Watson Behaviorism Quotes

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. (1930)

Science is opposed to theological dogmas because science is founded on fact. To me, the universe is simply a great machine which never came into being and never will end. The human being is no exception to the natural order. Man, like the universe, is a machine. Nothing enters our minds or determines our actions which is not directly or indirectly a response to stimuli beating upon our sense organs from without. Owing to the similarity of our construction and the sameness of our environment, we respond in like manner to similar stimuli, and from the concordance of our reactions, understanding is born. In the course of ages, mechanisms of infinite complexity are developed, but what we call 'soul' or 'spirit,' is nothing more than the sum of the functionings of the body. When this functioning ceases, the 'soul' or the 'spirit' ceases likewise. I expressed these ideas long before the behaviorists, led by Pavlov in Russia and by Watson in the United States, proclaimed their new psychology. This apparently mechanistic conception is not antagonistic to an ethical conception of life.

In behaviorism, an infant's talents and abilities didn't matter because there was no such thing as a talent or an ability. Watson had banned them from psychology, together with other contents of the mind, such as ideas, beliefs, desires, and feelings. They were subjective and unmeasurable, he said, and unfit for science, which studies only objective and measurable things. To a behaviorist, the only legitimate topic for psychology is overt behavior and how it is controlled by the present and past environment. (There is an old joke in psychology: What does a behaviorist say after making love? "It was good for you; how was it for me?")

As the spectacular triumphs of technology mounted, something else was happening: old sources of belief came under siege. Nietzsche announced that God was dead. Darwin didn’t go as far but did make it clear that, if we were children of God, we had come to be so through a much longer and less dignified route than we had imagined, and that in the process we had picked up some strange and unseemly relatives. Marx argued that history had its own agenda and was taking us where it must, irrespective of our wishes. Freud taught that we had no understanding of our deepest needs and could not trust our traditional ways of reasoning to uncover them. John Watson, the founder of behaviorism, showed that free will was an illusion and that our behavior, in the end, was not unlike that of pigeons. And Einstein and his colleagues told us that there were no absolute means of judging anything in any case, that everything was relative. The thrust of a century of scholarship had the effect of making us lose confidence in our belief systems and therefore in ourselves. Amid the conceptual debris, there remained one sure thing to believe in—technology.

This was John Watson, a founder of behaviorism, writing around 1925. Behaviorism, with its notion that behavior is completely malleable, that it can be shaped into anything in the right environment, dominated American psychology in the midtwentieth century;

As for the public, the PR man, like the advertising expert and others who deal with people in the lump, including a number of would-be-statesmen and redeemers-at-large, conceive of that body as composed of non-ideographic units which are to be regarded not as ourselves but as, ultimately, gadgets of electrochemical circuitry operated by a push-button system of remote control. In fact, in dealing with the public in a purely technological society, the very notion of self is bypassed by various appeals to an undifferentiated unconscious, such appeals often having little or no relation to the vendible object or idea; in this connection history gives us to contemplate the fact that the psychologist J.B. Watson, the founder of American behaviorism, wound up in the advertising business. So history may become parable.

Arthur Kleinman explains, “We learn how to identify and react to pain, how to label and communicate dysfunction” (Klienman, **). He explains that every reaction and normative behavior is based on a set of culturally defined ideals, especially in explanation of illness and disease. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson agree that autobiography is a subjective act based on historical and cultural frameworks (Smith and Watson, **). This truth is evident in symptoms, as Klienman point s out. He explains, “The meanings of symptoms are standardized ‘truths’ in a local cultural system, inasmuch as the groups’ categories are projected onto the world, then called natural because they are found there

