CHAPTER 10

BEHAVIORISM: THE
BEGINNINGS
MISBAH AMIN 29
CHAND NAYAB 32
WAJIHA RAUF 26
RAMEEN 35
AYESHA AFTAB 34
BEHAVIORISM.
 The handsome psychologist was 42-year-old
John B. Watson, the founder of the school of
thought called behaviorism.
 Watson concluded that our adult fears,
anxieties, and phobias must therefore be
simple conditioned emotional responses that
were established in infancy and childhood
and that stayed with us throughout our lives.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF
BEHAVIORISM
 In 1903 Watson began to think seriously about a
more objective psychology
 He expressed these ideas publicly in 1908.
 Watson argued that psychic or mental concepts
have no value for a science of psychology.
 He wanted his new behaviorism to be of practical
value; his ideas were not only for the laboratory
but for the real world as well.
 He also offered a course for business students at
Hopkins on the psychology of advertising and
started a program to train graduate students to
work in industrial psychology.
WATSON’S BOOK:
 An Introduction to Comparative Psychology,
appeared in1914.
 He argued for the acceptance of animal
psychology and described the advantages of
using animal subjects in psychological
research.
 In 1919 he published Psychology from the
Standpoint of a Behaviorist, which he
dedicated to Cattell.
THE REACTION TO WATSON’S
PROGRAM:
 Watson’s attack on the old psychology and his call for a
new approach were stirring appeals for many
psychologists.
 Let us reconsider his major points:
A. Psychology was to be the science of behavior, not the
introspective study of consciousness, and a purely
objective, experimental natural science.
B. Both human and animal behavior would be investigated,
and psychologists would discard all mentalistic ideas and
use only behavior concepts such a stimulus and response.
C. Psychology’s goal would be the prediction and control of
behavior.
 Despite its appeal to some, however, Watson’s program
was not embraced immediately or universally. At first,
behaviorism received relatively little attention in the
professional journals.
TO BE CONTINUE…

 Despite its appeal to some, however,

Watson’s program was not embraced
immediately or universally. At first,
behaviorism received relatively little
attention in the professional journals.

 One psychologist who disagreed with Watson

was Mary Whiton Calkins.
THE SUBJECT MATTER OF
BEHAVIORISM
 The primary subject matter for Watson’s behavioral psychology
was the elements of behavior;
1. the body’s muscular movements
2. and glandular secretions.
 As the science of behavior, psychology would deal only with
acts that could be described objectively, without using
subjective or mentalistic terminology.
 Responses can be either explicit or implicit. Explicit
responses:
These responses are overt and directly observable.
Implicit responses:
These responses are not observable such as visceral
movements, glandular secretions, and
nerve impulses, occur inside the organism. Although not
overt, they are still considered to be behavior.
INSTINCTS:
 Introduction to Comparative Psychology
(1914), Watson described 11 instincts,
including one dealing with random behaviors.
 By 1925 Watson revised his position and
eliminated the concept of instinct
altogether.
 He argued that behaviors that seem
instinctive are really socially conditioned
responses.
 Behaviors that seemed inherited were traced
to early childhood training.
TO BE CONTINUE…
 For example, he argued that children were
not born with the ability to be great athletes
or musicians but were slanted in that
direction by parents or caregivers who
encouraged and reinforced the appropriate
behaviors.
 This emphasis on the overwhelming nurturing
effect of the parental and social environment
was one reason for Watson’s phenomenal
popularity.
EMOTIONS:
 emotions were merely physiological
responses to specific stimuli.
 Watson investigated the stimuli that produce
emotional responses in infants.
 He suggested that infants show three
fundamental unlearned emotional response
patterns:
 Fear
 rage
 love.
TO BE CONTINUE…

 By loud noises and by sudden loss of support,

Fear can be produced.

 Rage is produced by the restriction of bodily

movements.

 Love is evoked by caressing the skin or by

rocking and patting.
MARY COVER JONES:
 Her subject was three-year-old Peter, who already
showed a fear of rabbits, although his fear had not
been conditioned in the laboratory.
 While Peter was eating, a rabbit was brought into
the room but kept at a distance great enough so as
not to trigger a fearful response.
 Over a series of trials lasting several weeks, the
rabbit was brought progressively closer, always while
the child was eating.
 Eventually Peter got used to the rabbit and could
touch it without showing fear.
 Generalized fear responses to similar objects were
also eliminated by this procedure.
THOUGHT PROCESSES:
 Watson’s behaviorist system attempted to
reduce thinking to implicit motor behavior.
 He argued that thought, like all other
aspects of human functioning, was a type of
sensorimotor behavior.
 He reasoned that the behavior of thinking
must involve implicit speech reactions or
movements.
 Thus, he reduced thinking to sub-vocal
talking that relies on the same muscular
habits we learn for overt speech.
TO BE CONTINUE…

 As we grow up, these muscular habits

become inaudible and invisible because our
parents and teachers frequently admonish us
to stop talking aloud to ourselves.

 In this way, thinking becomes a way of

talking silently.
WATSON QUOTE:
 The following paragraph from Behaviorism is
frequently quoted to support Watson point:
“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”
CAUSE OF EMOTIONAL
DISTURBANCES:
 Watson’s conditioned reflex experiments,
such as the Albert study, persuaded him that
emotional disturbances in adulthood are
caused by conditioned responses established
in infancy, childhood, and adolescence.
 If adult disturbances are a function of faulty
childhood conditioning, then a proper
program of childhood conditioning should
prevent the emergence of adult disorders.
Watson