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John Broadus Watson was born in rural South Carolina in 1878 and died in New York City in 1958. In between, he held academic positions at the University of Chicago and Johns Hopkins University, where he excelled as a researcher and scholar, and executive positions at J. Walter Thompson and William Esty advertising companies, where he excelled as a businessperson. He was married twice, with two children from each marriage. As did B. F. Skinner, Watson advanced the possibility that a genuine science of behavior could benefit human welfare if that science was based on naturalistic principles instead of mentalistic social-cultural assumptions. However, Watson emphasized antecedent, mechanical causation, whereas Skinner emphasized contingencies and consequences. As a result, Watson's classical S-R behaviorism differs greatly from Skinner's behavior analysis, and Watson's approach falls well short of being a comprehensive behavioral orientation.
Keywords: B. F. Skinner, Behaviorist Manifesto, classical S-R behaviorism, Little Albert
John Broadus Watson was born on January 9, 1878, near Greenville, South Carolina. He died on September 25, 1958, in New York City. For at least the first 41 years of his life, when he was active in academia, he was one of the central figures in American psychology if not American intellectual history. The year 2013 was celebrated as the centennial year for one of Watson's best known papers, "Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It" (Watson, 1913b), which is sometimes referred to as the "Behaviorist Manifesto." The present article continues the review of his professional contributions and seeks to increase the understanding of his role in the historical and conceptual development of psychology, especially in regard to behaviorism.
Biography
Personal
John Broadus Watson's life is well documented in Buckley (1989) and O'Donnell (1985), which are the sources of much of the information here. Watson's mother was Emma, a devout Baptist. His father was Pickens, a Civil War veteran on the side of the Confederate Army. John was the fourth of six children. John's mother named him after John Albert Broadus, a noted Baptist preacher and theologian of the South Carolina region.
Pickens had inherited a section of farmland from his father but failed to use it productively, owing to his penchant for whiskey and a wandering lifestyle. Emma held the family together during...