john broadus watson: 1878-1958

John Broadus Watson: 1878-1958Author(s): Robert S. WoodworthSource: The American Journal of Psychology, Vol. 72, No. 2 (Jun., 1959), pp. 301-310Published by: University of Illinois PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1419386 .

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31o!n Broabu% Eat%on: 1878-1958 The founder of Behaviorism, who died in Woodbury, Connecticut, on

September 25, 1958, was born on January 9, 1878, the second of five children of a well-to-do farmer living near Greenville, South Carolina. He learned in boyhood to take part in farm work, including carpentry which remained for him a life-long hobby. From the age of six years, he at- tended country schools, and from the age of twelve years, the Greenville grammar and high schools. According to his own account (in his very interesting autobiography),' he was far from being a studious boy; yet we find him entering college at sixteen years of age, paying his own way in part by assisting in the chemical laboratory; and, when he had finished his studies at Furman College with an A.M. degree in 1900, we find him eagerly seeking a university for graduate study. (His mother had wished him to study for the Baptist ministry. She died during his college course and he became quite negative in his attitude toward religion.) In college he had taken a full curriculum of Greek, Latin, and mathematics, though with little satisfaction. Philosophy (including psychology) had made a much stronger appeal. He chose philosophy, therefore, as his field and Chicago as his university. He was attracted to Chicago primarily by the fame of John Dewey, the philosopher. Once there, he soon made close contact with other members of the department, including James R. Angell, the psychologist, whose "erudition, quickness of thought, and facility with words" won him over to a major in experimental psychology, with minors in philosophy and neurology. In H. H. Donaldson's neurological laboratory he made the acquaintance of the white rat and discovered that he liked rats better than human 'observers' as experimental subjects. His doctoral dissertation combined neurological and behavioral studies of the development of the white rat. After three years of strenuous work, and a near-breakdown from overwork, he obtained the Ph.D. degree in 1903. Watson remained at Chicago five more years as an assistant and instructor in experimental psychology. He taught Titchenerian experiments in the main laboratory, meanwhile constructing an animal laboratory in the base- ment where he carried on his own very active research. He greatly enjoyed working with rats and monkeys, but he became increasingly impatient with the current human psychology-with its introspective reports, the "stuffy, artificial instructions given to subjects," and the "intangible, imponderable" concepts of William James. He married Mary Ickes in 1904. In 1908 he

1J. B. Watson, Autobiography, in A History of Psychology in Autobiography, Clark University Press, III, 1936, 271-281.

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NOTES AND DISCUSSIONS

was offered an assistant professorship at Chicago, but a full professorship at the Johns Hopkins University, where, from 1908 to 1920, he was Pro- fessor of Experimental and Comparative Psychology and Director of the Psychological Laboratory. At Johns Hopkins he threw himself with great energy and success into the work of developing and equipping an animal laboratory, later extending his behavioral researches to the study of young children. His university work was suspended for a year in 1917-18, while he served as Major in the Signal Corps, Aviation Section of the U.S. Army.

In 1920, misfortune overtook Watson in the shape of a sensationally publicized divorce suit. Being asked to resign from Johns Hopkins, he sought business opportunities in New York. He "knew nothing of life outside the walls of a university," but, with characteristic enterprise and willingness to work, he soon made contacts with business men and in 1921 became a staff member of the J. Walter Thompson Company, specialists in advertising and selling. He was advanced to a Vice President of that company in 1924 and remained there until 1936, when he became Vice Presi- dent of William Esty and Company, where he remained until his retirement in 1946. He found "that it can be just as thrilling to watch the growth of a sales curve of a new product as to watch the learning curve of animals or men." Meanwhile, between 1920 and 1930, he gave some very popular lecture courses on Behaviorism at the New School for Social Research and at the Cooper Union, both in New York. These lectures were published in his book, Behaviorism, in 1925, revised in 1930.

During his business career in New York, having married Rosalie Rayner in 1920, he bought 80 acres of farm land near Westport, Connecticut, and developed there a well-equipped farm and residence. In the course of time he built a fine barn with his own hands and the help of his three sons. After his wife's death about 1934 and his retirement from business in 1946, he gave up his farm and moved to a much smaller estate farther out in the country. He is survived by his four children-a married daughter living in Connecticut; one son, an oil geologist in Texas; another son, a psychiatrist in New York; and the third son, a personnel psychologist in California-and ten grandchildren.2

Watson was president of the American Psychological Association in 1915. He was also a member of the American Physiological Society, and, in 1917, he became a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sci- ences.

