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In 1920, psychologist John Watson described his infamous experiments on an infant in a bid to show that the human mind is a blank slate.\u00a0A hundred years on, Antonio Melechi examines the rise and fall of behaviourism, and the utopian\u00a0\u2013\u00a0or dystopian\u00a0\u2013 reflexes that it conditione<\/p>\n
\u201cGive me a dozen infants…and my own specified world to bring them up in,\u201d wrote John B. Watson in his 1925 book\u00a0\u200bBehaviorism<\/em>\u200b, \u201cand I\u2019ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I select \u2013 doctor, lawyer, artist, \u200bmerchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, \u200bregardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors.\u201d<\/p>\n When Watson summoned up this brave new world of vocational education, American psychology was beginning to cosy up to the new research foundations and glad-hand state bureaucrats. Having emerged as an adjunct to philosophy, the discipline had, in the eyes of Watson and other US practitioners, not done enough to retool itself as an experimental and applied science: a science that could not only revitalise the classroom, factory and hospital, but take on the church and the family when it came to questions of \u201chow to live\u201d.<\/p>\n Watson is regarded as the founder of the psychological school of behaviourism and\u00a0was also a tireless promoter of the credo, quite prepared, by his own admission, to push \u201cbeyond my facts\u201d. His message, transmitted via radio, public lectures and a vast outpouring of journalistic bombast, was as simple as it was combative. Don\u2019t bother with William James, Henri Bergson and the armchair psychologists, he snarled. Ignore the Freudian soothsayers. Be done with talk of consciousness, sensation, attention, the inner self and inherited traits.<\/p>\n Behaviourism, as Watson had defined it a decade earlier, while\u00a0chair of the psychology department at\u00a0Johns Hopkins University<\/a>, was the science of human activity and conduct, and its mission was to discover the \u201claws and principles whereby man\u2019s actions can be \u200bcontrolled by organized society\u200b\u201d. But where, exactly, was the evidence for behaviourism\u2019s view of the self as a\u00a0tabula rasa<\/em>? And what had two decades of research at the universities of Chicago and Johns Hopkins really demonstrated about the possibilities of environmental modification?<\/p>\n Born into a Carolina farming family and raised in the Baptist church, Watson (1878-1958) narrowly dodged a career as a clergyman before finding his way to the\u00a0University of Chicago<\/a>. Guided by the neurologist Henry Donaldson, his doctoral research sought to understand the complex behaviour of white rats. To this end, Watson designed a series of problem-box experiments with rats that became increasingly adept at searching out food. He concluded that learning occurs by \u201ca gradual selection of certain acts and movements in \u200bthe given situation\u200b by reason of the satisfaction they bring\u201d.<\/p>\n By the time Watson published\u00a0his landmark paper \u201cPsychology as the behaviorist views it\u201d<\/a>\u00a0in 1913, he had transferred to Johns Hopkins, extending his research on problem-solving with rats, while overseeing laboratory and naturalistic investigations of learning in monkeys, terns and pigeons. These wide-ranging studies were filled with interesting ethological particularities, but a kind of elective blindness, a grasping for the grand principle, was about to overtake him. For all his insistence on \u201cempirical data obtained through careful and controlled observation\u201d, Watson had already stepped well beyond his remit. To proclaim that there was \u201cno dividing line between man and brute\u201d, even as a methodological premise, was a daring provocation. To assert the role of environmental conditioning without acknowledging the importance of imitation and social learning, to reduce thinking to the ghost of \u201csubliminal speech\u201d, was a confession of faith.<\/p>\n Watson\u2019s first textbook, \u200bPsychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist<\/em>\u00a0(1919), redoubled this commitment to reducing complex behaviour to the most simple and observable of rules. Yet the experimental and evidential hole at the heart of behaviourism was plain to see. Apart from some short-lived experiments on the conditioning of the motor reflex, behavioural psychology had no human data to draw upon. The notion that it could furnish laws of control and training that were general and comprehensive, able to adapt to shifting social standards, was impossibly far-fetched.<\/p>\n \u201cIn spite of its shortcomings the book had a tremendous effect,\u201d recalled the Harvard psychologist and neo-behaviourist B. F. Skinner (1904-90), whose work on operant conditioning went on to abandon Watson\u2019s \u201cfalse scent\u201d for a focus on learning through reward. \u201cThe new movement immediately attracted attention and adherents…In the controversy which followed, Watson\u2019s taste for, and skill in, polemics led him to extreme positions which he would never escape.\u201d And throughout these broadsides, Watson, probably the country\u2019s most famous psychologist, was keen to tell isolationist America that behaviourism was a \u201cnative production\u201d, a utilitarian endeavour free from elaborate, European-style abstractions.<\/p>\n As his thinking developed, the conditioned reflex \u2013 a concept taken from work separately undertaken by Ivan Pavlov and Vladimir Beckterev \u2013 became the dynamo of habit and learning in Watson\u2019s work. In 1918, upon returning from military service, he coordinated a research project at Johns Hopkins\u2019 Phipps Clinic that set out to record the occurrence of reflexes and instinctive tendencies in infants from birth onwards. On the basis of these findings, Watson speculated that there were only three emotional reaction patterns \u2013 fear, rage and love \u2013 each of which was recognisable (to Watson) by telltale behavioural indicators such as stiffening of the body, recoiling, catching of breath, crying, cooing or smiling. Every child was a blank slate, a laboratory for establishing \u201cconditioned emotional responses\u201d. The only innate or unconditioned fear stimuli were, in Watson\u2019s view, loss of physical support (being dropped) and loud noises.