John Watson

This, according to Watson, is the start of memory. All of the ideas previously mentioned are what Watson says make up our memory, and that we carry the memory we develop throughout our lives. Watson tells the tale of Mr. Addison Sims and his friend in order to illustrate these ideas. A friend of Mr. Sims' sees Mr. Sims on a street sidewalk and exclaims: "Upon my life! Addison Sims of Seattle! I haven’t seen you since the World’s Fair in Chicago. Do you remember the gay parties we used to have in the old Windermere Hotel?" Even after all of this, Mr. Sims cannot remember the man's name, although they were old friends who used to encounter many of the same people, places, and experiences together. Watson argued that if the two men were to do some of their old shared activities and go to some of the old same places (the stimuli), then the response (or memory) would occur.

Watson understood that college was important to his success as an individual: "I know now that I can never amount to anything in the educational world unless I have better preparation at a real university." Despite his poor academic performance and having been arrested twice during high school—first for fighting, then for discharging firearms within city limits—Watson was able to use his mother's connections to gain admission to Greenville's Furman University at the age of 16. There, he would complete a few psychology courses, though never excelling. He would also consider himself to be a poor student, holding a few jobs on campus to pay for his college expenses. Others thought him as quiet, lazy, and insubordinate, and, as such, he continued to see himself as "unsocial," making few friends. Nevertheless, being a precocious student, Watson would leave Furman with a master's degree at the age of 21.

Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select – doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors. I am going beyond my facts and I admit it, but so have the advocates of the contrary and they have been doing it for many thousands of years.

In 2009, Beck and Levinson found records of a child, Douglas Merritte, who seemed to have been Little Albert. They found that he had died from congenital hydrocephalus at the age of 6. Thus, it cannot be concluded to what extent this study had an effect on Little Albert's life. On 25 January 2012, Tom Bartlett of The Chronicle of Higher Education published a report that questions whether John Watson knew of cognitive abnormalities in Little Albert that would greatly skew the results of the experiment. In 2014, however, the journals that initially endorsed Beck and Fridlund's claims about Albert and Watson (the American Psychologist and History of Psychology) published articles debunking those claims.

R. Dale Nance (1970) worried that Watson's personal indiscretions and difficult upbringings could have affected his views while writing his book. This would include having been raised on a poor farm in South Carolina and having various family troubles, such as abandonment by his father. Suzanne Houk (2000) shared similar concerns while analyzing Watson's hope for a businesslike and casual relationship between a mother and her child. Houk points out that Watson only shifted his focus to child-rearing when he was fired from Johns Hopkins University due to his affair with Rayner. Laura E. Berk (2008) similarly examines the roots of the beliefs that Watson came to honor, noting the Little Albert experiment as the inspiration of Watson's emphasis on environmental factors. Little Albert did not fear the rat and white rabbit until he was conditioned to do so. From this experiment, Watson concluded that parents can shape a child's behavior and development simply by a scheming control of all stimulus-response associations.

Watson lived on his farm until his death in 1958 at age 80. He was buried at Willowbrook Cemetery, Westport, Connecticut.

Historian John Burnham interviewed Watson late in life, presenting him as a man of (still) strong opinions and some bitterness towards his detractors. In 1957, shortly before his death, Watson received a Gold Medal from the American Psychological Association for his contributions to psychology.

John Watson was born on May 4, 1946 in Belfast, Northern Ireland as John Marshall Watson.

An example of Watson's use of testimonials was with the campaign he developed for Pebeco Toothpaste. The ad featured a seductively dressed woman, and coaxed women to smoke, as long as they used Pebeco toothpaste. The toothpaste was not a means to benefit health or hygiene, but as a way to heighten the sexual attraction of the consumer. Watson stated that he was not making original contributions, but was just doing what was normal practice in advertising. Watson stopped writing for popular audiences in 1936, and retired from advertising at about age 65.

The 20th century marked the formation of qualitative distinctions between children and adults. In 1928, Watson wrote the book Psychological Care of Infant and Child with help from Rosalie Rayner, his assistant and wife. In it, Watson explains that behaviorists were starting to believe psychological care and analysis were required for infants and children. All of Watson's exclamations were due to his belief that children should be treated as a young adult. As such, he warns against the inevitable dangers of a mother providing too much love and affection, because love—along with everything else understood by the behaviorist perspective—Watson argues, is conditioned. He uses invalidism to support his warning, contending that, since society does not overly comfort children as they become young adults in the real world, parents should not set up these unrealistic expectations. Moreover, he disapproves of thumb sucking, masturbation, homosexuality, and encourages parents to be honest with their children about sex. He would reason such views by saying that "all of the weaknesses, reserves, fears, cautions, and inferiorities of our parents are stamped into us with Sledge Hammer blows," inferring that emotional disabilities were the result of personal treatment, not inheritance.

