J.B.WATSON

John Broadus Watson
John Broadus Watson was born on January 9, 1878 in a poor family in Greenville, South Carolina. He was grew up on a farm. John B. Watson was the fourth of six children. He had a mixed upbringing in which his mother, Emma Kesiah Watson who was a very religious woman. She pushed for Watson to be a religious Christian who was expected to restrain from those negative behaviour such as dancing, smoking, and drinking. Meanwhile, his father, Pickens Watson, was a heavy drinker who was often in trouble with the law and did not follow the same rules of living as his mother. Unfortunately, while growing up, John Watson grew particularly close to his father and also found himself getting into trouble. He subsequently seemed destined to follow his father's model of violence and recklessness. As Watson grew older, his father began cheating and betrayed on his mother. Pickens’s extra-marital affairs ultimately resulted in Pickens leaving the family just after Watson turned thirteen. The breakdown of family gave a great impact on Watson, and his motivation for academics disillusioned. Thus, it can be said that John B. Watson was not necessarily groomed for academics. As a young boy, he did not excel in his studies and was a discipline problem to many of his teachers. He assaulted other black children at his school and even mocked his own teacher during class. He even found himself in trouble with the law after he was arrested for violent behaviour on two separate occasions. However, at the age of sixteen, Watson’s view on life and attitude towards academics changed and improved when he earned acceptance to Furman University. Yet, Watson also encountered a series of mentors at various stages of his academic career who impressed him so much that he quickly discovered an insatiable desire for learning. Therefore, at the stage of studied in Furman University, the most much credit of Watson successes can said to be given to Watson’s mentor, Gordon Moore who was responsible for introducing young Watson to the subject of psychology. Watson continued his studies and proved himself as an intelligent student. Five years later, in 1900, Watson graduated with his Masters degree from Furman University. At that time, he was only 21. Watson's mother died shortly after his graduation from Furman, freeing him to pursue philosophy rather than the ministry as he free himself from the conviction of her mother. In 1900, He arrived at the University of Chicago (where his mentor Gordon Moore was now positioned in) with only $50 in his pocket. He worked as a janitor, waiter, and rat caretaker to earn money to sustained his daily life. At Chicago, he shifted his focus on philosophy. Watson took philosophy courses with John Dewey. However, after studying with Dewey, Watson claimed not to understand his teaching, and he soon sought out a different academic path. At first, he considered working on the physiology of the dog's brain with the radical biologist, Jacques Loeb, but later he chose and pursued PhD in experimental psychology under the well-known psychologist James Rowland Angell and physiologist Henry Donaldson as his advisors instead.
While as a student at the University of Chicago, he also became interested in the fields of animal study and comparative psychology. He wrote his dissertation about the relation between behaviour in the white rat and the growth of the nervous system. It only took him three years to major in experimental psychology and neurology, with philosophy as a minor in University Chicago. In 1903, Watson graduated from the University of Chicago at the age of 25. At that time he was the youngest person to earn a PhD at the University of Chicago. He remained there five more years as Angell's assistant and later as a research professor, focusing on learning and sensory input in animals. Surprisingly, after only one year, in 1904, he married one of his students, Mary Amelia Ickes. Watson and Mary had their first child in June of 1905 which they named Mary. They also gave birth to their second child, John, some years later. Perhaps, due to the influenced and modelling of his father’s affairs as a child, Watson began dating and getting ambiguous with other women on the campus. These scandal became a hot topic of conversation for students and faculty at the University of Chicago. In order to avoid further problems and issues with the faculty in Chicago, Watson made his decision to leave the University of Chicago. In 1908, Watson accepted a faculty position at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. Watson began teaching psychology at John Hopkins University where he remained until 1920. While teaching psychology at Johns Hopkins University, he acted as the department chair and the director of the psychological laboratory. Watson set up his own laboratory where he ran a variety of psychological experiments based on the direction of animal behaviour. After that, he shifted his research in animal behaviour to human behaviour and focused his study on children. It was here that John Watson produced some of his greatest accomplishments. In 1913, he published his first famous article, “Psychology