Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [166]
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:
At Chicago, I first began a tentative formulation of my later point of view. I never wanted to use human subjects. I hated to serve as a subject. I didn’t like the stuffy, artificial instructions given to subjects. I always was uncomfortable and acted unnaturally. With animals I was at home. I felt that, in studying them, I was keeping close to biology with my feet on the ground. More and more the thought presented itself: Can’t I find out by watching their behavior everything that the other students are finding out by using O’s? *21
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