More than other intellectual pioneers, John B. Watson’s views have been so simplified and distorted by successive generations of authors that it is difficult to discern his actual message. Watson founded behaviorism in 1913; the difficulty lies in the fact that this doctrine directly contradicts the ancient folk psychology that forms the basis for our languages and for our strongly ingrained beliefs. Most readers, including almost all psychologists, have escaped the difficulties by adopting a simplified and false interpretation of his doctrines and leaving it at that. In fact, most handbooks and textbooks corroborate that falsely caricatured version.

Todd (1994) surveyed textbook treatments of Watson over the decades and found that they became “standardized” after 1960. According to that portrayal, Watson “appeared suddenly in 1913” and promoted a narrow brand of psychology that assumed that all behavior was learned and that led to an unethical “baby-frightening experiment.” Given the mass of work Watson produced studying instinct in animals in the laboratory and the field and the countless infants he worked with in Baltimore, he would have been exasperated, but probably not surprised, to read such a summary.

The purpose of this essay is to correct the record by concentrating on a few major aspects of his work. Many complete accounts appear elsewhere (Buckley 1989; Malone 1990/2004, 2009; Malone and Garcia 2014).

Introduction

John Broadus Watson was born in 1878 on a farm near Greenville, South Carolina. He earned a master’s degree in 1899 at Furman University in Greenville and went on to the prestigious University of Chicago, where he became the youngest recipient of a PhD and remained as an instructor. He soon established a reputation as a researcher of animal behavior, and in 1908 the opportunity of a lifetime arose when he was offered a professorship and department chairmanship at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Watson also became editor of the Psychological Review, affording him tremendous influence over the development of psychology. Malone (2014) noted that he was “…attractive, strong, scientifically accomplished, and forceful” at a time when other psychologists and zoologists “…seemed weak, tentative, mealy mouthed, and ineffectual.”

Watson was combative and articulate, a real fighter who dismissed the psychology that existed at the time. And he was a full professor at Johns Hopkins at the age of 29! He was universally respected as both a researcher and scholar and came with a plan for action, rather than traditional quiet discussion and polite debate.

Watson had begun his career in the study of animal behavior (Malone 2017), both in the laboratory and in the field, including physically demanding research on noddy and sooty terns in the Dry Tortugas. He clearly considered himself a comparative psychologist and 80 years later so did comparative psychologist Donald Dewsbury (1994). But after 1915 his interest centered on child development. His academic career was cut short in 1920, partly due to a scandalous divorce (Buckley 1989; Malone 1990/2004). Isolated from academics, he began a very successful second career in advertising, first with J. Walter Thompson agency and later with William Esty. He continued to lecture occasionally and published frequently, but usually in popular magazines. His influence on modern psychology was evidenced in 2014, when the centennial of his 1913 seminal lectures announcing the founding of behaviorism was celebrated by the Association for Behavior Analysis International (ABAI) and the publication of many testimonial articles. It is commonly known that he established behaviorism, a movement that fractured (or blossomed) into many disparate parts over the years.

Behaviorism

This is a way of treating the entire subject matter of psychology as activity, or behavior. That seems a simple thing to say, but its implications are difficult for many people to grasp and easy to misunderstand. Imagine that common psychological terms like “memory” and “visual images” are replaced by “remembering” and “seeing.” Instead of things like memories and images that are somehow stored in the brain and perceived by an inner ghost, we treat the psyche only as activities and dismiss our childish notions of bodies with computer brains controlled by magic spirits. When Watson proposed that we can study psychology in an objective way, just as we study the rest of the physical world by concentrating on behavior, some listeners and readers were enthralled, but most were shocked. They believed in 1913, as they believe now, that Watson had forbidden the study of the mind!

Watson was not limiting psychology; Hilgard (1987) argued that he was expanding its field of study. Psychology had been obsessed with the analysis of consciousness, restricted to humans able to understand and use language and who were more or less sane. They were trained to “introspect” and describe their conscious experience using labels that they were taught, like “sensation,” “feeling,” and “image.” Behaviorism, on the other hand, applied to children and other nonverbal individuals, as well as subhuman animals and the insane.

Consciousness?

Watson argued that the concept of consciousness derives from the invention of the soul by lazy but clever ancients who discovered that they could manipulate people through fear of the supernatural (1924). In both the 1924 and 1930 editions of Behaviorism, it was “The Advent of the Behaviorists” that first began to set things straight by banishing the soul, consciousness, and other fictional subjective terms and so providing a psychology that is “as objective as baseball.”

