Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [165]
There is perhaps no subject in experimental psychology upon which more time and effort have been expended than upon the conditioned reflex. The acquisition of conditioned reflexes by animals, children, and adults; the relative ease of conditioning of various reflexes; the stability of conditioned reflexes, their extinction and reappearance; the relation of school learning to ease of formation of conditioned reflexes… [have all] been subjected to experimental attack… Many psychologists hoped—and the strict objectivists believed—that the conditioned reflex would prove to be the unit or element out of which all habits are built.18
Mr. Behaviorism: John B. Watson
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