He wrote: "Give me 12 healthy babies, a special environment dominated by me, and let me raise them in this environment, regardless of their parents' talents, hobbies, tendencies, abilities and races. I promise to train any one of them to be any kind of person-doctor, lawyer, artist, big businessman, even beggar or robber. "

In the article "Research on Infant Psychology" published in the same year, he said: "The personality of a baby before the age of five can be created by our will or destroyed by our will." Watson's view that the environment determines children's psychological development is the concrete embodiment of his behaviorism basic view. The basic idea is that human behavior is determined by external stimuli (stimulus-response).

Related theories:

Watson believes that babies are born with only three emotional reactions: fear, anger and love. There are generally only one or two kinds of unconditional stimuli that cause these emotions, but older children can produce these emotional responses to many stimuli, so the response to these stimuli must be learned.

For example, Watson believes that there are only two kinds of unconditional stimuli that will cause fear to babies, one is sudden sounds, and the other is loss of support (such as falling from the sky), but older children will be afraid of many things, such as strangers, cats, dogs, darkness and so on. Fear of these things must be learned.

For example, children's fear of snakes is because they hear screams when they see them, so snakes become conditioned stimuli. Watson and others took a boy 1 1 month as the experimental object to see if he could be afraid of mice through conditioned reflex. At the beginning of the experiment, the children were not afraid of mice, but after conditioned reflex, the children changed a lot.