The assumption that we have minds that operate our body machines is pure folk psychology. Watson never argued that minds exist but are not objective, so cannot be studied. This misunderstanding has persisted for a century. He actually said that there is no “mind!” There are activities like seeing, hearing, listening, remembering, and imagining, but do they constitute a “mind” that is separate from the body?

Watson emphasized repeatedly that the mind/body distinction is a false one, writing that “Surely no one could ever be bold enough or rash enough to question that there is such a thing as mind or that it is made up of conscious units. And yet this is just what the Behaviorist did” (1926). We do not study the Easter Bunny (or the mind) because there is no profit in studying things that exist only as words. The mind/body distinction was invented by savages and, though incoherent, was passed on as folk wisdom that is believable only because it is drilled into us in our language. The cultural belief in mind and body does not make minds exist.

Similarly, does the word sensation mean anything? If not, why try to analyze our experience into sensations? Or, as Watson urged, should we study the conditions that produce reports of “red” and the range of stimuli to which we are sensitive and the conditions that cause red/green confusions, as he did with a variety of animal subjects (Malone 2017)? Do we really want to hear your description of the feeling of “redness” or my description of the feeling of the chime of a bell? But that was psychology in 1913.

Reactions to Watson’s Behaviorism

No one enjoys watching their life’s work dismissed, especially when the movement responsible gains traction and acclaim as revolutionary. Woodworth (1931) referred to “the outbreak of behaviorism” as if the movement was a disease. Behaviorism was a “youth movement,” and Woodworth disapproved of the fact that Watson “had won the public ear” (1931). He was unhappy with reviews of Behaviorism, Watson’s (1924 1930) flagship book: “The New York Times said of the book, “It marks an epoch in the intellectual history of man.” The Tribune was more effusive: “Perhaps this is the most important book ever written. One stands for an instant blinded with a great hope” (Woodworth 1931). And Woodworth was neither the only critic nor the harshest. Jastrow (1929) was furious, referring to Watson’s “extravagant and irresponsible claims…superman-ic distain for one’s fellow scientists,” coming from someone whose “standing is unchallenged, his ability exceptional, his contribution notable.” That made Watson’s hostility toward conventional psychology even more egregious, as if a “modern Machiavelli” was seeking to confound the world. Watson was using the prestige and authority he had earned to “throw the labors of everyone else into the discard…” (Jastrow 1929).

More recently, Harzem (1993) provided a detailed account of the harsh treatment Watson received from the psychological establishment, the press, and powerful enemies after his sensational divorce in 1920 and his departure from a pinnacle of academic success at Johns Hopkins. Harzem wrote that Watson had “dismissed at one stroke the entire body of literature on experimental psychology… painstakingly built over many decades…the academic reaction to this action was strong.”

Even today, it is difficult to find a textbook or handbook or encyclopedia entry that presents a fair rendition of Watson’s views. The leading biography of Watson is generally well done, but Kerry Buckley (1989) mistitled it Mechanical Man, implying a robotic/erector set orientation. Watson’s behaviorism holds that explanations must deal with our activity (behavior), not with supposed underlying, usually hypothetical machinery. But like the cat attracted to the laser pointer spot, the public is fascinated by colorful brain scans, believing that they somehow explain the workings of the mind. Watson was expert in biology, yet included no illustrations of brain mechanisms, since he knew that a nervous system was not necessary for intelligent behavior and that attributing behavior to the brain was only a distraction. No reader of his books could conclude that Watson denied private experience and treated us as complicated machinery; ironically, that better describes many cognitive theories! Yet, long after his death in 1958, his famous descendent B. F. Skinner showed no hesitation in throwing Watson under the bus while damning him with faint praise (e.g., 1974) and implying that Watson was guilty of the list of such sins (like portraying us as automatons) that are often still attributed to all behaviorists.

Mary Calkins Understood

Mary Calkins (1930) had studied under the great William James in the 1890s, and she correctly understood Watson’s behaviorism. In 1930 she distinguished between “moderate” and “extreme” behaviorism, which roughly corresponds to what Skinner (1945) would call “methodological” and “radical” behaviorism. The former holds that the mind cannot be treated by science because it is subjective, a position never held by Watson or by Skinner, but which is often attributed to both. The latter, radical behaviorism, promoted by Watson and named by Skinner, holds that mental terms are fictional products of folk psychology and that the mind/body distinction is a false one. Calkins was more perceptive than most psychologists who followed, since she recognized that Watson’s behaviorism was the radical kind and she wrote, “Rather, no theory is rightly called behaviorism which does not effectively ‘scrap’ mind and consciousness alike,” published the year she died (1930).

