WATSON, JOHN B. (1929)
Behaviorism
New York: W.W. Norton & Co.
"...to apply to the experimental study of man the same kind of procedure and the same language of description that many research men had found useful for so many years in the study of animals lower than men. We believed then, as we do now, that man is an animal different from other animals only in the types of behavior he displays."
"Human beings do not want to class themselves with other animals. They are willing to admit that they are animals but `something else in addition'. It is this `something else' that causes the trouble. In this "something else" is bound up everything that is classed as religion, the life hereafter, morals, love of children, parents, country, and the like. The raw fact that you, as a psychologist, if you are to remain scientific, must describe the behavior of man in no other terms than those you would use in describing the behavior of the ox you slaughter, drove and still drives many timid souls away from behaviorism."
"Behaviorism...holds that the subject matter of human psychology isthebehaviorofthehumanbeing. Behaviorism claims that consciousness is neither a definite nor a usable concept."
"Stimulating a properly brought up infant at any age with snakes, fish, darkness, burning paper, dogs, birds, cats, monkeys, will not bring out that type of response which we call `fear' (which to be objective we might call reaction `X') which is a catching of the breath, a stiffening of the whole body, a turning away of the body from the source of stimulation, a running or crawling away from it".
"Now try this: At the instant you show him the animal and just as he begins to reach for it, strike the steel bar behind his head. Repeat the experiment three or four times. A new and important change is apparent. The animal now calls out the same response as the steel bar, namely a fear response. We call this, in behavioristic psychology, the conditionedemotionalresponse -- a form of conditionedreflex."
"Thus we see how relatively simple our emotional responses are in the beginning and how terribly complicated home life soon makes them."
"Probably more adults in this universe of ours suffer vicissitudes in family life and in business activities because of poor and insufficient visceral habits than through the lack of technique and skill in manual and verbal accomplishments."
"Behaviorism, as you have already grasped from our preliminary discussion, is, then, a natural science that takes the whole field of human adjustments as its own. Its closest scientific companion is physiology..."
"Behaviorism, on the other hand, while it is intensely interested in all of the functioning of these parts, is intrinsically interested in what the whole animal will do from morning to night and from night to morning."
"The interest of the behaviorist in man's doings is more than the interest of the spectator--he wants to control man's reactions as physical scientists want to control and manipulate other natural phenomena. It is the business of behavioristic psychology to be able to predict and control human activity."
"...most of the things we see the adult doing are really learned. We used to think that a lot of them were in instinctive, that is, `unlearned'. But we are now almost at the point of throwing away the word `instinct'."
"...behavioristic psychology has as its goal to be able, given the stimulus, to predict the response--or seeing the reaction take place to state what the stimulus is that has called out the reaction."
"Observations on infants show quickly that while there are thousands of unconditioned stimuli, they are relatively few when contrasted with the conditioned. Conditioned stimuli are legion in number. Every one of the printed and written 15,000 words that a well educated individual can respond to in an organized way must be looked upon as an example of a conditioned stimulus."
"...there are thousands of simple unlearned and unconditioned responses, such as finger and arm movements, eye movements, toe and leg movements, that escape the notice of all but trained observers. These are the elements out of which our organized, learned responses must be formed and apparently by the process of conditioning. These simple, unconditioned, embryological responses, by the presentation of appropriate stimuli (society does this for us), can be grouped and tied together into complex conditioned responses, or habits, such as tennis, fencing, shoe-making, mother reactions, religious reactions, and the like."
"The importance of early conditionings in building up bodily attitudes, especially on the emotional side, is almost undreamed of. It is practically impossible for us in adult life to have a `new' stimulus thrust upon us that does not arouse this vestigial organization."
"Man is an animal born with certain definite types of structure. Having that kind of structure, he is forced to respond to stimuli at birth in certain ways..." "yet there exists a certain amount of variation in each--the variation is probably merely proportional to the variation there is in the structure..."
"A certain type of structure, plus early training--slanting--accounts for adult performance."
"Let us start by saying that from now on man for us is a whole animal. When he reacts he reacts with each and every part of his body. Sometimes he reacts more strongly with one group of muscles and glands than with another. We then say he is doing something. We have named many of these acts such as breathing, sleeping, crawling, walking, running, fighting, crying. But please do not forget...that each of these named acts involves the whole body."
"...Our hereditary structure lies ready to be shaped in a thousand different ways--the same structure--depending on the way in which the child is brought up."
"I should like to go one step further now and say, `Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select--doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors.' I am going beyond my facts and I admit it, but so have the advocates of the contrary and they have been doing it for many thousands of years. Please note that when this experiment is made I am to be allowed to specify the way the children are to be brought up and the type of world they have to live in."
