The Story of Psychology (49 page)

No one did more to sell behaviorism to American psychologists than Professor John B. Watson of Johns Hopkins University. A gifted huckster, he energetically and skillfully peddled himself and his ideas to his colleagues, rose swiftly to the top of his profession while launching the behaviorist movement, and later, having been expelled from academia because of a sexual scandal, had a second and financially lucrative career as psychological adviser to a major advertising firm.
¹⁹

Like the fictional traveling salesman, Watson exuded self-assurance, stated his views flamboyantly and with certainty, and was a lifelong womanizer. Behind the facade, however, he was insecure, afraid of the dark, and emotionally frozen. He could be sociable and charming in company, but if the conversation turned to deeper feelings he would leave the room and busy himself with chores. He was loving to animals but almost incapable of expressing affection to the people in his life. (He never kissed or held his children; at bedtime he shook hands with them.) After the untimely death of his second wife, whom he seems to have cared for deeply, he never spoke of her to their two sons, one of whom later bitterly recalled, “It was almost as if she had never existed.”
²⁰
No wonder he was the champion of a psychology that rejected introspection and self-revelation, dealt only with external acts, and as experimental subjects preferred rats to human beings.

Watson’s success story was as remarkable as any by Horatio Alger. Born in 1878 near Greenville, South Carolina, he was the son of a petty farmer of violent nature and unsavory reputation, and an upright, devout Baptist woman. Torn between these dissimilar models of adulthood, Watson was a shiftless, indolent small-town boy. When he was thirteen, his father abandoned the family and ran off with another woman, and his mother sold the farm and moved to Greenville. There Watson, teased by classmates for his country ways and upset by his father’s abandonment, did poorly in school. “I was lazy,” he later recalled, “somewhat insubordinate, and, so far as I know, never made above a passing grade.” Like his vanished father, he had a penchant for violence: He often boxed with a friend until one or both were bloody, was much addicted to what he called “nigger fighting” (beating up blacks), and was arrested twice, once for racial brawling and once for firing a gun within city limits.

Despite his redneck attitudes and habits, he somehow developed the desire to make something of himself and had either the courage or
effrontery to request a personal interview with the president of Furman College, a small Baptist institution in Greenville; he was granted the interview and made a good enough impression to be accepted as a student. He had intended to study for the Baptist ministry—his mother’s wish—but, always rebellious, turned against religion. He was never at ease with his fellow students, but when he grew into a strikingly handsome youth with sharp, clean-cut features, a strong chin, and dark wavy hair, he began a lifelong series of affairs. He was serious enough about his ambition, however, to work hard and do well academically, and he particularly liked those philosophy courses which included psychological subjects.

After graduation, Watson taught in a one-room school for a year, but his favorite philosophy professor, George Moore, who had moved to the University of Chicago, urged him to go there as a graduate student. Again Watson was brash enough to go directly to the top. He wrote a boldly self-promoting letter to William Rainey Harper, president of the university, telling him that he was poor but earnest, and entreating him either to waive tuition or let Watson pay it off later. He also persuaded the president of Furman College to write an extraordinarily strong letter on his behalf. President Harper accepted him—on what financial basis is not clear—and off Watson went. He arrived in Chicago with $50 to his name, completely on his own (his mother had died, his father had never been heard from) but ready for anything.

At first he majored in philosophy, but soon realized that it was psychology he cared about, and switched. He worked hard at his studies and supported himself by holding several odd jobs: he waited on table at his boarding house, served as a janitor in the psychology department, and took care of rats in an animal laboratory. At one point, overwhelmed by anxiety and sleeplessness, he suffered a breakdown and had to spend a month recuperating in the country. Another man, after such an experience, might have become self-searching and interested in introspective psychology; Watson did his doctoral research in the winter of 1901–1902 on how the level of brain development of young rats was related to their ability to learn mazes and open doors to get food. In part, he was simply falling in with the latest trend in psychology (Thorndike had announced his puzzle box findings four years earlier), but in part he was choosing the kind of psychology he found congenial:

Watson did such excellent work at Chicago that when he graduated, the department offered him an assistantship in experimental psychology. After only two years he was promoted to instructor, after two more to assistant professor-elect, and a year later, at thirty, was offered the chair of psychology at Johns Hopkins University at what was then (1908) a munificent salary, $3,500.

