Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [170]
During the first decade of his banishment from the academic world, Watson continued to write books and magazine articles about behaviorism and child rearing. (He advocated strict behaviorist methods, with all emotionality and affection banned.) But he did no more psychological research and no longer played a role in the field, although his expanded thoughts about behaviorism, presented in his books, were adopted by some of his former colleagues and entered behaviorist thinking.
And popular thinking. Watson’s psychology, attributing almost all human behavior to stimulus-response conditioning, was a simple, convenient rebuttal of the hereditarian views of Galton’s followers and appealed broadly to liberals and egalitarians—an irony, since Watson was politically conservative. In his popular writings, he waxed messianic: behaviorism could create a better world by scientifically engineering the development of personality. In 1924, in Behaviorism, he made what is probably his most famous and often-quoted statement:
Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select—doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors.29
From 1930 on, Watson had nothing to do with psychology except as it applied to advertising. He and Rosalie settled into the good life on a large estate in Connecticut, where in his leisure hours he played gentleman farmer. But after some tranquil years tragedy struck: Rosalie contracted dysentery, grew steadily worse despite treatment, and died in her mid-thirties. Watson, fifty-eight, was shattered. He continued to work in advertising (he had recently moved to the William Esty agency), but his only real interest lay in puttering about on his farm. There were always women in his life, but he never came close to marrying again. As he aged, he became careless about himself, dressed poorly, grew fat, and was something of a solitary.
In 1957, when Watson was nearly eighty, the American Psychological Association notified him that it was awarding him its gold medal for his contributions to psychology. Astonished and pleased, he went to New York with his sons to receive the award, but at the last moment, afraid that after almost forty years of exile he would burst into tears at the ceremony, he sent one of his sons to stand in for him. The citation accompanying the medal read:
To John B. Watson, whose work has been one of the vital determinants of the form and substance of modern psychology. He initiated a revolution in psychological thought and his writings have been the point of departure for continuing lines of fruitful research.
It was a gracious tribute. But in fact Watson had oversimplified or overstated many issues, and other behaviorists later had to elaborate on and qualify them. Almost no one today holds as extreme an environmental position as he did, nor does anyone now recommend withholding affection from children and rearing them by frigid behavioral rules. The Pavlovian conditioning that he made the keystone of his system proved not to be the only significant kind; later behaviorists added to it another major model called “operant” conditioning. Most important, at the very time that Watson received the gold medal it was becoming clear that chains of S-R