John B Watson Research Paper

John B. Watson is considered the founder of behaviorism. He suggested that psychology should be objective and focus on human behavior. Watson 's views dominated the field of psychology during the first half of the twentieth century. His theories and behavioral techniques that many psychologists have built on are still used today. This so-called father of behaviorism was born in 1878, in South Carolina into a poor family. Although left fatherless at the young age of thirteen, Watson who had drive and ambitionentered into college at the age of sixteen. He had entered college intending to become a minister. In 1903, he received his PhD in psychology from the University of Chicago. Watson was the youngest person in the school 's history to have received a doctorate degree. This goes to show how tenacious and ambitious he was. Before becoming a professor at John Hopkins in 1908, Watson worked as an instructor at the University of Chicago. Watson 's colleagues did not consider him successful at introspection and this may have helped direct him to an objective behavior psychology (Schultz, 2008). When Watson published his dissertation, it was apparent that he had a preference for animal
Using an eight-month old little boy named Albert;Watson hit a steel rod and got a fearful reaction from Little Albert. Every time the rod was struck they would show him a white rat. After just seven times of striking the rod and showing him the rat, they were able to just show Albert the white rat and get a fearful response. Albert also showed a generalization of his conditioned response by reacting fearfully to other white furry items (Meyer, 2001). With the results of this experiment, Watson concluded that adult fears and phobias must be simple conditioned responses that we established when we were very young and they have stayed with us throughout our