John Watson's Behaviorism
John Watson was born in 1878 in Greenville, South Carolina, a town that was enriched with religion and spiritual practices. Many people believed John would grow up to be a minister or have a wonderful job with the church, but John Watson had other ideas. By the age of thirteen, he was swearing, drinking, and chasing women. "At school, Watson began to be rather vicious and violent. He was obviously intelligent but he was lazy, 'somewhat insubordinate', and never made a decent grade (Cohen, pg 10)." Watson also began fighting with kids at school as a response to his hatred of it. Suddenly, Watson took a radical turn and, at the age of fifteen, was accepted into Furman University. This is amazing coming from the man that would one day fight for the radical ideas that he would propose. Watson, after being a juvenile delinquent, would start a movement that many would not understand or accept. This paper will show how John Watson created a small ripple in the water that is now a permanent fixture in the world of psychology. Watson called for a new and radical psychology that he termed Behaviorism. In his lectures on the new psychology of Behaviorism, he stated, "Behaviorism claims that 'consciousness' is neither a definable
Watson believed that introspection was not the way to study humans, while Calkins believed that was the only way. Robert Yerkes played a key role in allowing Watson to talk about behavior with someone who understood it from a psychological perspective and sharing animal research. In many ways Yerkes was helping propel Watson's ideas into the world of psychology. Under Behaviorism, the mind and body do not interact in any way. "As you can see by Watson's writings, many things had to change in order to get to this new behaviorist thought. In the book titled The Battle of Behaviorism, written by John Watson and William MacDougall, the authors tell how this new idea of observation can replace old ideas of studying psychology subjectively. Even thought Mary Calkins did not agree with Behaviorism, she did lay the framework for healthy competition and lead to the outgrowth of other forms of psychology. If this assumption proves to be wrong the entire construct that Behaviorism is built on will crumble in an instant (www. The behaviour of man, with all of its refinement and complexity, form only a part of the behaviourist's total scheme of investigation (pg 73). " Even people who were very close to John Watson were skeptical of his ideas. Yerkes was right; Watson's ideas were quite the controversial topic of the time. Watson began writing to Yerkes because their research areas were quit common.
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