Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [167]
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:
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 on the readiness with which they lend themselves to interpretation in terms of consciousness.
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.
The time seems to have come when psychology must discard all reference to consciousness; when it need no longer delude itself into thinking that it is making mental states the object of observation. We have become so enmeshed in speculative questions concerning the elements of mind, the nature of conscious content… that I, as an experimental student, feel that something is wrong with our premises and the types of problems which develop from them.
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,