John B. Watson

John Watson was born in South Carolina in 1878. He went to Furman University when he was 16 years old. He received his PhD in psychology in 1903. When Watson had graduated from John Hopkins University he then realized he wanted to get involved in the behaviorism in psychology. Watson started to look at animals and humans behaviorism. He reflexes what Ivan Pavlov had developed and applied it to the study of behavior. Watson was looking at how humans and animals act different in different…

In Ben Harris’ article, “What Happened to Little Albert?”, Harris explains of how John B. Watson’s famous classic conditioning experiment involving the infant Albert B. had different details than what was referenced and recorded and how the misinformation caused mistakes in other future psychologists’ research. After 60 years if Watson and his graduate student, Rosalie Rayner’s publication of the their trials with little Albert, many undergraduate textbooks that pertain to abnormal,…

JOHN B. WATSON’S EXPERIMENT ON LITTLE ALBERT According to the Oxford dictionary, behaviourism is “the theory that human and animal behavior can be explained in terms of conditioning, without appeal to thoughts or feelings…” John B. Watson was a psychologist who played an important role in the development of behaviourism. This essay will describe his theory of learning in detail, his experiment on little Albert and the ethical acceptability of this experiment. Watson believed that psychologists…

Behaviourism in Psychology is defined as an experimental branch of natural science (Watson, 1913). The goal of such investigation is to predict and control the behaviours of humans (Watson, 1913). Psychology itself is a study of behaviour within both animals and humans and usually the behaviour of humans is based on the studies conducted with animals (Watson,1913). (Cherry, 2016a) in an overview article throughout it pointed out that the behaviour is developed through conditioning, which is…

Cherie O’Boyle’s book, History of Psychology: A Cultural Perspective, has offered many interesting insights in to the field of psychology. The subfield of the discipline that sparks my curiosity the most has been Behaviorism. We were tasked as a class to interview Psychologist that worked in a field we may be interested in, and I chose to interview Dr. Robert Herdegen. Dr. Herdegen is a professor at Hampden-Sydney College in Farmville, Va. He specializes in general experimental psychology, with…

topic. John B. Watson noted this theory, and wondered if it was possible to classically condition human beings. Watson chose to classically condition a healthy infant, who almost never cried, so that the child would not have witnessed any negative experience prior to this study. Because Albert never cried, it was decided that Watson would classically condition him to emote fear. The boy, Albert, was classically conditioned so that whenever he saw something white, he became afraid. Watson…

especially children. There has also been many debates into Albert’s true identity and his health during the time, Watson reported the child’s health as ‘healthy and normal’ however it has since been debated by Beck, Levinson, and Irons (2009) that Albert’s identity is that of Douglas Merritte (1919-1925) a child who died of hydrocephalus. (Fridlund, 2012) Which would question why Watson would use a child with a neurological impairment in his research, while further jeopardizing the conclusions…

In the study, there is charge to anamnesis the experiment performed by John B. Watson and Rosalie Rayner in 1920. Watson adduce that cerebral researches should be based alone on credible behaviors and due to this viewpoint, his analysis was accompanied with conditioning of fear (learned). He accustomed aloft conditioning via accepted procedures including affiliation of stimuli, and analysis accountable alleged by him for the purpose of which was an 11-month old child called Albert. Albert was an…

One of the most obvious ones is B. F. Skinner. Skinner had originally wanted to be a writer and majored in English. He read an article that had been published in the Times Magazine about Pavlov. Skinner became a huge fan and had the article signed by Pavlov a couple years later. They…

adapt to changing environments (Skinner, 1938). Learning theories evolved to separate into two perspectives. First, the behaviourist perspective argues that learning be studied by observation and manipulation of stimulus-response associations. John Watson, who argued that psychology should be the study of observable phenomena, not the study of consciousness, or the mind, first articulated behaviourist perspective in 1913.…