John B. Watson

1878-1958 · American · Behaviorism

Give me a dozen healthy infants 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.

John Broadus Watson made psychology a science of behavior and threw the mind out the window. In his 1913 manifesto — "Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It" — he declared that psychology must abandon consciousness, introspection, and the whole vocabulary of mental states, and confine itself to what can be observed and measured: stimulus and response, the prediction and control of behavior. Within a decade behaviorism had captured American psychology, and it held it for half a century.

Topics John B. Watson addresses

• behaviorism
• stimulus and response
• the conditioned reflex
• habit formation
• the three unlearned emotions
• the conditioned emotional reaction
• Little Albert
• radical environmentalism
• the dozen healthy infants
• prediction and control of behavior
• the rejection of introspection
• the rejection of consciousness
• thinking as subvocal speech
• implicit behavior
• comparative psychology
• behaviorist childrearing
• the objective method
• the rejection of instinct
• transfer and generalization of responses
• the behaviorist manifesto
• emotion as conditioned reflex
• conditioning in advertising

Converse with John B. Watson on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in John B. Watson's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.