John B. Watson by Jacqueline Peralta

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

https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-B-Watson

Moore, J. (2011). Behaviorism. Psychological Record, 61(3), 449-464.