John B. Watson

American psychologist (1878–1958) who founded behaviourism and, in a public career of barely twelve years, changed what American psychology took itself to be doing. He grew up poor in South Carolina, took his doctorate at Chicago in 1903 with a study of the learning of rats and the growth of their nervous systems, and moved to Johns Hopkins in 1908. His 1913 lecture Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It — the behaviourist manifesto — argued that psychology had wasted forty years on introspection and on consciousness, that it should define itself as a purely objective, experimental branch of natural science whose goal is the prediction and control of behaviour, and that no line divides man from animal in the data it may use.

The books that followed set out the programme: Behavior: An Introduction to Comparative Psychology (1914), Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist (1919) and the popular Behaviorism (1924), whose most quoted passage offers, given a dozen healthy infants and his own world to bring them up in, to make any one of them into any specialist one might choose — a boast he immediately qualified in the next sentence as going beyond the facts, though it is rarely quoted with the qualification.

In 1920, with his assistant Rosalie Rayner, he conditioned a fear of a white rat in an eleven-month-old child known as Little Albert, an experiment cited ever since as a demonstration of learned emotion and as an example of what research ethics later came to forbid. The affair with Rayner ended his university career that same year; he spent the rest of his working life in advertising at J. Walter Thompson.

His Psychological Care of Infant and Child (1928), which advised parents against kissing and embracing their children, was repudiated later by the profession and, publicly, by his own family.