SO what did Watson get out the famous experiment (besides sex with Rosalie)?
Generalization: Little Albert's fear of white rats 'generalized' to similar stimuli, including a white Santa beard left over from the Christmas party, and even Watson's prematurely white hair.
Discrimination: Little Albert did not show the same fear to black furry puppies. He was able to 'discriminate' between similar stimuli and produce different behaviors to them.
Extinction: This was actually a mistake. It was an error in translation from Pavlov's original German. It should have been 'fading'. The idea is that repeated presentations of the Conditioned Stimulus will eventually cause the Conditioned Response to decrease or fade.
This one study pretty much did two things. It started a science of behaviorism and it made Watson famous to the general public. He became the spokesman, ambassador, living embodiment of the behaviorist school. He even wrote one of the best selling 'how to raise kids books' of all time. See the end of the notes for what he said about raising kids, but his advice was terrible-and as his Little Albert study showed, he had almost no concern for kid's emotions or well being.
For example, among other studies, he dropped (and caught) infants to generate fear and suggested that stimulation of the genital area would create feelings of love.
The ethics of Watson's techniques seemed to draw scant open criticism at the time--from either the university administration or psychologists in the field.
Thank goodness this never actually happened, but based on Watson's fame from the little Albert Study, the National Research Council actually approved a children's hospital he had proposed, that would include rooms for his infant psychology experiments. He planned to spend weekends working at the "Washington infant laboratory".
"I shall never be satisfied until I have a laboratory in which I can bring up children from birth to three or four years of age under constant observation," he wrote in a June 1920 letter to Johns Hopkins University President Frank J. Goodnow.
So as you can see, having Watson as a living embodiment of behaviorism was both a good thing and a bad thing. BUT, let me point out that with all his faults, Watson was a pretty smart guy and he did develop a well-integrated theory. Here are the basics of his theory of behavioral psychology: evolutionary continuity: behavior is behavior, and the only thing that separates man's behavior from the animals is its complexity - the same rules apply. Therefore, if we study animals, we can understand human behavior reductionism: we can break down behavior all the way down to neurons and neurotransmitter activity.
Determinism: behavior is never accidental, random, or free. There are always prior causes. As a side element to this, Watson stated that thinking goes along with behavior, but doesn't cause it.
Empiricism: we should study only observable and measurable events, since they are the only things that can be scientifically verified. Everything else (thoughts, dreams, etc.) can never be observed.
Now, even though Watson was the founder of a new school, it should be stated that he actually did see some value in the Freudian school, which was pretty well taking over the U.S. at that time. However, this regard didn't stop him from taunting them every chance he got.
"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 beggarman and thief, regardless of his talent, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors. I am going beyond by facts and I admit it, but so have the advocates of the contrary and they have been doing it for many thousands of years."
Watson was advocating the idea of Tabula Rosa, or blank slate. You are born a blank slate and your environment makes you what you are today.
So, back to Watson's personal life. Watson's Department Chair at Johns Hopkins had gotten himself fired for visiting a 'house of ill-repute', so the University made Watson the Dept Chair. They probably wouldn't have if they'd known then that he, being Watson, was of course sleeping with his grad student, Rosalie Raynor.
He picked the wrong student to sleep with. Her grandfather was a prominent Maryland businessman and huge donor to Johns Hopkins, and her uncle was a U.S. Senator.
Remember the brother-in-law who hated Watson? He hired detectives who not only found out about the affair, but 'acquired' (stole) the love letters Watson had written Rosalie. (Mary Ickes actually went into Rosalie's bedroom during a social function and stole them).
When his wife filed for divorce, Watson being Watson, he decided to fight it. This led to an intense and very public court battle between the daughter of a high society family and the famous psychologist. The peak of this battle was reached when the brother-in-law released Watson's love letters to the press.
Mary Ickes Watson got her divorce and Johns Hopkins began proceedings to fire Watson on a morals clause (probably worth noting that Watson's boss in the psyc department at the school had recently been fired when he was caught in a bordello raid). Trying to avoid that, Watson quickly married Rosalie Raynor. However, Hopkins fired him anyway.
