The Story of Psychology (50 page)

But since these, in his opinion, made up the sum total of innate human responses—later research would find otherwise—his larger aim was to show how virtually all other human behaviors and emotional reactions were built up of conditioned reflexes. He began by enunciating a Pavlovian hypothesis about emotional responses:

To verify this hypothesis, in the winter of 1919–1920 Watson and a student of his, Rosalie Rayner, conducted what became one of the most famous experiments in the history of psychology, an attempt to produce a conditioned fear response in an eleven-month-old boy they called, in their report of the work, Albert B.
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When Albert was nine months old,
they placed a white rat near him, and he showed no fear; he did, however, react with fear when a steel bar was banged with a hammer just behind his head. Allowing two months to pass so that the experiences would fade, Watson and Rayner then began the experiment. A rat was put down in front of Albert, who reached for it with his left hand; just as he touched it, the steel bar was struck behind him, and he jumped violently, fell forward, and buried his face in the mattress. On a second trial, Albert reached for the rat with his right hand, and as he touched it the bar was struck again; this time Albert jumped and fell forward and began to whimper.

Watson and Rayner delayed further trials for a week “in order not to disturb the child too seriously,” as they wrote—a curious comment, since they intended to and did disturb him seriously when they continued. In the course of half a dozen more pairings in which the rat was placed close to Albert and the bar hit behind his head, Albert developed a full-fledged conditioned fear response to the sight of the rat:

Still more experiments showed that Albert had generalized his fear to other furry things: a rabbit, a dog, a seal coat, cotton wool, and Watson sporting a Santa Claus mask. After a month’s layoff, Albert was tested again, and, as Watson and Rayner reported with apparent gratification, he cried and was afraid of a rat and a number of furry stimuli shown him without any accompanying clanging of the steel bar.

Shockingly—by today’s ethical standards of research—Watson and Rayner made no effort to decondition Albert, who left the clinic several days after the final tests. They did say in their report that “had the opportunity been at hand we should have tried out several methods [of deconditioning],” which they outlined. They then jested that twenty years hence some Freudian analyst might extract from Albert a pseudo-memory of having tried to play with his mother’s pubic hair at age three and been violently scolded for it.

Watson paid a high price for what he had done in the course of the collaboration, though not what he had done to Albert. He developed a mad passion for beautiful young Rosalie Rayner and began an affair with her. He was seen around town with her, was away from home a
great deal, and carelessly (or perhaps by unconscious design) left in a pocket a passionate note from Rosalie that his wife, Mary, found. He had been unfaithful on previous occasions and Mary had known about some of the episodes and weathered them, but this involvement was far more threatening to her and she felt compelled to take action.

She thought up a way to get damning evidence of his involvement, hoping to use it to force him to give up Rosalie instead of risking a scandal that would cost him his professorship. The Watsons dined at the home of Rosalie’s parents one evening, in the course of which Mary said she had a headache and would like to lie down for a while in Rosalie’s room. Alone and with the door shut, she searched the room and found and made off with a batch of love letters from Watson, who had been uncharacteristically expressive in them and rather explicit about his and Rosalie’s lovemaking.

But when she confronted Watson and threatened to expose him, he refused to break off with Rosalie. Mary decided to sue for divorce, and either she or her brother, to whom she had lent the letters and who had made copies of them, sent them to Frank Goodnow, president of the university. At that time and in that place, such conduct by a professor was utterly impermissible. In late September 1920, Goodnow summoned Watson to his office and demanded his resignation; Watson hotly defended himself but had no choice except to comply. When he left the office, he went home, packed a bag, and headed for New York, his dazzling career in psychology abruptly and permanently ended just as the movement he had spearheaded was succeeding.

Watson later married Rosalie and had two sons with her. He landed a job in New York, which eventually earned him a very large salary, as resident psychologist to the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency. There he combined his knowledge of psychology and his gift of salesmanship to conceive some of the firm’s most successful campaigns for deodorants, cold cream, Camel cigarettes, and other products. Among his triumphs: a campaign for Pond’s Cold and Vanishing Creams using testimonials from the Queens of Spain and Romania, one for Johnson & Johnson convincing mothers that it was important to use baby powder after every diaper change, and one for Maxwell House that helped to make the “coffee break” an American custom in offices, factories, and homes.

During the first decade of his banishment from the academic world, Watson continued to write books and magazine articles about behaviorism and child rearing. (He advocated strict behaviorist methods, with all
emotionality and affection banned.) But he did no more psychological research and no longer played a role in the field, although his expanded thoughts about behaviorism, presented in his books, were adopted by some of his former colleagues and entered behaviorist thinking.

And popular thinking. Watson’s psychology, attributing almost all human behavior to stimulus-response conditioning, was a simple, convenient rebuttal of the hereditarian views of Galton’s followers and appealed broadly to liberals and egalitarians—an irony, since Watson was politically conservative. In his popular writings, he waxed messianic: behaviorism could create a better world by scientifically engineering the development of personality. In 1924, in
Behaviorism
, he made what is probably his most famous and often-quoted statement:

From 1930 on, Watson had nothing to do with psychology except as it applied to advertising. He and Rosalie settled into the good life on a large estate in Connecticut, where in his leisure hours he played gentleman farmer. But after some tranquil years tragedy struck: Rosalie contracted dysentery, grew steadily worse despite treatment, and died in her mid-thirties. Watson, fifty-eight, was shattered. He continued to work in advertising (he had recently moved to the William Esty agency), but his only real interest lay in puttering about on his farm. There were always women in his life, but he never came close to marrying again. As he aged, he became careless about himself, dressed poorly, grew fat, and was something of a solitary.