as a Behaviourist Views It,” in Psychological Review. In the article, he explained his idea that psychology was a science of human behaviour, yet very similar to animal behaviour and it must be studied under careful lab conditions. His article outlined his views on behaviourism which was obviously influenced by Ivan Pavlov’s “classical conditioning” idea. His second major accomplishment was his publication of Behaviour: An Introduction to Comparative Psychology, in 1914. In this article, he explained his belief in the importance of using animal subjects to study reflexes activated by heredity. He argued that the best experimental tool was to use conditioned responses. In addition to his most influential writings, he also published over thirty-five papers, books, and reports. Watson strongly believed in his stimulus-response theory. While at Hopkins, Watson reach his career high peak as in 1915, he was elected to become the president of the American Psychology Association and he also edited numerous professional journals in the early 1920’s. However, his research study was interrupted by World War I when he had to serve as a psychologist. After the war, he resumed his work at Johns Hopkins University. Upon his return to Hopkins, Watson produced “Experimental Investigation of Babies” in 1919, one of the first psychology films produced in the United States. Watson’s career at Hopkins came to an end in 1920 when he was forced to resign his position due to his scandalous affair with research assistant, Rosalie Rayner, and succeeding divorce from his wife, Mary Ickes. After he left his wife, Watson and Rosalie eventually married and went on to have two children, James and William. He still continued to do research and write, while creating a family with Rosalie in New York City. After resigning from Johns Hopkins University and move to New York in 1921, Watson began working for the American advertising agency of J. Walter Thompson. He learned the many facets of the advertising business at ground level, even working as a shoe salesman in an upscale department store. Despite this modest start, in less than two years Watson had risen to a vice-presidency at Thompson. Watson studied advertising and how it motivates people's purchasing. Watson placed a major emphasis on empirical marketing research by stressing the importance of knowing the consumer through scientific study. He saw the marketplace as a laboratory for the advertising industry and how the consumer was akin to the experimental subject whose behaviour was deliberately controlled by the advertiser. Watson was convinced that to know anything about the consumer, one would have to "dissect" the consumer until it was known what he wanted and needed, and only then could the marketer properly provide a product. In 1935, Watson switched jobs to become an advertising executive at the William Esty Company where he remained until his retirement in 1945. While pursuing a career in advertising, he also continued to publish important books and articles with relevance to his first love of psychology. In 1925 he published Behaviorism, and then in 1928 he published Psychological Care of Infant and Child . In addition, he published a revision of Behaviorism in 1930. Unexpectedly, Rosalie died in 1935 after becoming very ill. Watson was so devastated that he began abusing alcohol and became a workaholic. Relationships with his family deteriorated, and John retired from his business job in 1946. His son William committed suicide in 1954. In his late life time, Watson moved to a smaller farm in Woodbury, Connecticut and lived there until his death in September 25, 1958. Although John Watson had many accomplishments throughout his career as a psychologist, the one that is most popular is his experiment on Little Albert, an eleven-month old child. Little Albert experiment give a major achievement on Watson’s study in the behaviorism on human and also known as one of the most controversial experiments in the history of psychology. Once Watson developed an interest in infant study in 1920, he conducted a study in which he ultimately conditioned the child to fear other similar furry animals, in addition to his initial fears of loud noises and rats. Watson focused his study on the fear a child would demonstrate when hearing loud noises. He believed that the fear was innate and felt that he could condition a child to fear another distinctive stimulus which was normally not feared by the child. In Little Albert experiment, John Watson and his graduate assistant, Rosalie Rayner conditioned a small child to fear a white rat. Watson and Rayner ran a series of emotional tests on him. They exposed the nine-month year’s old child to a series of stimuli including a white rat, a rabbit, a monkey, masks and burning newspapers and observed the boy's reactions. The boy initially showed no fear of any of the objects he was shown. To condition his fear, Watson and Rayner would make a loud noise behind Albert’s back by striking a steel bar with a hammer every time the baby touched the white rat. Naturally, the child began to cry after hearing the loud noise. After obtaining the required reaction