A Hundred Years Away (1913-2013) from the Beginning of Watsonian Behaviorism (original) (raw)
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WHEN A CLEAR STRONG VOICE WAS NEEDED: A RETROSPECTIVE REVIEW OF WATSON'S (1924/1930) BEHAVIORISM
Despite the attention given John B. Watson during the century since he introduced behaviorism, there remain questions about what he really contributed. He is still appropriately criticized for his arrogant selfpromotion and especially for his perceived emphasis on a simple S-R reflexology. However, we argue that the former was necessary at the time and that criticism of Watson on the second count only diverts attention from the genuine contributions that he did make. In support of these contentions we examine several aspects of his contributions that warrant clarification, namely, his promotion of applied comparative psychology, his views on the nature of mind, his originality, criticism from and respect afforded by contemporaries, his relation to recent interest in "the embodiment of mind," his treatment of thinking, and his appreciation of Freud's work. We organize our discussion around specific chapters of the two editions of Behaviorism, but in support of our arguments we include publications of Watson that are less well known. Those works develop some important points that are only briefly treated in both editions of Behaviorism.
FROM WATSON’S 1913 MANIFESTO TO COMPLEX HUMAN BEHAVIOR
Watson’s 1913 “behaviorist manifesto” had little effect in the years immediately following its publication. The inconspicuous but indefatigable rise of behaviorism was more of a barbarian invasion than a revolution, and the manifesto played the role of crystallizing sentiment and unifying diverse and tentative efforts under one flag. It also provided traditional psychology, the “low road,” with a favorite punching bag to spar with for mainstream favoritism, a situation which has not changed now a century later. Watson’s views often are misrepresented as naïve and simplistic and as a mere extrapolation of findings based on crude experiments with animals. But it was the objective methods of animal research, not the specific findings, that he sought to apply to human research. Critics and followers alike have often minimized his struggle as Watson tried to provide a psychology that could really account for complex human behavior. In this respect, one hundred years after the publication of the manifesto, behaviorism has yet to fulfill Watson’s promises for a genuinely scientific understanding of our complex subject matter.
An Updated Bibliography of John B. Watson
Perspectives on Behavior Science, 2020
is a significant figure in the history of psychology. Although some scholars contest the thesis that he was the creator of the behaviorist movement, he was undoubtedly a great popularizer of behaviorism, and many of the psychologists who proposed new varieties of behaviorism admit that they were directly influenced by him. Most psychologists, and probably all behavior analysts, read and heard about Watson at some point in their apprenticeship. Nevertheless, Watson's works are usually misunderstood, mainly because most of his publications are unknown to the majority of psychologists and historians of psychology. The publication of a more complete and precise bibliography may help to solve this problem. This article presents an updated bibliography of John B. Watson's published works; it contains 209 entries, including 50 new ones compared with the last, and at that point the most developed, bibliography available. The bibliography we present here is offered to assist researchers, historians, and other scholars in taking a broader view of Watson's behaviorism and its impact on academic and lay audiences. Keywords John B. Watson. bibliography. classical behaviorism John B. Watson (1878-1958) was one of the best-known psychologists of the early 20 th century and one of the most influential psychologists of his generation (Buckley, 1989). During the 1990s, he was ranked among the 10 most notable psychologists by historians of psychology and chairpersons of psychology departments in American universities (Korn, Davis, & Davis, 1991). In the 2000s, he was ranked 17 th among the 99 most eminent psychologists of the 20 th century (
La Psique como Comportamiento A Psique como Comportamento
2013
Behaviorism has argued that behavior is the Psyche and the subject matter of psychology. Although, some scientists had done empirical work with objective methods before 1913, the year in which John B. Watson published his manifesto, he was the first one to attempt a systematization of behavior as the Psyche, that is, as psychology’s subject matter. In this text, I outline Watson’s notion of behavior to compare it with two other forms of behaviorism: Skinner’s radical behaviorism and molar behaviorism. The purpose of the paper is to illustrate how the concept of behavior has been and is changing.
History of Psychology, 2019
What do we know about the history of John Broadus Watson's behaviorism outside of its American context of production? In this article, using the French example, we propose a study of some of the actors and debates that structured this history. Strangely enough, it was not a "classic" experimental psychologist, but Pierre Naville (1904 -1993), a former surrealist, Marxist philosopher, and sociologist, who can be identified as the initial promoter of Watson's ideas in France. However, despite Naville's unwavering commitment to behaviorism, his weak position in the French intellectual community, combined with his idiosyncratic view of Watson's work, led him to embody, as he once described himself, the figure of "the damned behaviorist." Indeed, when Naville was unsuccessfully trying to introduce behaviorism into France, alternative theories defended by philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty explicitly condemned Watson's theory and met with rapid and major success. Both existentialism and phenomenology were more in line than behaviorism with what could be called the "French national narrative" of the immediate postwar. After the humiliation of the occupation by the Nazis, the French audience was especially critical of any deterministic view of behavior that could be seen as a justification for collaboration. By contrast, Sartre's ideas about absolute freedom and Merleau-Ponty's attempt to preserve subjectivity were far more acceptable at the time.