John B Watson Research

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John B. Watson, founder of the behaviourist approach stated that behaviourism is purely scientific, should only study behaviour which can be observed, recorded and retested. Every form of behaviour is learned through association of a stimulus and a response. Furthermore, we are born tabula rasa and develop our behaviour through our external environment (Hall, n.d.). He argued that we are trained much like dogs. Ivan Pavlov proposed classical conditioning (1890). He concluded that dogs learn behaviour through association. Watson tested this theory to see whether this applied to humans in his little albert experiment (1920). Watson wanted to see whether he could condition a child to feel fear in response to a stimulus. Albert was presented with