John Watson was born January 9, 1878 in a small town outside Greenville, South Carolina. He was brought up on a farm by a fundamentalist mother and a carousing father. When John was 12, they moved into the town of Greenville, but a year later his father left the family. John became a troublemaker and barely passed in school.

At 16, he began attending Furman University, also in Greenville, and he graduated at 22 with a Masters degree. He then went on to the University of Chicago to study under John Dewey. He found Dewey “incomprehensible” and switched his interests from philosophy to psychology and neurophysiology. Dirt poor, he worked his way through graduate school by waiting tables, sweeping the psych lab, and feeding the rats.

In 1902 he suffered from a “nervous breakdown” which had been a long time coming. He had suffered from an intense fear of the dark since childhood -- due to stories he had heard in childhood about the devil doing his work in the night -- and this exacerbated into depression.

Nevertheless, after some rest, he finished his PhD the following year, got an assistantship with his professor, the respected functionalist James Angell, and married a student in his intro psych class, Mary Ickes. They would go on to have two children. (The actress Mariette Hartley is his granddaughter.)

The following year, he was made an instructor. He developed a well-run animal lab where he worked with rats, monkeys, and terns. Johns Hopkins offered him a full professorship and a laboratory in 1908, when the previous professor was caught in a brothel.

In 1913, he wrote an article called "Psychology as a Behaviorist Views It" for Psychological Review.  Here, he outlined the behaviorist program.  This was followed in the following year by the book Behaviorism:  An introduction to comparative psychology.  In this book, he pushed the study of rats as a useful model for human behavior.  Until then, rat research was not thought of as significant for understanding human beings.  And, by 1915, he had absorbed Pavlov and Bekhterev’s work on conditioned reflexes, and incorporated that into his behaviorist package.

In 1917, he was drafted into the army, where he served until 1919.  In that year, he came out with the book Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist -- basically an expansion of his original article.

At this time, he expanded his lab work to include human infants.  His best known experiment was conducted in 1920 with the help of his lab assistant Rosalie Rayner.  “Little Albert,"  a 9 month old child, was conditioned to fear a white rat by pairing it seven times with a loud noise made by hitting a steel bar with a hammer.  His fear quickly generalized to a rabbit, a fur coat, a Santa Claus mask, and even cotton.  Albert was never "deconditioned" because his mother and he moved away.  It was clear, however, that the conditioning tended to disappear (extinguish) rather quickly, so we assume that Albert was soon over his fear.  This suggests that conditioned fear is not really the same as a phobia.  Later, another child, three year old Peter, was conditioned and then “de-conditioned” by pairing his fear of a rabbit with milk and cookies and other positive things gradually.

In that year, his affair with his lab assistant was revealed and his wife sued for divorce.  The administration at Johns Hopkins asked him for his resignation.  He immediately married Rosalie Rayner and began looking for business opportunities.

He soon found himself working for  the V. Walter Thompson advertising agency.  He worked in a great variety of positions within the company, and was made vice president in 1924.  By all standards of the time, he was very successful and quite rich!  He increased sales of such items as Pond’s cold cream, Maxwell House coffee, and Johnson’s baby powder, and is thought to have invented the slogan “LSMFT -- Lucky Strikes Means Fine Tobacco.”

He published his book Behaviorism, designed for the average reader, in 1925, and revised it in 1930.  This was his final statement of his position.

Psychology according to Watson is essentially the science of stimuli and responses.  We begin with reflexes and, by means of conditioning, acquire learned responses.  Brain processes are unimportant (he called the brain a “mystery box”).  Emotions are bodily responses to stimuli.  Thought is subvocal speech.  Consciousness is nothing at all.

Most importantly, he denied the existence of any human instincts, inherited capacities or talents, and temperaments.  This radical environmentalism is reflected in what is perhaps his best known quote:

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. (In Behaviorism, 1930)

In addition to writing popular articles for McCall’s, Harper’s, Collier’s and other magazines, he published Psychological Care of Infant and Child in 1928.  Among other things, he saw parents as more likely than not to ruin their child’s healthy development, and argued particularly against too much hugging and other demonstrations of affection!

In 1936, he was hired as vice-president of another agency, William Esty and Company.  He devoted himself to business until he retired ten years later.  He died in New York City on September 25, 1958.