2 Thanks are due to William R. Watson, M.D., for interesting family data.

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He was editor of the Journal of Animal Behavior and of Behavior Mono- graphs in 1911-1917, of the Psychological Review in 1911-1915, and of the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 1916-1926.

Watson's fame as a theorist should not make us forget Watson the experimentalist-the man who equipped two animal laboratories, designed complicated apparatus when necessary, and carried out pioneering experiments on rats, birds, monkeys, and human babies. He attacked such prob- lems as these: behavioral development in relation to neural development in the white rat; sensory cues utilized by the rat in learning and running a maze; the role of kinesthesis in the control of behavior; color vision in different animals; the homing instincts and performances of noddy and sooty terns; and the early emotional development of the human child. Watson as an experimenter was keen, hard-working, persistent, always on the trail of some challenging theoretical conclusion. The homing study of terns was a large-scale enterprise, involving several years of field study during the nesting season of these birds. The study of infantile emotional development was another large-scale enterprise which, however, was broken off by the abrupt ending of his academic career.

WATSON'S BEHAVIORISM

Watson's behaviorism began to germinate during his first year of teach-

ing psychology. He began to wonder whether the introspections of human subjects were really as essential as officially supposed, and whether the fundamentals of psychology might not be even better learned from behavioral experiments on animals. He got little encouragement for such radical heresies from his Chicago colleagues, but at Johns Hopkins he encountered Knight Dunlap whose views were somewhat similar though less extreme. By 1912-13 he was ready to come forth with a visiting-lecture course at Columbia and an article in the Psychological Review on "Psy- chology as a behaviorist views it." In opposition to the traditional, or at least official definition, of psychology as the "science of consciousness," Watson's paper had the boldness of a declaration of independence, and even more. Behavior study was not only to be free from domination by the

psychologists of consciousness, but was to take entire possession of the field.

The time seems to have come when psychology must discard all reference to consciousness; when it need no longer delude itself into thinking that it is making mental states the object of observation. .... It is possible . .. to define it ... as the 'science of behavior,' and never .. . to use the terms consciousness, mental states,

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mind, content, will, imagery, and the like. .... It can be done in terms of stimulus and response, in terms of habit formation, habit integration, and the like.3

Of his reasons for discarding the introspective method, the most ob-

vious was its unavailability for the study of animals. Another was the lack of agreement among psychologists who were attempting to use the method in difficult fields like the thought-processes-disagreement as to the supposedly observed facts. A third reason was that introspection was

supposed to provide data for a scientific description of the 'content' of

consciousness; a perception, for example, was presumed to consist of

sensory and imaginal elements, and the problem was one of identifying the

elements. Watson wished to work with 'functional' concepts and laws

which would enable him to predict and control an individual's behavior.

How does behavior-psychology differ from physiology, since both have

to do with objectively observable activities of the organism? Watson met

this challenge by pointing out that physiology is concerned with the several

bodily functions, such as circulation, digestion, muscular action, and nerve-

and-brain action, whereas behavior is the activity of the body as a unit in

relation to the environment. This, then, is the true field of psychology- from the behaviorist's standpoint.

Behavior, from Watson's point of view, consists of motor and glandular

responses to sensory stimuli; it is always sensorimotor. A stimulus arouses

activity in one or more receptors; so nerve impulses are excited in sensory nerves conducting to the brain and spinal cord, where outgoing nerve

currents are excited in the motor and glandular nerves, with resulting excitation of muscles and glands. Whatever 'organization' takes place in

the brain and cord is mostly beyond our ken at present, and it is not

worth while for the psychologist to devise speculative schemes of the brain

processes. We can be reasonably sure of two things: that every sensory

impulse arouses in the brain a prompt motor impulse, and that every

muscular contraction feeds back a kinesthetic sensory impulse to the brain.

By such feedback an often-repeated series of movements can be so directly chained together as to run off smoothly without any dependence on external

stimuli-an important factor in Watson's theories of motor skill and even

of skill in thinking.

Implicit behavior. Much sensorimotor activity can go on inside the body without

being observable from outside, unless perhaps by a more sensitive recording

apparatus than is yet available. Very slight muscular contractions may excite weak

kinesthetic feedback and this may suffice to keep a behavior-chain going forward

'Watson, Behavior: An Introduction to Comparative Psychology, 1914, 7, 9.

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until finally an overt movement is produced. For instance-the most important instance-a person confronted by a problem may stand apparently motionless for several minutes and finally come forth with a solution expressed in spoken words or executed by overt hand movements. This invisible process of thinking, according to Watson's theory, is just as genuine sensorimotor behavior as if it consisted of walking, manipulating, or talking aloud. It consists of subvocal talking, silently talking to oneself. Fluent speech makes use of kinesthetic feedback, and such skill is carried over to silent speech.

