John B Watson Research Paper

Up to the beginning of the twentieth century the primary method of collecting data was through self- observation and introspection. Most of this was done in a lab or on an analysts couch. Then along came John B. Watson, who led a new generation of psychologists to a new way of thinking. This new way of thinking was behaviorism. For Watson, psychology was the study of observable, measurable behavior and nothing more. He insisted that you can not see or even define what consciousness is any more than you can observe ones soul. If you cannot locate or measure something then it can not be the object of study. He came to deny the legitimacy of ideas such as consciousness, thinking, feelings or the self. Most of our ways of describing human behavior
and experience was deemed unscientific. He tried to show that all psychological phenomenon are the results of conditioning.
In 1920 Watson was forced to resign from Johns Hopkins and for years after he still wrote articles and books on psychology, however, he ultimately let others take over refining behaviorism through research. One of these researchers was B.F. Skinner. Skinner believed that the mind was invisible and irrelevant to scientists. He believed that we should only be concerned with what goes in the mind and comes out of the mind but not what happens inside the mind. He believed in “reinforcement”, which meant if you put a rat in a special made cage and allowed it to run around and check out it’s environment in this cage, that eventually it would find the special button that released a treat. Skinner believed that this rat would learn to always push this special button and always get a treat. He thought that the reason the rat did this was because he was rewarded for hitting the button. He called this “instrumental conditioning”. For at least 50 years psychology was dominated by behaviorism and for all of those years cognitive psychology was
ignored. In the 1960s behaviorism wasn’t looking so great anymore. People were starting to ask a lot of questions about topics that behaviorists had ignored all these years. They could not answer the questions being asked. Research in other fields was starting to shed new light on how the mind works. There were new research methods and even the definition of psychology had changed at this point. Cognitive psychology is the study of our mental processes in the broadest sense, such as: thinking, feeling, judgment, learning, and remembering.
Where behaviorists only cared about what went into the mind and what came out of the mind, cognitive psychologists wanted to know how we processed the information while it was in the mind. Unlike behaviorists, cognitive psychologists thought that how the mind processed, could and should be studied scientifically. Topics that were rejected as “unscientific” were again the subject of experimentation. Along with all of this came new phrases; information processing, organization, structure, cognitive. Not everyone accepted cognitive psychology with open arms. Early volumes of “cognitive behavior modification” were actually banned from several campuses where behaviorism was predominant. Two schools that paved the way for the cognitive revolution were Gestalt psychology and humanistic. Gestalt psychology studies how people perceive and experience objects as whole patterns. When applied to perception it refers to our tendency to see patterns or to distinguish an object from its background. Humanistic psychology emphasizes nonverbal experience and altered states of consciousness as a means of realizing ones full human potential. They focus on mental health and well being instead of focusing on mental illnesses. Cognitive psychology has had huge impacts on every area of
psychology. If you have a behavioralist view on things you would believe that all learning occurs in steps. If you give everyone the same steps they will all reach the same objective. However, there would be some students getting A’s and some getting B’s, C’s, D’s and F’s. Cognitive psychology on the other hand believes that people all learn in different ways. Some people are direction readers and are very good at steps and processes. Then there is the flip side to that coin, where some people learn better if they are shown or experience the task. I myself am a learner by doing. I am not very good at the normal instruction methods. In the behavioralists mind maybe if you sat me down with a book and gave me a cookie every time I got an answer right I would learn to do it their way. I don’t like cookies very much so I think I will stick to the cognitive psychology way and experience it.