Watson assumed that he would be snapped up by some other prestigious school, but soon found that the scandal had ruined his academic career.
With no academic doors open to him, he took his considerable skills to Madison Avenue and the J. Walter Thompson Ad Agency. Using his charm, abilities, and ideas about behaviorism, he made a fortune - becoming the first millionaire psychologist.
Despite the fact that he no longer had a 'psychology' job, Watson was still a psychology star. He became a self- promoter in the emerging market of pop psychology and self-help advice. He took his message to the masses, penning articles in popular magazines. He taught some classes at the New School for Social Research in New York (where he again was forced out after apparent sexual misconduct). He did lecture tours, and still pushed the cause of behaviorism. With his looks and charm - not to mention notoriety, he was a major draw until the day he retired from public life.
In 1935, Rosalie died (worth noting that their kids found out from the cook and not their dad) and a disconsolate Watson turned more and more to alcohol. Watson retired to a farm in western Connecticut There is some irony, given his childhood, and isolated himself from everyone and every one he'd ever known--except scotch.
He had little contact with his kids, except for one son who represented him in public. There are two things worth noting about this son: #1: he became a Freudian psychiatrist - estranging himself from Watson; #2: this son committed suicide about 4 years after Watson's death.
Watson spent his time at the farmhouse working on his memoirs, putting his papers together, drinking, and doing a fair amount of the hard physical farm labor of his youth. One afternoon though, his secretary came out to the farm and Watson was standing with a bottle of scotch in front of a big fire in his fireplace. In the fireplace were his memoirs and all his collected notes and papers. He told the shocked secretary "When you are dead - you are all dead."
Watson died in 1958 just as he lived - alone. What I'm saying was that despite all of his affairs, he was an alienated individual. He moved through his life touching many others (literally) but who touched him? With the possible exception of Rosalie, whom did he ever make human contact with? How did his personality - his personal demons - influence his theories?
Well, Watson's behavioral psychology was based on Pavlovian conditioning, now called classical conditioning, but briefly called Watsonian conditioning.
As you might guess, it spurred a lot of research in the U.S. Some of this research was by Freudians trying to discredit it, but most was by scientists trying to find practical applications.
For example, Mary Cover Jones' used 'deconditioning' to treat a 3 year old named Peter who was phobic about rabbits. She simply distracted Peter with food while bringing the rabbit into the room. Gradually across many sessions, as Peter ate they brought the rabbit closer and closer until he could touch the rabbit without fear.
One of the biggest things Watson did was make Behaviorism popular among the layman. He called for a society based on scientifically shaped and controlled behavior, free of myths, customs, and convention.
In his popular book 'The Religion Called Behaviorism' (which would heavily influence Skinner later) he
- Emphasized childhood environment and minimized effect of heredity
- implied emotional disturbances in adulthood due to conditioned responses during earlier years
- implied that proper childhood conditioning precludes adult disorders
- set out a list of experimental ethics as part of a plan to improve society
All of Watson's articles and books led to an 'outbreak of psychology' by others:
- psychological advice columns
- newspaper columns like "Keeping Mentally Fit," or
"Exploring Your Mind"
- radio programs
- pop psychology books
But there were critics as well:
Karl Lashley, a student of Watson at Johns Hopkins challenged Watson's notion of a point-to-point connection in reflexes, saying the brain was more active in learning than Watson accepted
McDougall, an English psychologist affiliated with Harvard and Duke, noted for his instinct theories of behavior (as well as his ideas about Nordic superiority and psychic research), disagreed with Watson about free will in particular and had a famous debate with Watson in 1924. At the time, it was widely considered that McDougall won, but Watson's ideas eventually won out.
I. Contributions of Watson's Behaviorism
A. Made psychology more objective in methods and terminology
B. Stimulated a great deal of research
C. Surmounted earlier positions and schools
D. Objective methods and language became part of the mainstream
As I said earlier, one of the areas that Watson was best known for during the 1920s' was his views on child care. He published two books Behaviorism (1924) and The Psychological Care of Infant and Child (1928) which were enormously popular - he was really the Dr. Spock (the author, not the Star Trek guy) of his day.