Though Watson claimed in 1936 that he never understood John Dewey’s lectures when a student at Chicago, the professor and the graduate student shared some important beliefs. According to Dewey (1930), modern justification for mind/body dualism comes in part from physics, of all sources, and he probably was thinking of Galileo when he wrote, “Qualities ejected from physics found a home in mind, or consciousness.” This is because Galileo viewed reality solely as physics and dismissed sensations, like “warm” or “bright,” as unreal, since they are subjective. Dewey pointed to “…the authority of physics for taking them to be mental and psychic in nature.” The separation of physics and sensation “…created…the beginnings of modern psychology and impregnated its terminology. Behaviorism is a reaction against the confusion created by this mixture” (Dewey 1930).

So “mind,” “consciousness,” “sensation,” “image,” and other terms are jargon, fictions that have no referent, but they “impregnated” our terminology. If Watson asked you to define those mental terms, he claimed that you would soon be “tongue-tied” since “you don’t know what you mean by them” (1924). Bergmann (1956) famously displayed a complete misunderstanding of Watson’s behaviorism writing, “His premise, that there are no minds, is false and sheer nonsense…when…I speak of minds, these are so-called mental contents, or awarenesses, or phenomenal givennesses…” (Bergmann 1956).

Bergmann confused Watson’s denial of mental causes, like mind, sensation, and the rest, with denial of seeing, imagining, thinking, and other aspects of private experience that were never denied by Watson or by anyone, ever. This is always a contentious subject, because most of us feel that we experience imagery and it’s easy to recoil when someone tells us that there are no “images,” as Watson did and as Skinner later agreed. But even cognitivists agree that there are no “pictures in the head, so there is no argument among most psychologists today (see Malone 2009). There are better descriptors than “phenomenal givennesses,” such as “qualia,” but whatever they’re called, pieces of private experience are not “mental content,” and they’re not causes of observable behavior or speech; they are also behaviors/activities that are part of the fabric of all behavior. How experience “feels” is best left to the humanities to describe.

Nonetheless, the astute Mary Calkins (1930) also had her doubts that behaviorism could replace the study of consciousness wondering, “Is thinking merely a kind of doing?” We wonder (with Watson) what else it could be. Consider first Watson’s bare-bones “theory of learning;” once understood, his views on thinking, emotion, child development, and psychopathology become clear.

Pattern Reactions

In 1919 Watson wrote that we are “what we come with and what we have been through,” and the latter is by far the most important. We come with a set of innate reactions called out by specific stimuli, so touch produces movement, an air puff causes a blink, food in the gut produces peristaltic movements, an object crossing the visual field causes orienting and following, and a sudden noise causes fear reactions. In the womb the infant reacts incessantly, adjusting to constantly changing stimulation, and adjustment continues until death, the final adjustment.

Through life, we adjust, constantly, with the whole body. These pattern reactions comprise three general categories: manual (M), “laryngeal (L),” and visceral (V), corresponding to motor, communicative, and emotional behaviors. Whether calm or agitated, reading or walking, asleep or awake, these three classes of behavior simultaneously are active, though in different degrees. For example, quiet reading may show low levels of manual and visceral behaviors and higher levels of laryngeal activity, as could be symbolized mLv. That could change in a moment if we react to the sound of a scream, becoming MLV.

This principle applies easily to learning, say a baby learning to grasp a bottle, which it does “by the sweat of its brow” (Watson 1919). The shiny object calls out its whole set of reactions – arms, legs, vocal cords, salivation, and stomach secretion – the MLV set. Eventually, the bottle is pushed away or grasped and adjustment is achieved. The evoking stimulus has changed and whatever behavior accomplished that will be likelier to occur when such a stimulus recurs. That behavior will also occur when similar stimuli appear, and this acquisition of old responses to new stimuli forms the basis for all learning and the formation of one’s personality.

Embodiment

Watson repeated often that we adjust with the whole body – “Let me emphasize again – whole” (1924). And we place “…no more emphasis on the brain and spinal cord than upon the striped muscles of the body, the plain muscles of the stomach, the glands, etc…” (1924). In fact, a nervous system merely “speeds up the message,” but the message still gets through in the absence of a nervous system, just more slowly (1924). As a biologist, he also realized that the whole body is alive, therefore not really “mechanical,” in the sense that we usually refer to nonorganic devices such as erector set robots.

