John B. Watson

John B. Watson was an American psychologist who founded behaviorism and argued that psychology should study observable behavior rather than consciousness.

Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It: A 1913 article by Watson that called for psychology to become an objective experimental science of behavior. This manifesto announced the methodological break that made Watson’s behaviorism distinctive.
Classical conditioning: A learning process in which a previously neutral stimulus comes to elicit a response after being paired with another stimulus. Watson used conditioned responses to explain how environmental events could shape behavior.
B. F. Skinner: An American psychologist who developed radical behaviorism and analyzed behavior through its consequences. Skinner extended behaviorism beyond Watson’s focus on stimulus-response relations.
University of Chicago: A private research university in Chicago, Illinois, founded in 1890. Watson earned his doctorate there and conducted the animal research that preceded his behaviorist manifesto.
Behaviorism: An approach to psychology that explains behavior through observable actions and their relations to the environment. Watson made this approach a prominent alternative to introspective psychology.
Little Albert experiment: A 1920 study by Watson and Rosalie Rayner that examined fear conditioning in an infant. The study became Watson’s best-known demonstration of his account of learned emotion.
Edward Thorndike: An American psychologist whose studies of animal learning produced the law of effect. Thorndike’s learning research helped establish behavioral methods that Watson later championed.
Johns Hopkins University: A private research university in Baltimore, Maryland, founded in 1876. Watson led its psychology department before his 1920 dismissal ended his academic career.
Introspection: The examination and reporting of one’s own conscious experiences. Watson rejected introspection as an unreliable basis for a scientific psychology.
Rosalie Rayner: An American psychologist who collaborated with Watson on the Little Albert study. Rayner co-authored the experiment that supplied the clearest test of Watson’s emotional-conditioning claims.

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