John B. WatsonBorn 9 Jan 1878; died 25 Sep 1958 at age 80. John Broadus Watson was an American psychologist whose ideas initiated behaviorism as a branch of psychology. Inspired by the recent work of Ivan Pavlov, he studied the biology, physiology, and behavior of animals. Watson viewed animals as extremely complex machines that responded to situations according to their “wiring,”or nerve pathways that were conditioned by experience. When he continued with studies of the behavior of children, his conclusion was that humans, while more complicated than animals, operated on the same principles. Watson's behaviourism dominated psychology in the U.S. in the 1920s and '30s. |