Watson’s Behaviorism presents psychology as the activity of the whole body. In current cognitive jargon, that is “the embodiment of mind,” described well by Killeen and Glenberg (2010), who trace the history of the “situating” of mind from Descartes to the present. Watson would be pleased to see that the old “information processing” model is now becoming passé, as we realize that digital computers are awful models for organic intelligence. Louise Barrett (e.g., 2011) showed how powers that were previously ascribed to the brain are actually explained by body structure and the environment, just as Watson and many modern writers argue. As Watson pointed out, there are “…many animals and free swimming plants without nervous systems” (1924, p. 43). This is not to say that a central nervous system is superfluous, but many writers have joined Barrett (2011) in condemning the brain reverence of the past century (e.g., Tennenhouse 2017).

Thinking

Watson wrote that “…man both talks and thinks with his whole body – just as he does everything else with his whole body” (1930). But earlier he had suggested that laryngeal movement was an important physical embodiment of thinking, as well as talking (e.g., 1913), and this was seized by critics eager to show that a functioning larynx was not essential for thought. But even his contemporary critics recognized that interpreting thinking as “behavior” did not necessarily mean activity of the laryngeal vocal apparatus.

Watson dealt with this specific issue in both editions of Behaviorism (e.g., 1924) and earlier when he issued “A Correction of Statement” in 1920 at the Congress of Philosophy that met at Oxford. He wrote, “In advance of any argument I think we can say that he (the behaviorist) has never really held the view that thinking is merely the action of the language mechanisms…Like everything that we do thinking is done with the whole body.” Further, if the body is damaged so that limbs or organs are missing, “he thinks with the remaining parts…thinking, whatever its type, is an integrated bodily process.”

Silent Problem Solving

When problem solving, our behavior is no different from that of a rat learning a maze. Suppose a man is given a gold cigarette case with a secret release mechanism and told that he can have the case if he can figure out how to open it (Watson 1920). We watch as he spends several minutes manipulating it but fails to find the release mechanism. Now we send him away to a room by himself and tell him to come out when he has figured it out. After a few minutes, he comes out and proudly shows that he has figured out the trick to open it. But how did he do it? We didn’t see what he did when he was sent to that room. But we saw him at work for several minutes before entering the room – why would we suppose that he did anything different once we couldn’t observe him? The parallel with observable behavior and thinking is obvious; just because we can’t see or hear the process doesn’t mean that it is different in kind from the problem-solving behavior that we do see.

Other Thinkers

To really understand another’s “thinking,” the behaviorist, “as well as the psychoanalyst… (require) a minute search into the subject’s biography as far back as infancy” (1920). Watson went on to criticize the study of moment-by-moment private experience since that requires introspective training, with the subject repeating the labels for “conscious experience” that were just taught – what else could they be? He continued, “The report by the subject throws very little light.” The same applies when the behaviorist considers his own thinking, which yields little via introspection and really requires examination of one’s own life history. However, we find that most of our past experiences were not verbalized, and the body of that wordless “memory” constitutes the unconscious. Watson suggested that “The theory of the unverbalized in human behavior gives us a natural science way of explaining many things that the Freudians now call “unconscious complexes,” “suppressed wishes” and the like” (1930). This explains Watson’s respect in his early work for the methods of psychoanalysis.

Psychoanalysis

Watson criticized psychoanalysis in his last works, just as he criticized all “subjective psychology.” But for decades he approvingly cited Freud and even published a detailed endorsement of Freudian psychoanalysis in 1916, when Freud had not yet become a household word. This was a scholarly piece, published in The Scientific Monthly, which Watson concluded by arguing that everyone who dares should undergo psychoanalysis. This applies especially to those occupying stressful high-level government or business positions, so that their pressures are not augmented by the stresses of unresolved conflicts arising in childhood and youth that they are incapable of verbalizing! Years before and after that article, Watson referred repeatedly to Freudian psychology, criticizing some of its language, but endorsing it in general. Perhaps surprising, Watson was a conspicuously vocal defender of Freudian psychology, though Freud never realized this (Bergmann 1956).

Psychopathology

The adjustments we make through life produce sets of reactions to the innumerable situations we have encountered, and those reactions are organized so that we can also adjust to new situations. Though “new” unfamiliar circumstances resemble familiar situations to some degree and the more they resemble the familiar, the easier the adjustment. So a person familiar with high school can adjust to college easily, but the adjustment to military life may be more difficult, since it includes stimuli that demand responses we lack. Our learned adjustments total to become our personality, and a well-adjusted personality can deal with new situations that are encountered. But what if the new situation is so novel that it leaves us unable to adjust?

