Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [168]
Popular accounts of Watson’s life say that the manifesto catapulted Watson to the presidency of the American Psychological Association in 1915, but a careful review of the evidence by the social psychologist Franz Samelson finds it more likely that he was elected because he was highly visible as the editor of the Psychological Review, was well known to and on good terms with the three members of the nominating committee, and was a representative of the new generation of genuinely experimental psychologists.24
Whatever the reason, he was flying high, but he knew that he had not yet suggested a specific method by which behaviorists could pursue research, and in his presidential address to the APA he addressed this problem.25 He now had something to offer: the conditioned reflex method. Though he knew only the bare outlines of Pavlov’s work, he presented it as a model for behaviorist experimentation not only with animals but with humans. He noted that his student Karl Lashley (who had disproven Pavlov’s physiological theory), had already made a removable fistula that could be installed inside the human cheek; with it, he had successfully measured both unconditioned and conditioned salivary reflexes in human volunteers.
Watson himself began to study conditioned reflexes in human beings, although, not surprisingly, he did so with infants rather than adults. The psychiatrist Adolf Meyer, head of the Phipps Psychiatric Clinic at Johns Hopkins, had invited him to set up a laboratory there, and in 1916 Watson began observing infants from birth through much of their first year. World War I interrupted the work, but he got back to it in late 1918.
Watson first sought to discover what unconditioned reflexes infants possess, that is, what stimuli would produce reflexes without any learning process. From simple experiments with infants in the clinic he concluded that there are only a few instinctive reflexes in humans, among them sucking, reaching, and grasping. (A famous photograph shows Watson holding a rod from which a newborn is hanging by one hand like a little monkey.) He also found that infants have three innate emotional responses to certain stimuli: fear at hearing a loud sound or at suddenly being dropped (the infant catches its breath, puckers its lips, and then cries); rage when its arm or head movements are forcibly restrained (it stiffens its body, makes thrashing arm movements, holds its breath, and turns red in the face); and love when stroked, rocked, gently patted, and the like (it gurgles, coos, or smiles).26
But since these, in his opinion, made up the sum total of innate human responses—later research would find otherwise—his larger aim was to show how virtually all other human behaviors and emotional reactions were built up of conditioned reflexes. He began by enunciating a Pavlovian hypothesis about emotional responses:
When an emotionally exciting object stimulates the subject simultaneously with one not emotionally exciting, the latter may in time (often after one such joint stimulation) arouse the same emotional reaction as the former.27
To verify this hypothesis, in the winter of 1919–1920 Watson and a student of his, Rosalie Rayner, conducted what became one of the most famous experiments in the history of psychology, an attempt to produce a conditioned fear response in an eleven-month-old boy they called, in their report of the work, Albert B.28 When Albert was nine months old, they placed a white rat near him, and he showed no fear; he did, however, react with fear when a steel bar was banged with a hammer just behind his head. Allowing two months to pass so that the experiences would fade, Watson and Rayner then began the experiment.