Watson's advocacy of behaviorism in child rearing was harsh and influenced more than one generation of parents afraid of coddling their children, a practice he called "mawkish and sentimental." He declared that infants should be brought up by a rotation of "parents" and nurses, saying that family life destroyed the child's individuality and independence. Here is an excerpt from the book:
"Children should be awakened at 6:30 A.M. for orange juice and a pee. Play 'till 7:30. Breakfast should be at 7:30 sharp; at 8:00 they should be placed on the toilet for twenty minutes or less 'til bowel movement is complete. Then follow up with a verbal report. The child would then play indoors 'till 10P00 A.M., after 10:00 outside, a short nap after lunch, then "social play" with others. In the evening a bath, quiet play until bedtime at 8:00 sharp."
"Treat them as though they were young adults. Dress them, bathe them with care and circumspections. Let your behavior always be objective and kindly firm. Never hug and kiss them, never let them sit in your lap. If you must, kiss them once on the forehead when they say goodnight. Shake hands with them in the morning. Give them a pat on the head if they have made an extraordinarily good job of a difficult task."
He argued that institutions like the Boy Scouts and the YMCA could lead to homosexuality. Girls were even in more danger because they held hands, kissed, and slept in the same bed at pajama parties. "Our whole social fabric is woven so as to make all women slightly homosexual."
In John Watson's ideal world, children were to be taken from mothers during their third or fourth week; if not, attachments were bound to develop. Sort of like Freud, he claimed that the reason mothers indulged in baby-loving was sexual. Otherwise, why would they kiss their children on the lips?
He railed against mothers whose excessive affection made the child forever dependent and emotionally unstable. Children should never be kissed, hugged, or allowed to sit on their laps. If there has to be kissing, let it b on the forehead. Parents would soon find they could be 'perfectly objective and yet kindly.
Worth noting that the only time his kids could remember him hugging them was at their mother's gravesite.
Watsonian behaviorism, however, created a troubled legacy in his own family. Physical affection was taboo. He used his children as study subjects. Later, he publicly regretted much of his child-rearing advice. And its worth noting that his granddaughter, actress Mariette Hartley, wrote a 1991 memoir, 'Breaking the Silence', about surviving her dysfunctional upbringing.
In the end, even her grandmother had her doubts. In 1930, Rosalie Rayner Watson, who raised two sons in the behavioristic pattern, wrote an article "I Am the Mother of a Behaviorist's Sons," for Parents' Magazine. She died five years later from pneumonia.
"In some respects I bow to the great wisdom in the science of behaviorism, and in others I am rebellious," Watson's wife wrote. "I secretly wish that on the score of [the children's] affections, they will be a little weak when they grow up, that they will have a tear in their eyes for the poetry and drama of life and a throb for romance . . . . I like being merry and gay and having the giggles. The behaviorists think giggling is a sign of maladjustment."
The revolution sparked by Watson brought a new school to psychology. As founder, John B. Watson supported psychology as a science of behavior, purely objective, experimental natural science, unlike the introspective study on consciousness proposed by Wundt. Watson, identified as lazy and defiant in his youth, was born into a family where his mother was intensely religious and his father had a desire for strong drink and women. During his school years, Watson never made passing grades.
At the age of 16, he enrolled at Furman University. Improving academically, he was determined to become a minister to fulfill his mother's wishes. At Furman, Watson studied philosophy, mathematics, Latin and Greek, receiving his master's degree in 1899. After the death of his mother (in his mind releasing him from the commitment made to her), Watson traveled to the University of Chicago to begin work on a PhD. At Chicago, Watson studied under distinguished professors such as Dewey and Loeb.
However, the professor who had the most influence on him was James Rowland Angell, who inspired him to begin a rigorous career in psychology. In 1903, Watson received his PhD at the age of 25. In 1908, Watson was offered a professorship at Johns Hopkins, where for 12 years his work in psychology was extremely productive. In his 1913 article, "Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It," behaviorism was initiated as a formal movement.