Watson argued that mental activity could not be observed. In his book, Behaviorism (1924), Watson discussed his thoughts on what language really is, which leads to a discussion of what words really are, and finally to an explanation of what memory is. They are all manual devices used by humans that result in thinking. By using anecdotes that illustrate the behaviors and activities of mammals, Watson outlined his behaviorist views on these topics.

In 1920, following the finalization of the divorce, Watson and Rayner married in New Jersey, parenting two sons, William Rayner Watson (1921) and James Broadus Watson (1924), who were raised with the behaviorist principles that John espoused throughout his career. The couple remained together until Rayner's death at age 36 in 1935. Just like their half-sister, both sons also later attempted suicide, with William killing himself in 1954.

Meanwhile, Watson served as the President of the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology in 1915.

In 1913, Watson published the article "Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It" (also called "The Behaviorist Manifesto"). In the "Manifesto", Watson outlines the major features of his new philosophy of psychology, behaviorism, with the first paragraph of the article concisely describing Watson's behaviorist position:

Though having researched many topics throughout career, child-rearing became Watson's most prized interest. His book would be extremely popular, having sold 100,000 copies after just a few months of release. Many critics were surprised to see even his contemporaries come to accept his views. His emphasis on child development started to become a new phenomenon and would influence some of his successors, though the field had already been delved into by psychologists prior to Warson. G. Stanley Hall, for instance, became very well known for his 1904 book Adolescence. Hall's beliefs differed from Watson's behaviorism, as the former believed that one's behavior is mostly shaped by heredity and genetically predetermined factors, especially during childhood. His most famous concept, the storm and stress theory, normalized adolescents’ tendency to act out with conflicting mood swings.

Watson earned his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1903. In his dissertation, "Animal Education", he described the relationship between brain myelination and learning ability in rats at different ages. Watson showed that the degree of myelinization was largely related to learning ability. Watson stayed at the University of Chicago for five years doing research on the relationship between sensory input and learning. He discovered that the kinesthetic sense controlled the behavior of rats running in mazes. In 1908, Watson was offered and accepted a faculty position at Johns Hopkins University and was immediately promoted to chair of the psychology department.

Watson's wife, Mary I, later sought divorce due to his ongoing affair with his student, Rosalie Rayner (1898–1935). In searching Rayner's bedroom, Mary I discovered love letters Watson had written to his paramour. The affair became front-page news during divorce proceedings in the Baltimore newspapers. The publicity would result in Johns Hopkins University asking Watson to leave his faculty position in October 1920.

John Broadus Watson (January 9, 1878 – September 25, 1958) was an American psychologist who popularized the scientific theory of behaviorism, establishing it as a psychological school. Watson advanced this change in the psychological discipline through his 1913 address at Columbia University, titled Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It. Through his behaviorist approach, Watson conducted research on animal behavior, child rearing, and advertising, as well as conducting the controversial "Little Albert" experiment and the Kerplunk experiment. He was also the editor of Psychological Review from 1910 to 1915. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Watson as the 17th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.

After graduating, Watson spent a year at Batesburg Institute, the name he gave to a one-room school in Greenville, at which he was principal, janitor, and handyman. Watson entered the University of Chicago after petitioning the University President. The successful petition would be central to his ascent into the psychology world, as his college experience introduced him to professors and colleagues who would be integral to his success in developing psychology into a credible field of study. Watson began studying philosophy under John Dewey on the recommendation of Furman professor, Gordon Moore. The combined influence of Dewey, James Rowland Angell, Henry Herbert Donaldson, and Jacques Loeb, led Watson to develop a highly descriptive, objective approach to the analysis of behavior, an approach he would later call behaviorism. Wanting to make psychology more scientifically acceptable, Watson thought of the approach as a declaration of faith, based on the idea that a methodology could transform psychology into a scientific discipline. Later, Watson became interested in the work of Ivan Pavlov (1849–1936), and eventually included a highly simplified version of Pavlov's principles in his popular works.