You have been trained both at your mother's knee and in psychological laboratories to say that thinking is something peculiarly incorporeal, something very intangible, very evanescent, something peculiarly mental. . . . The behaviorist advances a natural science theory about thinking which makes it just as simple, and just as much a part of biological processes, as tennis playing. .... The behaviorist advances the view that what the psychologists have hitherto called thought is in short nothing but talking to ourselves . . . the muscular habits formed in overt speech are responsi- ble for implicit or internal speech (thought) . . . after our overt speech habits are formed, we are constantly talking to ourselves (thought). . . . Soon any, and every bodily response may become a word substitute . . . whenever the individual is thinking, the whole of his bodily organization is at work (implicitly).4

Instinct. Watson's views on instinct changed markedly between 1914 and 1925. In his 1914 book, Behavior, he made much of the instincts of various animals, de- fining an instinct as an inherited combination or serial pattern of simple reflexes, with the pattern as well as the component reflexes being native and unlearned in a given species, though usually perfected and extended by learning. In his great 1919 book, Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist, he took up the question of human instincts and insisted that purely unlearned behavior can be observed only in little babies, because of the quick overlay by habit. Starting with the numerous little unlearned movements of the infant, we can trace the development of the complex learned performances which have been carelessly called human instincts. The inborn tendency to manipulate objects, for example, provides the basis of manual and constructive skills.

In his book of 1925, basing his conclusions again on his studies of infants, he came out almost savagely against the notion of human instincts.

There are then for us no instincts-we no longer need the term in psychology. Everything we have been in the habit of calling an 'instinct' today is a result largely of training-belongs to man's learned behavior. As a corollary from this I wish to draw the conclusion that there is no such thing as an inheritance of capacity, talent, temperament, mental constitution and characteristics. These things depend on training that goes on mainly in the cradle.5

He had evidently come to regard the notion of instinct as contaminated with the 'mental,' the "mystical inner life of bents and instincts." Thus he was led to the extreme environmentalist position of asserting that any normal individual, if given the appropriate environment and behavioristic training from birth on, could be bent toward any occupation (by conditioning) and given all the requisite ability.

4 Watson, Behaviorism, 1925, 191, 192, 213. 5Watson, Behaviorism, 1925, 74f.

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Precursors. There were precursors of behaviorism in Germany, in Russia, in England, and in America. The early German 'objectivists,' students of animal behavior and physiology, had proposed to eliminate all terms such as seeing and desiring which seemed to imply consciousness in animals. The Russian physiologists hoped to explain all mental operations in physiological terms. Watson quite early got to know something of Pavlov and of Bekhterev and made some use of the conditioned-reflex method for the study of the senses of animals. Later it seemed to him that Pavlov had found the key, in conditioning, for all processes of learning; but by no means did he base his original behaviorism on these leads. The English psychologist, William McDougall, had also refused to define psychology as the science of consciousness, insisting that it must become a science of human conduct or behavior. Several American psychologists had adopted the same definition, or had chosen objective methods for their own experiments, though without seeking to eliminate introspection from all psychology. Many objective experiments had been made elsewhere, as by Helmholtz and by Ebbinghaus.

As Watson observes in the Preface of his 1919 Psychology, this preceding work and discussion made no great contribution to behaviorism as such. Watson did not, however, "claim behavior psychology as a creation of his own. It has had a rapid development and is a direct outgrowth of the work on animal behavior. It is purely an American production."

Behaviorism seemed to go into a decline when Watson's vigorous impetus was ended. About 1930, however, several productive younger behaviorists appeared on the scene, none of them agreeing with all of Watson's views but all of them determined to push forward by the use of objective methods and functional concepts. It has sometimes been difficult to say whether behaviorism has absorbed psychology in the United

States, or whether psychology has absorbed behaviorism. Is it still too early in psychological history to appraise the permanent

effect of the behaviorism which created such a stir in the early decades of this century? Certainly very little has been heard of consciousness in these later decades; Watson's taboo against the word is still potent. Other 'mentalistic' terms which he banished, like perception, are coming back as names for important functions of the human and even the animal

organism. As to the introspective method, it tends to come back in its

simpler form, the verbal report of psychophysics and of the study of per- sonality, though little use is being made of its complex form as used in the old studies of imagery and thinking.

