John Watson

place in history. Behaviorism took over the world in the 1900’s, more specifically the world of psychology, and the man who led this take over was John Watson. Watson is the official founder of behaviorism because he fought to establish not only himself but also his new form of psychology (Schultz & Schultz, 2011). Many people were fascinated with Watson and his ideas,…

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,…

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…

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…

John Broadus Watson was an American psychologist who established that psychology should study only observable behavior, he was determined to demonstrate that fears could be conditioned, through a processes involving an association of stimuli. Watson believed that the goal of psychology must be to study something that is definable and observable. He was doing his research on conditioning of fear in humans. Watson had already done research to prove that young children are not naturally afraid of…

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…

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…

objective measure, social learning, and reductionism (the notion that human behavior can be explained by breaking it down into smaller elements), (Khan, 2013; McLeod, 2013). Ivan Pavlov, John Watson, Edward Thorndike, and B.F. Skinner figure among some of the key theorist of this approach, (McLeod, 2013; Ormrod, 2012; Watson, 1999). Two of the most well-know theories of behaviorism are classical (or respondent) conditioning and operant conditioning (also…