<\/p>\n To provide experimental evidence of a conditioned fear, he and his graduate student Rosalie Rayner undertook a series of experiments that were destined to become among the most infamous in the history of modern psychology. The subject was \u201cLittle Albert\u201d, the nine-month-old child of a hospital nurse. Weighing 21 pounds and \u201con the whole stolid and unemotional\u201d, Albert was, apparently, selected because his temperament would ensure that little harm would arise from the tests Watson had in mind. These initially involved a series of stimuli being placed in his crib, including a white rat, a dog, various masks and a burning newspaper. \u201cAt no time did this infant ever show fear in any situation,\u201d Watson and Rayner reported. \u201cThe infant practically never cried.\u201d<\/p>\n At 11 months of age, Albert was again presented with the rat, but just as he went to touch the animal a steel bar was struck with a hammer behind his head, causing him to withdraw and whimper. This was repeated on five separate occasions, after which Albert began to cry when presented with the rat, minus ear-splitting clang. The same conditioned response was elicited in slightly weaker form when he was presented with other furry stimuli, and these reactions persisted after a month\u2019s lapse in experimentation. Calling the experiment as \u201cconvincing a case of a completely conditioned fear response as could have been theoretically pictured\u201d,\u00a0Watson and Rayner\u2019s 1920 paper \u201cConditioned emotional reactions\u201d<\/a>\u00a0signed off with some characteristically wayward bluster, namely that \u201cemotional disturbances in adults\u201d could be \u201ctraced back to\u2026conditioned and transferred responses set up in infancy and early youth\u201d.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n In the weeks after the paper\u2019s publication, Watson\u2019s personal and professional life began to unravel. As his affair with Rayner became public knowledge, he was made to resign from his post at Johns Hopkins. Divorcing his wife, he married Rayner and took up a lucrative position as vice president of the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency,\u00a0directing the accounts of Johnson\u2019s Baby Powder and Pond\u2019s Extract. Claiming to find it \u201cjust as thrilling to watch the sales curve of a new product as to watch the learning curve of animals or men\u201d, he succeeded in combining his business and academic interests and, with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, commenced research at\u00a0Columbia University<\/a>\u00a0on procedures that parents and teachers might use to control the behaviour of children and alter their personalities.<\/p>\n The upshot of this work was\u00a0Psychological Care of the Infant and Child\u200b,<\/em>\u00a0co-authored with Rayner. Offering a series of scattershot injunctions against excessive coddling (as likely to lead to invalidism), shouting and scolding, this parenting guide advocated a regime of accelerated learning, recommending the \u201cbeautifully effective\u201d punishment of pencil-rapping of the child\u2019s finger whenever any undesirable act took place. The book was widely reviewed and sold well, but its Gradgrindian lessons in loveless parenting did not make it to a second edition.<\/p>\n Most histories of behaviourism suggest that the nursery science remained influential through the 1930s and 1940s, paving the way for the work of Skinner and other neo-behaviourists before being swept aside by the cognitive revolution. Although this is broadly true, significant allies of the behaviourist cause had begun to fall away much earlier. Adolf Meyer, who had encouraged and facilitated\u00a0Watson\u2019s\u00a0work on child psychology at Columbia, feared that his myopic outlook and lack of judgement had already become a danger to the development of psychology. The philosopher Bertrand Russell, a friend and early champion of Watson, sensed an even greater danger ahead: that the technocratic elite\u2019s use of behaviourism would create a social division between \u201cthinkers\u201d and \u201cfeelers\u201d. By the early 1930s, the lay press had also become more critical of behaviourism, asking what practical benefits the science had gifted American society over the last two decades. Writing in\u00a0The<\/em>\u00a0\u200bAtlantic Monthly\u00a0<\/em>in 1934, one commentator accused Watson\u2019s psychology of having duped the public: \u201cIt has renamed our emotions \u2018complexes\u2019 and our habits \u2018conditioned reflexes\u2019, but it has not changed our habits nor rid us of our emotions.\u201d<\/p>\n Behavioural science was an unfulfilled prophecy. Although Watson’s legacy can be traced through the work of B. F. Skinner, Clark Hull and Edward Tolman, today\u2019s psychology textbooks invariably cite the Little Albert experiment as a cautionary tale about the twin dangers of scientism and\u00a0experimentation without proper ethical controls. Partly because of the dark shadow that lingers over the experiment, it\u2019s easy to forget that behaviourism had once sought to promote a forward-thinking vision of social harmony, and that Watson\u2019s extreme environmentalism was (along with Franz Boas\u2019 cultural anthropology) an ideological bulwark against the eugenics movement.<\/p>\n Whatever its ethical or methodological shortcomings, the Little Albert experiment ultimately belongs to a feverish and embattled moment in the history of science: a time when technocrats dreamed up wild and improbable utopias, when psychologists volunteered to become mechanics in human engineering, and when so-called experts in childcare dared to wonder whether it was really a good idea for Little Albert and his peers to live with, or even know, their own parents.\u00a0Watson’s misadventure reminds us not only of the dangers of scientific\u00a0overreach, but raises questions about whether modern psychology still owes as much to the armchair as to the laboratory.<\/p>\n