First, deny the role of heredity.

First of all, Watson thinks that the formula of behavior occurrence is stimulus-response. Response can be predicted from stimulus, and stimulus can be inferred from response.

Secondly, although Watson admits that the structural differences of the body come from heredity, he believes that structural inheritance cannot lead to functional inheritance.

Thirdly, Watson's psychology aims at controlling behavior, and heredity can't be controlled, so the role of heredity is smaller; The more likely it is to control behavior. Therefore, Watson denies the role of heredity in individual psychological and behavioral development.

Second, the role of environment and education is exaggerated unilaterally.

Watson's famous saying fully embodies his theoretical orientation of environmental determinism. He pointed out: Give me a dozen healthy babies and let them grow up in a special environment set by myself, then I am willing to ensure that I can choose one of them at will and train him to be any kind of expert I choose-doctor, lawyer, artist and thief.

Regardless of his talents, hobbies, tendencies, abilities, talents and the race of his ancestors. However, please note that when I am engaged in this experiment, I have to personally decide the training methods and environment of these children. He unilaterally exaggerates the role of environment and education in individual psychological development, ignores individual initiative, initiative and creativity, and ignores the internal motivation to promote psychological development.

Watson's theoretical thought

First of all, behaviorism theory

1, psychological nature and object

Watson opposed the traditional psychology of consciousness to regard consciousness as the research object of psychology and introspection as the research method of psychology. Instead, he advocated that psychology should use the objective method of natural science to study behavior, and on this basis, he constructed his behavioral psychology theory system.

2. Research methods of psychology

There are many research methods of behaviorism, including observation, conditioned reflex, speech report, test and social experiment. Observation methods include natural observation and instrument observation.

Second, instinct theory.

Watson's understanding of instinct has gone through three stages: at first, he completely accepted the views of traditional psychology, then he wavered in his doubts and finally completely denied the existence of instinct. In his view, human beings are an animal, and they are born with a certain structure. Because of this structure, people respond to various external stimuli in some way at birth, such as breathing, heartbeat, sneezing and so on.

Third, the theory of emotion.

Watson believes that emotion is a genetic type of response, including profound changes in systemic mechanisms, especially in the visceral and glandular systems. Watson believes that instinct and emotion are inherited, and almost all reactions are in the same order, but instinct and emotion are different.

Fourth, thinking theory.

Watson believes that thinking is also an act of sensory movement. He said that there are two kinds of language habits, one is explicit language habits, that is, speech; One is implicit language habit, that is, thinking. Watson believes that in addition to verbal thinking, human beings also have nonverbal thinking.

Verb (abbreviation of verb) personality theory

Watson believes that personality refers to all existing and potential "assets" and existing and potential responsibility reactions. He believes that the way to study personality is to try to cut off the flow of action and make it a cross section. He also believes that personality can be changed because it is formed by the influence of the environment; So the way to change personality is to change people's environment.

Sixth, the theory of meaning.

From his behaviorist point of view, Watson tries to avoid using traditional psychological terms such as "feeling" in his works, and replaces them with words such as "stimulus" and "response". He changed all kinds of feelings into "visual response", "auditory response" and "pain response". He also replaced differential sensitivity with differential response, complementary color vision with white light response, aftereffect with afterimage, and illusion with visual response error.