"...there has been very great resistance to studying the behavior of the human young. Society is in the habit of seeing them starve by hundreds, of seeing them grow up in dives and slums, without getting particularly wrought up about it. But let the hardy behaviorist attempt an experimental study of the infant or even begin systematic observation, and criticism begins at once."
"Almost daily observation of several hundred infants from birth through the first thirty days of infancy and of a smaller number through the first years of childhood has given us (a) set of (rough) facts on unlearned responses..."
"Crying as such very shortly becomes conditioned. The child quickly learns that it can control the responses of nurse, parents and attendants by the cry, and uses it as a weapon thereafter."
"Smiling is due in all probability at first to the presence of kinaesthetic and actual stimuli. It appears as early as the fourth day. It can most often be seen after a full feeding. Light touches on parts of the body, blowing upon the body, touching the sex organs and sensitive zones of the skin are the unconditioned stimuli that will produce smiling. Tickling under the chin and a gentle jobbing and rocking of the infant will often bring out smiling. Smiling is the response in which conditioning factors begin to appear as early as the thirtieth day."
"Take smiling. It begins at birth--aroused by intraorganic stimulation and by contact. Quickly it becomes conditioned, the sight of the mother calls it out, then vocal stimuli, finally pictures, then words and then life situations either viewed, told or read about. Naturally what we laugh at, whom we laugh at and with whom we laugh are determined by our whole life history of special conditionings."
"Nearly 40 years ago James gave to the psychology of the emotions a setback from which it has only recently begun to recover. It is to be regretted that James, physiologist and physician as he was, in addition to being the most brilliant psychologist the world has ever known, should have diverged so far from Darwin who preceded him by many years."
"...according to James the best way to study emotions is to stand stock-still while having one and begin to introspect...Each man has to make his own introspections. No experimental method of approach is possible. No verification of observations is possible. In other words, no scientific objective study of emotions is possible."
"The complicated nature of...adult responses makes it hopeless for the behaviorist to begin his study of emotion upon adults. He has to start with the infant where his problems are simpler."
"One of the things we find by such tests is that even at three years of age many (but not all) of the children are shot through with all kinds of useless and actually harmful reactions which go under the general name emotional."
"A child three years of age is very young. Must we conclude that emotional reactions are hereditary? Is there an hereditary pattern of love, of fear, rage, shame, shyness, humor anger, jealousy, timidity, awe, reverence, admiration, cruelty? Or are these just words to describe general types of behavior without implying anything as to their origin?"
"In our experimental work we early reached the conclusion that young children taken at random from homes of both the poor and the well-to-do do not make good subjects for the study of the origin of emotions. Their educational behavior is too complex."
"So many false notions have grown up around the response of infants to furry animals that we were surprised ourselves to see these youngsters positive always in their behavior toward this proverbial `black cat'. Reaching out to touch the cat's fur, eyes, and nose was the invariable response."
"These tests on children not emotionally conditioned proved to us conclusively that the classical illustrations of hereditary responses to furry objects and animals are just old wives' tales."
"I feel reasonably sure that there are three different forms of emotional response that can be called out at birth by three sets of stimuli. For convenience we may call them `fear', `rage', and `love'."
"Our work upon infants, especially those without cerebral hemispheres where the reaction to noise is more pronounced, early taught us that loud sounds almost invariably produce a marked reaction in infants from the very moment of birth."
"The other stimulus calling out this same fear reaction is loss of support."
"...Hampering of bodily movement brings out the series of responses we call rage."
"The stimulus to love responses apparently is stroking of the skin, tickling, gentle rocking, patting. The responses are especially easy to bring out by the stimulation of what, for lack of a better term, we may call the erogenous zones, such as the nipples, the lips and the sex organs."
"Whether these three types of response are all that have an hereditary background we are not sure. Whether or not there are other stimuli which will call out these responses we must also leave in doubt. If our observations are in any way complete, it would seem that emotional reactions are quite simple in the infant and the stimuli which call them out quite few in number."
"They are certainly not the complicated kinds of emotional reactions we see later on in life but at least I believe they form the nucleus out of which all future emotional reactions arise."
"We were rather loath at first to conduct experiments in this field, but the need of study was so great that we finally decided to attempt to build up fears in the infant and then later to study practical methods for removing them."
"Our first experiment with Albert had for its object the conditioning of a fear response to a white rat."
"Another set of factors increasing the complexity of our emotional life must be taken into account. The same object (for example a person) can become a substitute stimulus for a fear response in one situation and a little later a substitute stimulus for a love response in another, or even for a rage response. The increasingly complexity brought about by these factors soon gives us an emotional organization sufficiently complicated to satisfy even the novelist and the poet."
"The whole field of emotions, when thus experimentally approached, is a very thrilling one, and one which opens up real vistas of practical application in the home and in the school -- even in everyday life."