Watson's peripheralism-his tendency to locate 'implicit behavior' in the muscles rather than in the brain-has been the guiding principle of the Hullians down to the present time. It is by no means the guiding principle of the modern physiological psychologists. His muscular theory of thinking is still accepted by many psychologists, though regarded as

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wholly inadequate by many others. His extreme environmentalism still has its stanch adherents but on the whole has given way to a more balanced estimate of the relative importance of heredity and environment in human

development and the production of individual differences. Watson's preference for animal experiments and his reliance on them

for investigation of the fundamental laws of learning find plenty of sup- port in recent work. Such laws, it is often felt, should be established in the animal laboratory; otherwise they may only reveal human ingenuity and use of language. Conditioning still plays a big role in learning theory, as it did for Watson, except that the law of effect or reinforcement can no

longer be discarded as it was by him. The perceptual factor in learning, also overlooked by Watson, has been coming to the fore in numerous studies of human skills, industrial and military. Instead of speaking of motor skills, we now call them perceptual-motor.

WATSON'S STATUS IN CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOLOGY

To illustrate Watson's standing in contemporary psychology we could cite a large number of comments dating from the decade of the fifties.

The most laudatory of all is from one who looks at Watson's work from the standpoint of logic and the history of science. Bergmann writes:

Second only to Freud, though at a rather great distance, John B. Watson is, in my judgment, the most important figure in the history of psychological thought during the first half of the century . . . although the attention he receives now, in the fifties, is perhaps not as great as it was in the twenties and thirties. . . . Among psychologists the sound core of Watson's contribution has been widely accepted; his errors and mistakes have been forgotten. . . . Watson is not only an experimental psychologist . . . he is also . . . a systematic thinker, ... a methodologist. In this latter area he made his major contribution.6

Quite a different estimate, though from the same general standpoint, is contained in an analytical review of Clark Hull's system:

The 'classical' behaviorism of Watson . . . was itself little more than a set of orientative attitudes . . . not a single behavioristic author put forward a concrete theory. .... It was Hull's firm intention to assume intellectual responsibility for developing the orienting commitments of earlier behaviorism into detailed explanatory theory. In this, he was setting himself an impossible goal.7

Hull's own reactions to Watson are to be found in his autobiography. At first, while inclined to agree on the futility of introspection, Hull was repelled by Wat- son's dogmatic claims. Later, after hearing Koffka criticize Watson at great length, he writes:

I came to the conclusion not that the Gestalt view was sound but rather that Wat-

6 Gustav Bergmann, The contribution of John B. Watson, Psychol. Rev., 63, 1956, 265-276.

7 Sigmund Koch, Clark L. Hull, in W. K. Estes et al., Modern Learning Theory, 1954, 5, 163.

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son had not made out as clear a case for behaviorism as the facts warranted. Instead of converting me to Gestalttheorie, the result was a belated conversion to a kind of neo-behaviorism-a behaviorism mainly concerned with the determination of the quantitative laws of behavior and their deductive systematization.8

Let us see what some other behaviorists, whose autobiographies are included in the same (1952) volume, have to say. Walter S. Hunter writes:

By 1922 I had come to the belief that behaviorism represented essentially the only adequate scientific point of view in psychology and that some of Watson's pronounce- ments represented less the essential details of behaviorism than his own prodigious effort to fill in the experimental gaps with hypotheses pending further work .... The fundamental issue in behaviorism is not, and never was, the particular specula- tions of any one behaviorist-of Watson for example.9

Edward C. Tolman, known as a 'purposive behaviorist,' relates how in his graduate-student days, he became worried about introspection, then asserted to be the chief method in psychology, though it seemed to be of little use in the laboratory. In his further development, he continues:

On the one hand I sided with Watson in not liking the Law of Effect. But, on the other hand, I did not like Watson's over-simplified notions of stimulus and response . . . a really useful behaviorism would not be a mere 'muscle-twitchism' such as Watson's. . . . The further notion that purpose and cognition are essential descriptive ingredients of ... behavior. . . . Today, however, the operational battle has so largely been won that to the average psychologist it no longer seems worth arguing about. In other words, today we are practically all behaviorists.'0

When Tolman said, "Today we are practically all behaviorists," he was thinking of American psychologists, for of the seven Europeans included in the 1952 Autobiographies, only one mentioned Watson or American behaviorism. Albert Michotte van den Berck, early in his career, was a member of Kiilpe's introspective school and employed his methods. Later, his confidence in these methods was shaken both by Titchener's criticisms and by the contentions of the behaviorists.

I became convinced that it was a vain task to try to describe internal events and analyze them into elements, and that the only value of introspection must be an informative one. . . . General information . . . about the state of mind of the ob- server, about the way in which he understands the situation . . . and about his own reactions . . . seemed to me indispensable in all psychological experiments. .... It is to a large extent . . . the meanings that certain objects or actions may have for a man or an animal . . . that have prevented me from subscribing to a radical behaviorism."

