When
talking about psychology, there are many important figures who established
their own thoughts or perspectives regarding psychology. One of these figures
was the American psychologist, John B. Watson. Watson was born on January 9,
1878 in Travelers Rest, South Carolina and died September, 9, 1958 in New York,
New York. In 1903, he received his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of
Chicago. Just five years after that, Watson became a psychology professor at
Johns Hopkins University in Maryland.
Watson’s
school of thought was called behaviorism, “…an approach to psychology that, in
his view, was restricted to the objective, experimental study of the relations
between environmental events and human behaviour[sic]” (John B. Watson, 2015, para. 1). During the 1920s and ‘30s
in the United States, behaviorism became the dominant school of thought.
Watson
believed that psychology was a natural science and disagreed with both
structuralism and functionalism. He believed that mental life as traditionally
developed did not exist. “Rather, psychology should embrace behavior as its
subject matter and rely on experimental observation of that subject matter as
its method” (Moore, 2011, pg. 451). Behaviorism adopted measurement and
analytical techniques from “animal psychology” and reflexology. It was objective
rather than subjective and applied these strategies to adaptive forms of
behavior. Since Watson’s methods emphasized observability, this prevented the
lack of reliability and the lack of agreement. His principal unit was habit,
the coordinated and consistent act that develops in a given situation through
repetition. He adapted his analysis to everything from human emotional
responses to language. Even with Watson’s additions to psychology, two problems
remained. According to Moore (2011, pg. 451), “One was the apparent spontaneity
of behavior: Some responses seemed to develop without a characteristic stimulus
evoking them. A second problem was the variability of behavior. Even when a
characteristic stimulus preceded responses, the topography and frequency of the
responses often differed significantly.”
As a result of these problems, by 1930
researchers began to search for ways to modify behaviorism. However, John B.
Watson still made an important contribution to psychology.
References
John B. Watson
(2015). In Encyclopedia Britannica.
Retrieved from
Moore, J. (2011). Behaviorism. Psychological Record, 61(3),
449-464.
