THE ROUGH GUIDE TO PSYCHOLOGYThe behaviourists: John Watson and B.F. Skinner
John Broadus Watson (1878–1958) burst onto the psychology scene in
1913, age 34, when he delivered an iconoclastic lecture at Columbia
University, slamming the nascent science for its past failures and
arguing for a new exclusive focus on the prediction and control of
outwardly observable behaviour – what became known as behav-
iourism. Watson had started his postgraduate studies at the University
of Chicago studying philosophy under John Dewey but, unimpressed,
he changed supervisors and ended up completing his doctoral thesis
on the brain changes associated with learning in rats.
By the time Watson delivered his controversial address at Columbia
University, he was already head of the psychology department at
Johns Hopkins University, having joined the school just five years
earlier. His address was published a few weeks later as an article in the
journal Psychology Review, entitled “Psychology as the Behaviourist
Views it”. Known by many as the “Behaviourist Manifesto”, this article
would come to signify the birth of behaviourism.
Watson’s reputation continued to rise and two years later he was
duly elected president of the American Psychological Association.
However, everything changed in 1920 when it was discovered that
he had been having an affair with his student Rosalie Rayner. Forced
to resign, Watson subsequently married Rayner, and she acted as his
co-author on what has become his most famous and controversial
research – the conditioning of a baby known forever in psychological
mythology as “Little Albert” (see p.110). Although Watson continued
writing about psychology for the general public, he followed his
departure from Johns Hopkins University with a career in advertising
in New York City at J. Walter Thompson, becoming vice-president, and
a millionaire in the process.
Burrhus Frederic Skinner (1904–90) took Watson’s ideas and
ran with them, establishing what would become known as radical
behaviourism. At one time probably the most famous scientist on
the planet, Skinner actually started out his post-grad days with a
brief stint as a writer and poet, but the works of Pavlov and Watson
turned him onto psychology. Eventually he became a professor
at Harvard University, and his name would become associated
in psychological mythology with the eponymous Skinner box, a
chamber for training rats.
Skinner’s radical behaviourism argued that human and animal
actions can be understood entirely in terms of reinforcement schedules
- in other words, whether past behaviours had been followed by
rewarding or punishing consequences. Among Skinner’s most famous
works are his first book The Behaviour of Organisms (1938); Verbal
Behaviour (1957), which drew scorn from the celebrated linguist