All through the years, European psychology has been comparatively little influenced by Watson. If we consult all four volumes of the Auto-

biographies (1930, 1932, 1936, 1952), we find 29 European psychologists narrating their careers. Only 9 of these make any mention of Watson or American behaviorism, and these 9 comments are about equally divided

8 C. L. Hull, Autobiography, in A History of Psychology in Autobiography, Clark Univ. Press, IV, 1952, 153f.

'W. S. Hunter, Autobiography, ibid., 172, 186. l Ibid., 326, 329-331. " E. C. Tolman, Autobiography, ibid.. 220, 222.

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NOT'ES AND DISCUSSIONS

between the favorable and the unfavorable. (The corresponding American count is: no comment, 6; favorable, 11; unfavorable, 11.) A characteristic European comment came from Claparede (1930): "Psychologists have lost much time in these controversies . . . I do not oppose the study of behavior, but simply behaviorism as a dogmatism."

Since an autobiographer usually ranks as an 'elder statesman,' we may do well to quote also from some younger psychologists of the 1950s. So from Kenneth W. Spence:

Watson . proposed to extend the same objective behavioral methods of observation to the study of human behavior.... I should like to turn now to an analysis of the general conception of their science that the majority of psychologists in this country hold today. While behavioristic in outlook, this conception is probably better described as objective psychology. As such it does not require adherence to the orthodox doctrines of Watson.12

This from a recent book of Skinner's:

J. B. Watson argued that 'words function in the matter of calling out responses exactly as did the objects for which the words serve as substitutes.' . . . This is a superficial analysis which is much too close to the traditional notion of words 'standing for' things.13

Skinner's views are also well represented in this quotation from Keller and Schoenfeld's text:

John B. Watson, an American pioneer in the objective, natural-science approach to psychology . . . proposed a cataloguing of reflexes as basic to the control of human and infrahuman behavior. . ... Watson's proposal is now deemed impractica- ble. ... We need a dynamic, rather than a static, picture of the behavior of orga- nisms . ... Watson's views were received with hostility by most of his contempo- raries because they were radical for that time and because they were not developed to a stage where their fruitfulness could silence criticism. . . . Watson was thus cor- rect in his general approach, though he erred in detail.14

Watson's purely 'peripheral' theory of emotion is regarded by Jersild as un- fortunate. He writes:

So many psychologists for so many years were so easily seduced into following the simplified version of emotional development proposed . . . by John B. Watson. . . . A vast amount of research on emotional behavior has suffered from this tendency to pay attention primarily to objective and overt features without proper regard for subjective factors which, from the individual's point of view, are the most crucial feature.'5

And here are two recent judgments, not entirely contradictory, regard- ing Watson's contribution to the psychology of thinking:

We must conclude that the influence of behaviorism on the psychology of thought has been a negative one. Watson showed how the phenomena of thought could be

12 K. W. Spence, Behavior Theory and Conditioning, 1956, 11, 15. 13 B. F. Skinner, Verbal Behavior. 1957, 86-87. 14 F. S. Keller, and W. N. Schoenfeld, Principles of Psychology, 1950, 7, 379. 15A. T. Jersild, Emotional development, in Leonard Carmichael's, (ed.), Manual

of Child Psychology, 1954, 79, 841.

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rephrased to fit his system of behavior, but he did not show how to do anything about it. His criticism of subjective methodology scared many psychologists away from [research on] thinking. ... Modern behaviorists, more sophisticated than Watson in some respects, have avoided [research on] thinking.16

The motor theory of thought . . . embodies a concept of the greatest importance for understanding behavior. . . . The theory is no longer entertained as a complete explanation . . . but the concepts which it developed concerning sensory feedback remain valid and important.17

What shall we say then? Watson's mistakes have evidently not been

forgotten; every recent comment takes note of one or more of them. It would not be safe to overlook them unless we were prepared to overlook Watson altogether; and that we are not prepared to do-not in America

anyway. It seems that our psychologists have been gravitating together, the behaviorists broadening their coverage and the nonbehaviorists more and more employing functional concepts-which were after all the positive core of Watson's system.

Columbia University ROBERT S. WOODWORTH

AN ACKNOWLEDGMENT

The JOURNAL is indebted to Dr. William R. Watson for the photograph and signature of his father that are reproduced in the frontispiece of this number. The photograph was taken in 1943, when he was 65 years of

age; the signature was written shortly before his death. K. M. D.

16 D. M. Johnson, The Psychology of Thought and Judgment, 1955, 11. 17 D. 0. Hebb, A Textbook of Psychology, 1958, 58.

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john broadus watson: 1878-1958

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