biography
| name: |
Watson, John B(roadus)
|
| sex:
| male
|
| lived:
| (1878–1958)
|
| biography:
| Psychologist and advertising executive, born in Greenville, South Carolina, USA. He studied at the University of Chicago (1903 PhD), and taught at Johns Hopkins University (1908–20), where he made a radical departure from the psychology of mental processes to found the movement called ‘behaviourism’. (He first used the term in a 1913 article.) His studies in medicine, biology, and animal behaviour led him to postulate that man and other animals functioned purely from physiological and physical bases; behaviourism stresses ‘stimulus–response’ as its basic tenet. Rejecting such notions as motivation or innate abilities, he claimed that given the proper environment, a normal child could acquire any skill. His book Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist (1919) ushered in a period of major growth and controversy in the field of psychology. Forced to resign from Johns Hopkins (1920) after he divorced his wife to marry a former student, he went to New York City and entered the field of commercial advertising, but he continued to write about and promote his behaviourist school. |
|
|
