Personal life. John B. Watson’s personal life shaped his professional work in many ways. Kerry Buckley’s biography, “Mechanical man: John Broadus Watson and the beginnings of behaviorism,” highlights important events in Watson’s personal and professional life and their impact on his development and perspective. Watson was born in South Carolina to Pickens Butler and Emma Watson. His mother identified as Baptist, and was very religious. She named him after a Baptist minister with the hope that it would inspire him to become affiliated with the clergy. Watson ultimately identified as Atheist, perhaps due to the extensive, harsh religious training he received during his childhood. When Watson was 13 years old his father, who suffered from alcohol abuse, left him and his mother. Prior to leaving, his father’s presence was unpredictable and often volatile. His mother decided they would move to a more urban area so that Watson could have access to better opportunities.
Growing up in poverty, Watson realized that college was the key to success, however, his academic performance in high school was quite poor. Additionally, he was arrested twice in high school—once for fighting, and once for discharging a firearm within city limits. Despite being a relatively poor student, he was accepted into Furman University at age 16. He managed to complete his bachelor’s and master’s degrees by age 21. Shortly after the death of his mother, his only remaining tie to the south, he went on the University of Chicago to earn his Ph.D. in 1903. In 1908, Watson accepted a faculty position at Johns Hopkins University and became chair of the psychology department. He remained in that position until 1920, when he was asked to leave due to the publicity surrounding his affair with a graduate student. He was married to Mary Ickes at the time, and when she became aware of his relationship with his graduate student, Rosalie Rayner, they divorced. He married Rayner in 1921 after leaving the University of Chicago and finalizing his divorce from Ickes (Buckley, 1989).
Professional life. John B. Watson is well-known in the field of psychology for his impact on modern behaviorism. While strides toward the development of a behavioral perspective were already being made, it was Watson who championed the behaviorism movement as it is known today. Watson disagreed with both the popular concepts of structuralism and functionalism claiming that neither were effective as a science and that it was time for psychology to be recognized as a natural science (Moore, 2011). He argued that psychology should not focus on internal processes because there was no such thing as unobservable behavior. This viewpoint has for the most part been retracted in the current view of behaviorism and its application to clinical psychology, however, this suggestion laid the foundation for present day behaviorism. His belief was that psychology should have behavior as its subject matter, rather than consciousness since that kind of abstract concept cannot be directly observed and measured. In his 1913 address, “Psychology as the Behaviorist Views it” he concisely defines his view of behaviorism and its application to psychology:
Psychology as the behaviorist views it is a purely objective experimental branch of natural science. Its theoretical goal is the prediction and control of behavior. Introspection forms no essential part of its methods, nor is the scientific value of its data dependent upon the readiness with which they lend themselves to interpretation in terms of consciousness. The behaviorist, in his efforts to get a unitary scheme of animal response, recognizes no dividing line between man and brute. The behavior of man, with all of its refinement and complexity, forms only a part of the behaviorist's total scheme of investigation. (p. 158)
This statement largely reflects the modern view of behaviorism and highlights the current view that psychology should be grounded in empirical methods and objective measurement. Throughout his career he took on the tasks of explaining many phenomena such as language, speech, memory, and emotion. In general, he took a stance against understanding human behavior using abstract or unobservable constructs, and therefore explained these concepts in terms of their physiological properties.
As discussed in Kerry Buckley’s “Mechanical man: John Broadus Watson and the beginnings of behaviorism,” Watson was the first to apply Ivan Pavlov’s theory of conditioning to human phenomena. He suggested that there are three unlearned emotional reactions, fear, rage, and love. For example, he suggested that there are two unconditioned stimuli that evoke fear, loss of physical support and loud noises. He argued that other fears, such as fear of certain animals, are learned. He used similar logic to explain how unconditioned and conditioned stimuli contribute to the human experiences of rage and love. Watson’s “Little Albert” experiment (1920) attempted to display the application of classical conditioning to fear in a young infant. There were ethical and methodological aspects of the study that made the experiment controversial. For example, some have suggested that Little Albert had cognitive deficits that impacted him from being able to effectively participate in the study and that he was not properly “deconditioned” following the experiment. Moreover, some have suggested that Little Albert’s fear responses to the conditioned and unconditioned stimuli were indistinguishable and that Watson was unable to prove the classical conditioning of fear (Buckley, 1989).
In addition to theories on these aspects of psychology, he often wrote about child rearing and developmental psychology from a behavioral perspective. He suggested that children should be treated like little adults and that providing too much affection or providing them with too much comfort would be harmful for their transition into adulthood when such expectations would not be fulfilled by others. In regard to the nature and nurture debate within developmental psychology, he argued that lived experiences had greater impact on emotional wellbeing than inherited traits. Although his view that children should not be comforted is no longer a common position of behaviorists, his suggestion that individuals’ histories impact their psychological wellbeing and future functioning is still accepted.
Methods
A psychobiographical analysis of John B. Watson’s personal and professional life will be conducted through qualitative analysis of works reflecting each of these areas. Watson’s personal life will be assessed using Kerry Buckley’s biography, “Mechanical man: John Broadus Watson and the beginnings of behaviorism.” Moreover, his perspective on psychology will be analyzed using his 1913 address, “Psychology as the behaviorist views it.” In order to draw parallels between his personal and professional life, data in the form of themes will be determined by three raters from each of these sources. Specific passages related to key events will be selected from each source and independent raters will read the passages. The raters will then identify relevant themes for each passage. Themes identified as being associated with each passage will be analyzed for similarities across raters. Based on the similarities across raters, broad themes will be assigned to each passaged. The final themes from each life area will then be assessed in terms of their direct and indirect implications on the other area. In other words, each theme will be discussed as it applies to Watson’s personal and professional life.
Results
Three raters independently reviewed an empirical work of Watson’s and passages from a biography written about his personal and professional lives. Each rater identified themes within each passage that served as summaries of various events experienced by Watson. Raters first analyzed Kerry Buckley’s chapter Background for Behaviorism: Growing up in the New South, 1878 to 1900 in his biography, “Mechanical man: John Broadus Watson and the beginnings of behaviorism.” They identified themes related to his personal life based on this chapter. Raters then analyzed Kerry Buckley’s chapters Crying in the Wilderness: The Advent of Behaviorism, 1913 to 1917 and Conditioned Emotional Reactions: Fear, Rage, and Love in Baltimore to identify themes related to Watson’s professional development and work. They also analyzed “Psychology as the behaviorist views it” and identified themes related to his perspective on psychology. After compiling a list of themes from all independent raters, broad topics were selected based on commonalities between each raters’ themes. Refer to Table 1 for broad themes related to Watson’s personal and professional life.