of discomfort and crying from Albert when he was exposed to both the sound and the rat simultaneously, Watson and Rayner presented him solely with the rat. A week later, after a series of testing, Albert was able to cry by being exposed to only the rat. As they accomplished this experiment by repeatedly pairing the white rat with a loud, frightening clanging noise, they were also able to demonstrate that this fear could be generalized to other white, furry objects as Albert had associated the loud noise to the rat and seemed to generalize his response to other fury animals or objects. Thus, Watson showed how it was possible to condition a fear response into a child. Unfortunately, Albert was taken from the hospital the day the last tests were made. Hence, the opportunity of developing an experimental technique for removing the conditioned emotional response was denied. Therefore, Watson concluded that even complex behaviours, such as emotions, could be learned through manipulation of one’s environment. Besides that, Watson also introduced the theory of ‘Behaviorism’. Watson coined the term "Behaviourism" in 1913. Behaviourism assumes that behaviour is observable and can be correlated with other observable events. Thus, there are events that precede and follow behaviour. The main idea of behaviourism is to explain the relationships between antecedent conditions (stimuli), behaviour (responses), and consequences (reward, punishment, or neutral effect). Watson's behaviourism has had a long-lasting impact on the nature-versus-nurture debate, and his work illuminated the strong role early experiences play in shaping personality. Some mental health professionals use behaviourist principles proposed by John B. Watson to condition away phobias and fears. In addition, advertisers frequently use behaviourist conditioning to encourage consumers to purchase products. Today Watson's impact in the field of advertising is readily apparent. For example, direct testimonials are seen in many of the same women's magazines in which Watson's ads once appeared. Advertisements are filled with images of various celebrities and attractive models endorsing products such as cosmetics, clothing, and even watches. These testimonial advertisements are promoting not just products, but also beauty and status that come along with applying the cosmetics or wearing the clothing. Today, modern behaviourist still hypothesize that human action involves trial and error, and recent trend in psychology considers that human cognition and emotion are fundamentally grounded in the body. In other words, people may experience the re-enactment of perceptual and motor activity previously learned by remembering the event experienced that caused the prior learning. As we all known, Watson is well known for taking his theory of behaviourism and applying it to the development of children. He believed strongly that a child's environment is the factor that shapes behaviours over their genetic makeup or natural temperament. According to Watson’s famous quote, "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 beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors." for saying that he could take a dozen healthy infants and train any one of them to become any type of specialist he might select including doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and even a thief. In other words, he believed that we can expose our child to certain environmental forces and over the time, condition that child to become any type of person we want. As we might imagine that this was radical thinking and a type of behavioural control that many people were not comfortable with at that time. Little Albert experiment has brings a conspicuous influence on child psychology. Behaviourists’ believed in a stimulus-response theory of learning that has impacted today’s educational setting as well. To this day, a child’s behaviour can be conditioned by the use of reinforcement. Parents and teachers continue to use time-out rooms, quiet corners and other behavioural techniques to reinforce a good behaviour. Some systems or methods can be used in the process of nurturing and educating child by allowing them to practice the sample of good behaviour in their daily life in a repetition way. For example, in a classroom setting, a teacher may choose to teach her students responsibility by using a system of rewards and penalties. Students who submit homework or attending the class punctually will be given a token as a reward. In the other hand, the token will also be taken away as the student fail to complete the task given on time. So, we can said that the tokens are earned as a reward and are taken away as a punishment. The main purpose of the teacher is to make the student desire the reward so much that they become responsible students. Moreover, the teacher may choose to compensate a student at the end of the week depending on how many the tokens earned. The can be vary in way which depending on the student’s age and need and not necessary to be monetary. Consequently, teachers must also make sure that the prize compensated must be adequate, relevant, and interesting to motivate