Question: What is it, to walk with God? Answer: Walking with God imports five things: 1. Walking as under God's eye. Noah reverenced God. A godly man sets himself as in God's presence, knowing that his judge is looking on: "I have set the Lord always before me" (Psalm 16:8). David's eyes were here. 2. The familiarity and intimacy which the soul has with God. Friends walk together and console themselves with one another. The godly make known their requests to God and he makes known his love to them. There is a sweet fellowship between God and his people: "Our fellowship (koinonia) is with the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ" (1 John 1:3). 3. Walking above the earth. A godly man is elevated above all sublunary objects. The person who walks with God must ascend very high. A dwarf cannot walk among the stars, nor can a dwarfish, earthly soul walk with God. 4. Visible piety. Walking is a visible posture. Grace must be conspicuous to the onlookers. He who reveals something of God in his behavior, walks with God. He shines forth in biblical conduct. 5. Continued progress in grace. It is not only a step but a walk. There is a going on towards maturity. A godly man does not sit down in the middle of the way but goes on until he comes to the "end of his faith" (1 Pet. 1:9). Though a good man may be out of the path, he is not out of the way. He may through infirmity step aside (as Peter did)—but he recovers by repentance and goes on in progressive holiness: "The righteous will hold to their ways, and those with clean hands will grow stronger" (Job 17:9).

I suppose if one takes into account the lack of an ethics committee to oversee my dad’s childrearing methodologies, the experiments started innocently enough. In the early part of the twentieth century, the behaviorists Watson and Rayner, in an attempt to prove that fear was a learned behavior, exposed nine-month-old “Little Albert” to neutral stimuli like white rats, monkeys, and sheaves of burned newsprint. Initially, the baby test subject was unperturbed by the series of simians, rodents, and flames, but after Watson repeatedly paired the rats with unconscionably loud noises, over time “Little Albert” developed a fear not only of white rats but of all things furry. When I was seven months, Pops placed objects like toy police cars, cold cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon, Richard Nixon campaign buttons, and a copy of The Economist in my bassinet, but instead of conditioning me with a deafening clang, I learned to be afraid of the presented stimuli because they were accompanied by him taking out the family .38 Special and firing several window-rattling rounds into the ceiling, while shouting, “Nigger, go back to Africa!” loud enough to make himself heard over the quadraphonic console stereo blasting “Sweet Home Alabama” in the living room. To this day I’ve never been able to sit through even the most mundane TV crime drama, I have a strange affinity for Neil Young, and whenever I have trouble sleeping, I don’t listen to recorded rainstorms or crashing waves but to the Watergate tapes.

Incompatible with one another (and often at odds with themselves), the three were widely seen as plotting the course of modernity toward a future without reli- gion and indeed without normative ethics. Today these threats, if not vanished, are diminished, almost to mockeries of their former magnitude and hubris. The Soviet embodiment of the Marxist idea has collapsed, as untenable politically and economically as apartheid proved to be. Logical positivism is now a historical cu- riosity. Philosophers who want to dig up the roots of our current philosophical plantings often find it necessary to explain just what positivism was and tell the story of the rival ideas that motivated otherwise intelligent thinkers to suppose that verificationism circumscribed the possibilities of meaning. And, of course, the doctrinaire behaviorism of Watson and Skinner that once proposed to do psy- chology without any idea of minds or thoughts, intentions or even dispositions, and dismissed as outmoded the ideals of human freedom and dignity, is itself a thing of the past, quaint as the brass microscopes that might decorate an antique shop window, no longer proposed for serious scientific use.

