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John Watson Research Paper

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How John Watson Made Psychology a True Science
Many people know John Watson as the father of behaviorism. Along with creating this new train of thought, he brought true scientific observation and method into the field psychology. Instead of inferring about a state of consciousness, you make physical observations of behavior individuals are enacting (Heffner, 2017). This was a radical idea when it was originally introduced, but over time this idea evolved into the psychological school of behaviorism that we see today, and allowed psychology to develop into a true science. Before John Watson gave a speech introducing and explaining the behaviorist perspective, psychologists were in argument over how psychology was studied. Dr. Watson believed that psychologists were studying unsuitable subjects, using insufficient …show more content…

The concepts around this school of psychology were focused on the unconscious mind, the repression of emotions etc. Many psychologist spoke to people to discover what was going on in their minds. Then they would use this information to help shape their theories. Then John Watson gave his speech at Columbian University in 1913 titled, “Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It”. In this speech Dr. Watson laid the basis for behaviorism. In the speech he explained that psychologists should study physical, observable behaviors instead of the unconscious mind. (Watson, 1999).
Dr. Watson went on to carry out various studies using his behaviorist methods. The most famous and most notable of these experiments is known as the “Little Albert Experiment”. This experiment was designed to show that young children learn their emotions through classical conditioning. In this experiment a 9 month old infant boy named Albert was shown a white rat. Every time he was shown the rat a loud noise was made to scare him. After a while Albert would become scared immediately when shown the white rat (Watson,

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