Watson’s behaviorism

John B. Watson applied Pavlov’s dog conditioning experiments to humans. He proposed that psychology should “discard all reference to consciousness” and “no longer delude itself into thinking that it is making mental states the object of observation” [18, p. 7].

From Watson’s perspective, human behavior is driven by the same stimulus-response connection that causes a leg to kick when the knee is tapped by a hammer. Thus, psychology should be “a science of behavior” that never uses “the terms consciousness, mental states, mind, content, will, imagery, and the like” [18, p. 9]. In other words, human behavior is no more than stimulus-response connections that Watson could observe, predict, measure, and control. Training a child is the same as training a dog.

Baby Albert

Watson demonstrated how classical conditioning elicits an emotional response by banging a steel bar behind the head of 9-month-old Albert whenever Albert reached for a favorite pet rat. The loud noise caused “little Albert” to jump violently, fall, and bury his head into a mattress.

After a few weeks of ringing Albert’s nerves whenever Albert saw the rat, Watson removed the pipe but continued exposing the rat to Albert. Once enamored with the rat, Albert now feared the rat. Each time he saw the rat, Albert cried and attempted to escape.

Watson also demonstrated how the conditioned response generalized to similar objects. He showed how Albert had also developed a fear of a rabbit, a dog, a sealskin coat, and a Santa Claus mask [19, pp. 151-152]. Watson then claimed he could use S-R psychology to turn any baby into whatever he wanted [5].

Watson lost his standing in the academic community shortly after the “little Albert” experiment [19]. He found success as an advertising executive, conditioning people “to buy all sorts of unnecessary but appropriately associated items” [14]. Watson also wrote popular books about raising children.

Watson’s impact

Watson’s research held little direct relevance to academic learning theory [2]. But he was influential in redefining psychology from a study of consciousness to a study of behavior. This established conditioning as a strategy for studying behavior and behavior change and raising children in the 1930s and 1940s as a matter of habit training [14].

Skinner’s radical behaviorism

Extrapolating from experiments he conducted with pigeons, B.F. Skinner demonstrated how learning occurs as a consequence of behavior. Whereas classical conditioning is learning by association (SàR), operant conditioning influences learning and behavior using rewards and punishments (RàS).

Skinner proposed that a person’s behavior is instrumental in determining if learning occurs [20]. In other words, if a person experiences a pleasant outcome from a behavior, that person is likely to repeat that behavior. Similarly, if a person’s actions result in an unpleasant outcome, the person is less likely to repeat the behavior. Skinner’s framework allowed him to even explain the complexities of the personality as an individual’s history of reinforcements [4].

Skinner’s work on operant conditioning resulted in radical behaviorism, which held that external events drive all behavior. Skinner did not dismiss internal states, like feelings, emotions, and thoughts. However, he argued that “internal states are not the causes of our behavior but one of its results” [14, p. 17]. In other words, human thinking processes are not important in learning.