Page 29 - History of Psychology

Chapter

Behaviorism 8

Watson & Pavlov

John B. Watson

Psychology as a study that studies behavior received strong support in the
developments of the 20th century, which mainly occurred in the United States.

Behavioristic psychology was born as an empirical discipline that studies behavior
as a form of adaptation to environmental stimuli. Behaviorism, especially in
America gradually turned into behaviorism which includes a wide range of human
and infra-human activities, and is studied through various empirical
methodologies.

Formally initiated by the American psychologist, John Broadus Watson (1878-
1958), in a work "Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It" published in 1913.
Watson was born in Southern California and completed his undergraduate
education at Furman University. Watson's early research into the confines of
space conundrum relied heavily on the methodological practice of physiology. In
1908, Watson accepted an offer of a position at Johns Hopkins University, where
the view of the possible formation of objective psychology took systematic form
as a logical program.

Watson advocates observable visible behavior as a reasonable subject of
discussion for psychological science. Watson's view is centered on the premise
that the domain of psychology is behavior, which is measured as a stimulus and a
response. The relationship between stimulus and response is association,
depending on the principle of frequency or practice, then on the principle of the
present. He increasingly embraced Pavlov's conditioning reflexology and
Thorndike's puzzle box method.

Types of Behavior and How They Are Learned.
For Watson, there are four types of behavior: explicitly learned behaviors such as
speaking, writing, and playing baseball; implicitly learned behaviors such as
increased heart rate caused by looking at the dentist's drill; explicit unlearned
behaviors such as grasping, blinking, and sneezing; and implicit unlearned
behaviors such as glandular secretion and circulatory changes. According to
Watson, everything a person does, including thinking, falls into one of these four
categories. To study behavior, Watson proposed four methods: observation,
either naturalistic or experimentally controlled; the method of conditioned
reflexes, proposed by Pavlov and Bechterev; testing, by which Watson meant

behavioral sampling and not "capacity" or "personality" measurement, as Cattell
said; and verbal reports, which Watson treats as another type of overt behavior.
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