His swift rise had been, in part, the consequence of carefully cultivated contacts but, in larger part, of splendid experimental work in animal learning. He taught rats to make their way through a miniature replica of the maze at Hampton Court, Henry VIII’s royal retreat outside London. At first the rats needed as much as half an hour to find their way, but after thirty trials they could race through in ten seconds. By what means had they learned the route? To find out, Watson deprived them of first one sensory cue, then another, to see which one was crucial to maze learning. He blinded some of the trained rats; their performance dropped off but rapidly returned to what it had been before. He washed the maze to remove odor cues, but trained rats did as well as ever. He surgically destroyed the sense of smell of some untrained rats, but they learned the maze as readily as intact rats. Hearing, similarly, proved to play no part in their learning. Watson concluded that kinesthetic cues—muscle sensations—were the key element in the rat’s learning process.
²²

From such research and from his knowledge of the work of Thorndike and other objectivists, Watson, rejecting all conjectures about invisible mental processes, began to formulate a new psychology based entirely on observable behavior. He first voiced these views at psychological meetings in 1908 and 1912 (in the latter year he and James R. Angell independently coined the term “behaviorist”), and in 1913 wrote an article, published in the
Psychological Review
and often called “the behaviorist manifesto,” that formally inaugurated the era of behaviorism in psychology.
²³

The manifesto, “Psychology As the Behaviorist Views It,” started off with a declaration of independence from all schools of psychology that dealt with mental processes:

In three sentences, he had proclaimed three revolutionary principles: first, the content of psychology should be behavior, not consciousness; second, its method should be objective rather than introspective; and third, its purpose should be “prediction and control of behavior” rather than fundamental understanding of mental events.

Watson charged that psychology had failed to become an undisputed natural science because it was concerned with conscious processes that were invisible, subjective, and incapable of precise definition. He jettisoned the psychologizing of the Greek philosophers, the medieval scholars, the rationalists and the empiricists, and such greats as Kant, Hume, Wundt, James, and Freud, all of whom had been, in his view, misguided.

As some wit said later, “Psychology, having first lost its soul to Darwin, now lost its mind to Watson.”

His assault on introspection as a method of research was based on its failure to yield objective data. It so often led to endless debates about subjective and undecidable issues, like the number of sensations, their intensity, or what any individual meant by his report of what he was experiencing, that the method itself had to be judged defective and a hindrance to progress.

For good measure, Watson also dismissed all dualist discussions of mind and body, whether couched in metaphysical terms or modern ones. These concepts, “time-honored relics of philosophic speculation,” were of no use either as guides to psychological problems worth studying or as solutions of those problems; he himself would prefer, he said, to bring up his students in total ignorance of such hypotheses.

In place of the psychology he junked, he proposed a new one free of all such terms as “consciousness,” “mental states,” and “mind.” Its sole subject matter would be behavior. Based on the premise that all organisms adjust to their environment and that certain stimuli lead them to make the necessary responses, psychology would study the connections between stimuli and responses, that is, the ways in which rewarding responses are learned and unrewarding ones are not. Since consciousness would be ignored, much of this study could be carried on with animals; indeed, “the behavior of man and the behavior of animals must be considered on the same plane as being equally essential to the study of behavior.”

Watson’s manifesto was actually less original than it seemed; it presented ideas that had been germinating for fifteen years. But it did so in an audacious, forceful, and crystallizing way; it was, in short, a sales pitch. Watson’s ideas did not sweep the field overnight, but over the next half-dozen years behaviorism became an important topic at meetings and a formative influence on the thinking of psychologists. By the 1920s it had begun to dominate psychology, and was the ruling paradigm in American psychology and an important one in Europe for well over four decades.

Popular accounts of Watson’s life say that the manifesto catapulted Watson to the presidency of the American Psychological Association in 1915, but a careful review of the evidence by the social psychologist Franz Samelson finds it more likely that he was elected because he was highly visible as the editor of the
Psychological Review
, was well known to and on good terms with the three members of the nominating committee, and was a representative of the new generation of genuinely experimental psychologists.
²⁴

Whatever the reason, he was flying high, but he knew that he had not yet suggested a specific method by which behaviorists could pursue research, and in his presidential address to the APA he addressed this problem.
²⁵
He now had something to offer: the conditioned reflex method. Though he knew only the bare outlines of Pavlov’s work, he presented it as a model for behaviorist experimentation not only with
animals but with humans. He noted that his student Karl Lashley (who had disproven Pavlov’s physiological theory), had already made a removable fistula that could be installed inside the human cheek; with it, he had successfully measured both unconditioned and conditioned salivary reflexes in human volunteers.

Watson himself began to study conditioned reflexes in human beings, although, not surprisingly, he did so with infants rather than adults. The psychiatrist Adolf Meyer, head of the Phipps Psychiatric Clinic at Johns Hopkins, had invited him to set up a laboratory there, and in 1916 Watson began observing infants from birth through much of their first year. World War I interrupted the work, but he got back to it in late 1918.

Watson first sought to discover what unconditioned reflexes infants possess, that is, what stimuli would produce reflexes without any learning process. From simple experiments with infants in the clinic he concluded that there are only a few instinctive reflexes in humans, among them sucking, reaching, and grasping. (A famous photograph shows Watson holding a rod from which a newborn is hanging by one hand like a little monkey.) He also found that infants have three innate emotional responses to certain stimuli: fear at hearing a loud sound or at suddenly being dropped (the infant catches its breath, puckers its lips, and then cries); rage when its arm or head movements are forcibly restrained (it stiffens its body, makes thrashing arm movements, holds its breath, and turns red in the face); and love when stroked, rocked, gently patted, and the like (it gurgles, coos, or smiles).
²⁶