During this psychological transformation, the ordinary anchors of everyday life fell away for many working Americans. Family, community, tradition, and certainty were shaken apart by the economic force of the new—urban, postindustrial, and corporate—brand of capitalism. The sense of a person's self, which had previously been socially defined, moved into the interior of each individual's life and mind. Gradually, another concept of the self emerged as capitalism moved into this new stage, and sales or leisured consumption replaced the older emphasis on production and honest, hard work. This transition marked a shift toward a new type of person, one “predicated on the effectiveness of sales technique or the attractiveness of the individual salesperson. Personal magnetism replaced craftsmanship; technique replaced moral integrity.”85 The pervasive anxiety of this era led Americans to look for leadership anywhere they could find it. Three new areas promised relief. First, a new, popular psychology of personality offered to teach Americans how to transform themselves into people with “an intensely private sense of well being.” Self-pleasure and self-satisfaction now became the purpose of individual existence rather than a by-product of a well-lived life, and this ideology conveniently dovetailed with the new consumerism.86 Not surprisingly, then, a second transformative force emerged as the emerging field of advertising co-opted psychology and drafted psychologists like John B. Watson, A. A. Brill, and Sigmund Freud's brilliant nephew Edward Bernays into its well-paying service. On the advice and example of these men, copywriters began to suggest to consumers that they could transform their position in the social and business hierarchy by buying and displaying the correct products and behaviors. The new generation of ads was highly motivational.

Today, evolutionary psychologists say Watson misinterpreted his Little Albert experiment: the real reason Albert developed such a profound phobia of rats was not because behavioral conditioning is so intrinsically potent but because the human brain has a natural—and evolutionarily adaptive—predisposition to fear small furry things on the basis of the diseases they carry. (I explore this at greater length in chapter 9.)

America’s environmentally oriented social scientists did not need the mailed fist of a Stalin to triumph over their opponents. With such forceful intellects as [Franz] Boas, [A. L.] Kroeber, [Margaret] Mead, [Ruth] Benedict, [John B.] Watson, and [B. F.] Skinner fighting their cause, they sailed to victory, greatly aided by the political winds at their rear. Heady with success, they made ever wilder claims for the environment’s molding power over humans—and made ever more disdainful dismissals of genetic contributions. As with many who announce new concepts about human behavior, the innovators, emboldened by the cordial reception their insights received, leap from moderate positions of partial environmental influence to sweeping pronouncements of total governance. And if the founders themselves didn’t raise the stakes in this way, their disciples were sure to do it for them. This dynamic held true for the theories of Freud, Boas, and Watson. In the latter case, Watson did the escalating himself. While Watson’s writings continued to acknowledge inherited traits, his euphoria at having unlocked the secrets of human behavior moved him to make the now famous 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, vocation, and race of his ancestors.

The first educational.Psychologist EL Thorndike, developed an understanding of behavior in the 1920s that could be very useful for parents. He called it the "law of reinforcement". Later, the concept became the basis for a branch of psychology known as behaviorism, which I resoundingly reject. Behaviorism was described by BF Skinner and JB Watson and includes the unbelievable notion that the mind does not exist, Period.One of my college textbooks referred to behaviorism as "psychology out of its mind." Well said! It perceives the human brain as a simple switchboard connecting stimuli coming in with responses going out.

The first educational psychologist, EL Thorndike, developed an understanding of behavior in the 1920s that could be very useful for parents. He called it the "law of reinforcement". Later, the concept became the basis for a branch of psychology known as behaviorism, which I resoundingly reject. Behaviorism was described by BF Skinner and JB Watson and includes the unbelievable notion that the mind does not exist, Period.One of my college textbooks referred to behaviorism as "psychology out of its mind." Well said! It perceives the human brain as a simple switchboard connecting stimuli coming in with responses going out.

Boundaries are not things you try to force other people to do. Since you can’t control anyone’s behavior but your own, you can’t create a boundary that will only be effective if other people change.

The behaviorist psychologist B. F. Skinner designed a special crib for his daughter, and there’s a persistent myth that she grew up psychologically damaged and eventually committed suicide. It’s completely false; she grew up healthy and happy. On the other hand, consider the psychologist John B. Watson, known as the founder of behaviorism. He advised parents, “When you are tempted to pet your child, remember that mother love is a dangerous instrument,” and he shaped views on child-rearing for the first half of the twentieth century. He believed that his approach was in the best interests of the child, but all of his own children suffered from depression as adults, with more than one attempting suicide and one succeeding.