As Watson wrote, “Almost any event or happening might start a change; a flood might do it, a death in the family, an earthquake, a conversion to the church, a breakdown in health, a fist fight – anything that would break up your present habit patterns…” (1930). Recovery from such trauma may be difficult and lengthy, since it requires a rebuilding of personality. We do not learn chemistry or become a piano virtuoso in a day, and reshaping a personality may be more difficult than either, but Watson was sure that it could be done.

Advertising and More

In 1920 Watson was 42 years old and left Baltimore for New York City, banished from academics and embittered; the publicity produced by his divorce and the viciousness of his former wife’s influential family was too much (Buckley 1989). He was introduced to people associated with J. Walter Thompson Advertising Agency and provisionally hired. By 1924 he was a vice president and became a wealthy man, living first on Fifth Avenue and later on a 40-acre “farm” in Westport, Connecticut.

Watson could have dedicated Behaviorism to Pavlov, or Darwin, or Bertrand Russell, but both editions were dedicated to Stanley Resor, who led the J. Walter Thompson Advertising Agency from 1916 to 1955. With his wife’s creative genius behind ad campaigns, Resor built JWT into a worldwide power, eventually setting records in billings. The dedication to Resor owed to that man’s “unfailing interest in both industry and science,” an interest shared by Watson, clearly evidenced in his 1913 manifesto. According to the archives of JWT, “To foster a scientific approach to advertising the company established a Research Department in 1915 and hired eminent academics such as John B, Watson, the founder of behavioral psychology. These professionals added a new dimension to marketing research as J. Walter Thompson applied motivational studies to advertising, initiated the use of scientific and medical findings as a basis for copy, and established the Consumer Panel…” (J. Walter Thompson Archives).

The behavioral approach to advertising was simple and effective. His research with infants suggested that there are three innate emotional (visceral) reactions – fear, rage, and love. The cues related to each of those, plus food, sex, and shelter, can form 720 combinations and should be used in advertising displays as often as possible to attract the viewer’s attention. So Johnson’s baby powder came to signify love, by pairing its image with that of a loving mother patting a healthy, happy baby. Scott’s toilet tissue was paired with imagery of a bowel surgery and the warning that harsh toilet paper can lead to scary results. Further examples appear elsewhere (Malone 1990/2004). Walter Dill Scott had already changed advertising from informative to persuasive. But Watson carried that strategy further than it had been applied, and he is credited for it in advertising circles (Advertising Age1999).

It appears that Watson’s legacy to business was more than just his work with advertising copy. He also produced innovations in personnel selection and management, as noted by DiClemente and Hantula (2000), who scoured the Library of Congress for documents providing a more complete picture of Watson’s business life and legacy. They wrote, “Indeed, the terms ‘behavioral’ and ‘experimental’ are often used to describe Watson and his work, and they have overshadowed his contributions to I-O psychology…many of his ideas endure today…He pioneered much of the work in selecting successful sales people and argued for personality testing in personnel selection before ‘The Big Five’ were introduced to contemporary research…This may be perhaps his lasting legacy….”

Remembered by His Son

Watson’s son James was interviewed by Hannush (1987), providing an account of memories of life with his father, with “no promises about objective observation.”

James remembered his father as having a sense of humor, as charming, and “a delightful person to be around.” He was bright, sociable (yet shy), fastidious, and masculine. James said that “Dad was very concerned with manly activities…courage and personal capabilities…, bravery and manliness, manual work, farm work, carpentry, and all of the manly arts including boxing.”

He showed more affection for animals than for people, and the only times he expressed much anger was when he saw “cruelty or abuse of other people or animals…cruelty to animals and children…That’s something he couldn’t stand.” He always had a huge garden and he was a skilled carpenter, who built bridges, barns, greenhouses, workshops, corrals, riding rings, dams, and stone walls.”

Watson’s so-called “behavioral” method of child raising was totally idiosyncratic and forbade any displays of warmth or emotion; James attributed his difficulties in life and his brother’s suicide to that upbringing, which he thought left them without the self-esteem necessary for a healthy life. He wrote, “Tragically, that’s the antithesis of what Dad expected from practicing those behavioral child raising philosophies.”

Following Rosalie’s death in 1936, Watson was devastated and seemed “confused” and depressed for several years. James was barely a teenager when she died, and his recollections of his father, then in his late fifties, show a less combative man. James could only say that he had “heard about” his father’s competitiveness and aggressiveness in his earlier career, but it evidently diminished after Rosalie’s death.

Cross-References