John Brodes Watson (rarely John Broadus Watson , Eng. John Broadus Watson ; January 9, 1878 - September 25, 1958 ) was an American psychologist , founder of behaviorism (one of the most common theories in Western psychology of the 20th century) .
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Scientific field | psychology |
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Alma mater | Furman University |
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Biography
John Brodes Watson was born on January 9, 1878 . Emma and Pikes Watson - John's parents - lived in South Carolina , in the small town of Trevelers Rest. Mother was very religious, so the boy’s life was full of restrictions and prohibitions. Pikens himself preferred a rather wild life, the scandals on this ground led to the departure of his father from the family in 1891 , when the boy was 13 years old. John was tied to his father, so he was very hard at separation and could not forgive him for the rest of his life.
John Watson grew up in Greenville ( South Carolina ) and received a master’s degree from Furman University. On the advice of one of his teachers, he then entered the University of Chicago to study philosophy under the supervision of John Dewey . However, in his own words, he did not understand what Dewey was talking about at all, and soon chose to change his supervisor, turning to psychologist James Angell and physiologist Henry Donaldson. He was going to work with Jacques Loeb on the brain research of dogs. The combined influence of these scientists led him then to form a rigorous, objective approach to the study of behavior.
His doctoral thesis , defended at the University of Chicago in 1903 ("Animal Education: An Experimental Study of the Physical Development of the White Rat, Coupled with the Growth of the Nervous System") was the first modern book on the behavior of rats.
February 24, 1913, John Watson gave a famous lecture ( manifesto ) in New York - “ Psychology from the Behavioral Perspective ”. From the time of behaviorism, psychology began to flourish, like experimental science. Watson generally denied consciousness as a subject of scientific research, reducing mental phenomena to various forms of behavior, understood as a set of body reactions to stimuli from the external environment. The purpose of psychological study is to predict what the reaction will be and to determine the nature of the current stimulus. The possibilities for reaction are very extensive. Watson distinguishes 4 large classes of reactions:
- visible (expresit) - unlocking the door, playing the violin.
- hidden (habitual reactions (implicit)) - thinking, which we consider to be an internal conversation.
- visible hereditary reactions - instinctive and emotional reactions (sneezing, etc.)
- latent hereditary reactions - the system of internal secretion ( physiology ).
From the point of view of behaviorism, psychology is a purely objective branch of natural science. Its purpose is to predict behavior and control it.
The influence of behaviorism grew so rapidly that Watson was elected president of the American Psychological Association in 1915 .
In 1920, Watson was forced to leave his place at Johns Hopkins University because of the scandal associated with his divorce and romance with graduate student Rosalie Reiner (co-author of the work on conditioning emotions in an 11-month-old boy who went down in the history of psychology as a case of “ little Albert ”) . He later married Rayner. No university agrees to hire him. He moved to New York where he got a job in the advertising industry, in the company of J. Walter Thompson, while simultaneously giving lectures at the New School for Social Research [5] .
Bibliography
- “Behavior: an introduction to comparative psychology” / “Behavior. Introduction to Comparative Psychology »1914
- "Behaviorism" 1925
- "Ways of Behaviorism" 1926
- "Psychological child care" 1928
Notes
- ↑ 1 2 BNF ID : 2011 open data platform .
- ↑ 1 2 Encyclopædia Britannica
- ↑ SNAC - 2010.
- ↑ 1 2 3 Watson, John Brodez // Great Soviet Encyclopedia : [in 30 t.] / Ed. A.M. Prokhorov - 3rd ed. - M .: Soviet Encyclopedia , 1969.
- ↑ Ludy T. Benjamin, Ludy T. Benjamin, Jr. A History of Psychology in Letters. Blackwell Publishing, 2006, p. 156 ISBN 1-4051-2611-6