Watson wanted psychology to be of practical value. Psychology From the Standpoint of a Behaviorist, published in 1919, presented a more complete state of behavioral psychology. Watson argued that methods and principles applicable to the study of animals were appropriate for humans as well. After being forced to resign from his academic career at Johns Hopkins due to scandal, Watson began a second professional career as an applied psychologist in the field of advertising. Watson believed that behavior of the human consumer was like that of machines and, therefore could be predicted and controlled.
He proposed the use of laboratory conditions to study buyer behavior. Emphasizing that advertising should focus on style and consumer satisfaction, he was credited with pioneering the use of celebrity endorsement for products and services to manipulate motives and emotions. His contributions were effective and afforded him further prominence. In 1928, Watson published Psychological Care of the Infant and Child, which outlined a regimented, proactive system of child rearing. The book, which transformed American child- rearing practices, stressed the role of environmental influences on children' s behavior and achievements. Original source material from Watson's 1913 article is a clear and concise account of his theses.
In particular, he addresses the definition and goal of behaviorism, criticizes functionalism and structuralism, notes the roles of hereditary factors in adaptation, argues that applied psychology is scientific, and emphasizes the importance of standard and uniform procedures in research. At first, Watson's call to arms was not widely accepted nor reflected in the content of professional journals. His 1919 book, Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist, had a great impact and the movement took hold. Still, the changes came slowly and Watsonian behaviorism was not the only form put forward.
Watson insisted that psychology restrict itself to the objective study of behavior, applying only the most stringently objective methods in the laboratory. These methods of research were to include observation with and without the use of instruments, testing, verbal report, and the conditioned reflex method because each provided an objective method of analyzing behavior, reducing it to its basic elements. The verbal report method came under attack because it was perceived as a disguised form of introspection.
For psychology, the objective method created a change in the role of human subjects. Observers became subjects, and experimenters became observers. For Watson, the primary subject matter of behavioral psychology was the elements of behavior, specifically muscular movements and glandular secretions within the body. Although his immediate goal was to reduce behavior to simple stimulus-response components, the eventual goal was understand the person's behavior as a whole. James focused on three key topics: instincts, emotions, and thought processes.
At first accepting but then rejecting the concept of nstincts, Watson contended that ostensibly instinctive behaviors are actually socially conditioned responses. Defining emotions as physiological responses to specific stimuli, Watson demonstrated conditioned emotional response in the classical experiment with 1 I -month-old Albert and a white rat. Mary Cover Jones' subsequent deconditioning of 3-year-old Peter was the precursor of behavior therapy. Thought processes, according to Watson, were implicit motor behaviors that could be treated as a form of sensorimotor behavior. Behaviorism's popular appeal stemmed from Watson's "call for a society based on scientifically shaped and controlled behavior, free of myths, customs, and conventional behaviors."
Appealing to those fettered by traditional mores, behaviorism became almost a religion to some. B. F. Skinner was among the new advocates; he latter honed and expanded Watson's work. Of particular appeal to the public was Watson's emphasis on environmental causes of behavior and downplaying of hereditary effects. The attractiveness of Watson's message coupled with his personal charm led to an "outbreak" of psychology. Watson's studies of the effects of diminished sensory capacity on learning by using surgical procedures on rats (a practice he later abandoned) drew criticism from the animal rights proponents.
In 1925, the American Psychological Association created the Committee on Precautions in Animal Experimentation whose members included Robert Yerkes and E. C. Tolman. Adopting the American Medical Association's Guidelines on humane treatment of research animals, editors of psychology journals were urged to reject articles that violated their regulations. The current APA Committee on Animal Research and Ethics (CARE) carries on these standards. One early behaviorist, Lashley, developed his own behavioral psychology.
As a physiological psychologist, Lashley continued the mechanistic tradition. Formulating two principles, the law of mass action and the principle of equipotentiality, Lashley' s findings suggested that the brain played a more active role in learning than Watson thought. In addition to adding a physiological dimension to behaviorism, Lashley's work further confirmed the value of the objectivity in psychological research.
A strong critic of behaviorism, William McDougall was a supporter of free will, Nordic superiority, and psychic research. McDougall argued the importance of introspection and promoted an instinct theory that highlighted innate influences on thinking and behavior. When Watson and McDougall debated their antithetical viewpoints, McDougal was judged the winner although Watson's position ultimately prevailed.