In 1957, when Watson was nearly eighty, the American Psychological Association notified him that it was awarding him its gold medal for his contributions to psychology. Astonished and pleased, he went to New York with his sons to receive the award, but at the last moment, afraid that after almost forty years of exile he would burst into tears at the ceremony, he sent one of his sons to stand in for him. The citation accompanying the medal read:

It was a gracious tribute. But in fact Watson had oversimplified or overstated many issues, and other behaviorists later had to elaborate on and qualify them. Almost no one today holds as extreme an environmental position as he did, nor does anyone now recommend withholding affection from children and rearing them by frigid behavioral rules. The Pavlovian conditioning that he made the keystone of his system proved not to be the only significant kind; later behaviorists added to it another major model called “operant” conditioning. Most important, at the very time that Watson received the gold medal it was becoming clear that chains of S-R units (series of linked conditioned stimulus-response connections), no matter how long, could not adequately explain complex and sophisticated kinds of behavior.

For all that, Watson was the first and most important spokesman of a radical theory and practice that dominated American psychology for nearly half a century. Raymond Fancher, in his
Pioneers of Psychology
, writes that although many of the developments of behaviorism might have happened without Watson, “he certainly hastened their occurrence, and lent a vitality and power to the objective psychology movement that it might otherwise have lacked.”
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Watson died in 1958, the year after he received the gold medal. To the end, he believed that the revolution he had started, and which had so long been the leading school of psychology in America, was also the psychology of the future. He was wrong. But we’ll come to that.

After a slow start, behaviorism rapidly gained favor among psychologists in the 1920s, particularly in America; it soon became the ruling view and, after a while, almost the only acceptable one, at least in academic circles.

The main reason for its popularity was its claim to be the first truly scientific psychology. Until the nineteenth century, psychology had consisted largely of philosophic speculation, not science. In the nineteenth century, adherents of the New Psychology had sought to turn psychology into a natural science but got no further than explaining a few simple
reflexes and perceptions in physiological terms—and even to achieve that much, they had had to rely on unverifiable introspections.

Behaviorists, in contrast, said they could construct a psychology entirely from visible, measurable events—the causally connected stimulus-response units of which, they maintained, the whole range of animal and human behavior was assembled. Such a psychology would be based on reactions as specific and unvarying as those of chemistry or physics, and should enable the psychologist, in Watson’s words, “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.”
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Another reason so many psychologists found behaviorism appealing was that by limiting themselves to visible behavior they could dispose of all those intractable questions about the mind that philosophers and psychologists had labored over for more than twenty-four hundred years. Behaviorists said that we not only cannot know what goes on in the mind, we don’t need to know in order to explain behavior. They often likened the mind to a black box containing unknown circuitry; if we know that when we push a particular button on it, the box will emit a specific signal or action, what is inside is of no consequence. Nor should what goes on in the mind even be discussed, since all talk about mental processes is tantamount to believing in some bodiless entity that runs the brain’s machinery—“the ghost in the machine,” as the English behaviorist philosopher Sir Gilbert Ryle derisively called it. (Equally derisive was the statement of an antibehaviorist: “The mere mention of the word ‘mentalism’ offends the sensibilities of a behaviorist in much the same way the word ‘masturbation’ offends polite company.”
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)

There were, moreover, deep-seated social and cultural reasons for the success of behaviorism. It appealed to the twentieth-century personality, especially in America, because it was practical; it sought not ultimate explanations but commonsense knowledge that could be put to use.

At least one historian of behaviorism, David Bakan, has also linked its rise to the urbanization and industrialization of America; these social developments, he says, created an urge to master the incomprehensible and worrisome strangers all around us—exactly what behaviorism promised to help us do.
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Bakan adds two other societal reasons for the success of behaviorism. First, World War I evoked hostility to German psychology, and behaviorism served as an up-to-date and available replacement. Second, behaviorism fit in with the endemic anti-intellectualism of America; it justified ignorance of the subtleties of mentalist psychology on the
grounds that mental phenomena, being either illusions or unknowable, were not worth one’s time and effort.

From the 1920s to the 1960s, behaviorism (or the more complex versions of it known as neobehaviorism) was the regnant force in American psychology and the model that it exported to the rest of the psychological world. Some psychologists still clung to older schools of thought, and a number of others, among them Freudians, developers of mental testing, child development psychologists, and Gestaltists, were concerned with mental processes, but on most campuses such people had to adapt their work and language to the behaviorist paradigm. Gregory Kimble, a historian of behaviorism, says, exaggerating only a little, “In midcentury American psychology, it would have cost a career to publish on mind, consciousness, volition, or even imagery,” since to use such terms signified that one was a mentalist who believed in outdated, subjective, and mystical concepts.
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