John Broadus Watson (1878～1958), American psychologist. Founder of behaviorist psychology. Born on January 9, 1878 in a farm outside Greenville, Carolina, USA. At the age of 16, he entered Fulman University in Greenville to study philosophy. At the age of 21, he received a master's degree in philosophy. In 1900, he entered the University of Chicago to study philosophy and psychology. He studied under the guidance of educational philosopher J. Dewey, psychologist J.R. Angell, neurophysiologist H.H. Donaldson and biologist J. Loeb. In 1903, he received a doctorate in psychology from the University of Chicago with a thesis entitled "The Education of Animals". He then became a lecturer and director of the Psychology Laboratory at the University of Chicago. In 1908, he was appointed as a full professor at Hopkins University. In 1913, the article "Psychology in the Eyes of a Behaviorist" was published, and behaviorism was officially born. In 1914, "Behavior: An Introduction to Comparative Psychology" was published. In 1915 he was elected president of the American Psychological Association. In 1918, he received an honorary doctorate from Fulman University. In 1919, "Behavioral Psychology" was published. During World War I, he served as a major in the United States Military Air Service. In 1920, he was forced to resign and leave academia because he presided over an experimental study on sexual behavior, which caused family disputes and divorced his wife. He switched to business and ran the advertising industry. He died on September 25, 1958.
His behaviorism is also called S-R psychology, which means stimulus-response psychology. In Watson's view, psychology should become "a purely objective natural science" and must become a purely biological or purely physiological natural science.
Watson's paper "Psychology in the Eyes of Behaviorism" published in 1913 is considered to be the symbol of the birth of the behaviorist school of psychology. The emergence of the behavioral school was influenced by philosophical thought. In opposing introspective methods and emphasizing the role of the environment on the organism, it accepted the basic views of the functionalist school of psychology and went even more extreme. The development of animal psychology and Pavlov's conditioned reflex method had a certain influence on Watson's creation of behaviorist psychology.
An important feature of behaviorism is its emphasis on the natural scientific nature and practical application value of psychology. It believes that psychology should be a purely objective experimental science like physics and chemistry, and subjective consciousness is difficult to study using ordinary scientific methods. Therefore, it strongly rejects consciousness as the research object of psychology and believes that psychology The task of learning is to predict and control human behavior. It not only regards various emotions as various responses to stimulation, but also believes that thinking is the reaction activity of the muscles of the whole body, especially the muscles of the larynx, which are not visible. Emotions are mainly a change of internal organs and glands in response to stimulation. ,etc. This school of thought focuses on the study of learning behavior and believes that learning is the key to understanding the development of human behavior, thereby denying the role of instinct and genetic factors.
The research methods of behaviorist psychology have had a positive effect on the establishment of education and the research on program teaching. But it treats people as controllable machines, completely separates consciousness and behavior, or denies the existence of consciousness, or denies the knowability of consciousness, and studies behavior that is not regulated by consciousness in isolation. This is a kind of mechanistic theory. point of view, and completely contrary to objective facts. The cognitive psychology and humanistic psychology trends that have gradually emerged since the 1950s have been influenced by behaviorism, but they mainly emerged in an attitude of overcoming the fundamental flaw of behaviorism's denial of consciousness.