John Watsons Behaviorism essays

John Watson's Behaviorism essays John Watson was born in 1878 in Greenville, South Carolina, a town that was enriched with religion and spiritual practices. Many people believed John would grow up to be a minister or have a wonderful job with the church, but John Watson had other ideas. By the age of thirteen, he was swearing, drinking, and chasing women. At school, Watson began to be rather vicious and violent. He was obviously intelligent but he was lazy, somewhat insubordinate, and never made a decent grade (Cohen, pg 10). Watson also began fighting with kids at school as a response to his hatred of it. Suddenly, Watson took a radical turn and, at the age of fifteen, was accepted into Furman University. This is amazing coming from the man that would one day fight for the radical ideas that he would propose. Watson, after being a juvenile delinquent, would start a movement that many would not understand or accept. This paper will show how John Watson created a small ripple in the water that is now a perm anent fixture in the world of psychology. Watson called for a new and radical psychology that he termed Behaviorism. In his lectures on the new psychology of Behaviorism, he stated, Behaviorism claims that consciousness is neither a definable nor a usable concept; that it is merely another word for the soul or more ancient times (Watson, pg 1). One of Watsons biggest hurdles to get over was this change from a school of thought that was based on consciousness to one that believed it was not needed at all. By eliminating states of consciousness as proper objects of investigation, Watson sought to remove the barrier of subjectivity from psychology which exists between it and the other sciences (http://fates.cns.muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/watson.htm). David Cohen wrote a book called The Founder of Behaviorism which included this famous quote from one of Watson&ap...