their students. For example, for pre-K students, sweets or stickers may choose to be rewarded to those who earn more tokens by the teacher. In the other hand, older students who get more token are allowed to play a game in the computer or either to be released a little earlier than the rest of the group at the end of the lecture. This will motivate the student while conditioning or reinforcing the desired behaviour or task. These behavioural techniques we used nowadays can allowing the younger generation to be more adapted to the good behaviour we expect them to do so by instil the firm concept in their mind. However, unfortunately, many of us tend to use more the punishments rather than the reward system which may only produce a temporary change of behaviour. That is why we can said that learning can be impacted both negatively and positively. Therefore, in my point of view, by studying the theory of behaviourism written by John B. Watson, I inspired that human behaviour can be trained and be fixed under the environment and circumstances that he or she stand for. Human will react naturally according to the changes of the environment and situation around them and once the stimulus is prolonged over a constant person will bring a change in behaviour of that person. Human are sensitive organism who face much more changes in our daily life. We tend to behave like what we supposed to do in order to react with the environment we faced for. John B. Watson noticed this and try to discover the amazing stimulus-response reaction which generate automatically and naturally by our human beings. He afford in discovery the behaviourism beneath our true natural instincts is important and useful among the society. Even though the Little Albert experiment is said to be controversial among the social and psychologist, but by study through the experiment and result, me as an open-minded adolescence, I choose to believe the concept and notion that proposed by John B. Watson in which human’s complex behaviours, such as emotions, could be learned through manipulation of one’s environment. As a populace, we can always notice the example that show us the change in environment can develop a different behaviour among the people. For instance, one stalwart and husky man can simply afraid of a small dog as he had been bitten by a small dog a few time since he was young. Some people also have resistance toward something which may cause them feeling uncomfortable or fear of. The idea of ‘I hate this item’ or ‘This item was scary’ can be instil in their mind as they were experienced some unpleasurable moment when having a contact with those items since they were young or even in their adult life. There are many psychological factors will influence our emotion and even our physical action. As a human being, I think that it is not a trifling things to get fully acquaintance and understanding in case of studying psychology. Human are always more emotional than we can expect. Thus, in order to get well understanding in human behaviourism, we must be prepared that we will facing a bundle of challenges and obstacles throughout the process. Apparently, John B. Watson‘s determination in studying the human behaviourism in a persist way motivated me to move forward and work harder to pursue my dream. John B. Watson’s achievement also show us that the miracle always comes from the assiduous and diligent. It can be shown as he was not elevated as a talented student in his younger childhood. Yet, his great achievement was attained by his own persistent and determination after he went into the world of psychology in his college life instead. However, as a great man who founded the behaviourism theory which brought a huge contribution in the psychology field, John B. Watson also showed us a bad role as he modelling his father’s amorous and irresponsible behaviour as a man and as a father. We cannot deny that he was influenced in his early childhood when his father was showing those bad illustration to him and yet he himself also discovery the theory of behaviourism in which environment is the factor that shapes behaviours over their genetic makeup or natural temperament. Thus, he seemed to follow his own theory that his own behaviour and adaptation were reinforced by his father’s abuses. All in all, John B. Watson had made many contributions to psychology. He is known as the father of Behaviourism, and is also famous for his many publications, experiments and awards. He set the stage for behaviorism, which soon rose to dominate psychology. While behaviorism began to lose its hold after 1950, many of the concepts and principles are still widely used today. Conditioning and behavior modification are still widely used in therapy and behavioral training to help clients change problematic behaviors and develop new skills. In 1957, a year before his death, John Watson was awarded the gold medal from the American Psychological Association for his contributions to the field of psychology. Thus, as an undergraduate who just start to familiar with the world of psychology, I appreciate all the contribution which achieved by John B. Watson in the field of psychology.