JOHN B. WATSON
1878-1958

John Watson was a psychologist and one of the starters of the behoriorist theories. He performed many experiments to observe the behavior of animals. From his studies he believed that behavior can change depending on circumstances put before the person. He felt so strongly about this that he said the following:

"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. I am going beyond my facts and I admit it, but so have the advocates of the contrary and they have been doing it for many thousands of years."
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Watson#The_.22twelve_infants.22_quote)

Theory
In The Ways of Behaviorism, Watson states that behaviorism is the scientific study of human behavior. It is simply the study of what people do. Behaviorism is intended to take psychology up to the same level as other sciences. The first task is to observe behavior and make predictions, then to take determine causal relationships. Behavior can be reduced to relationships between stimuli and responses, the S --- R Model. A stimulus can be shown to cause a response or a response can be traced back to a stimulus. All behavior can be reduced to this basic component. According to Watson, "life's most complicated acts are but combinations of these simple stimulus- response patterns of behavior."

Conditioning is the process of learning to react to the environment. Many behaviors have been previously conditioned in the human species by the environment. To gain control of a subject of study the behaviorist must know difference between what behaviors have been preconditioned and what was inherited from past generations. Gardner Murphy wrote in his book, An Historical Introduction to Modern Psychology, that some "believe that all learning is simply conditioning, and that the conditioned response is the true unit of learned behavior."

Conclusion:
1. Human psychology has failed to make good its claim as a natural science. Due to a mistaken notion that its fields of facts are conscious phenomena and that introspection is the only direct method of ascertaining these facts, it has enmeshed itself in a series of speculative questions which, while fundamental to its present tenets, are not open to experimental treatment. In the pursuit of answers to these questions, it has become further and further divorced from contact with problems which vitally concern human interest.

2. Psychology, as the behaviorist views it, is a purely objective, experimental branch of natural science which needs introspection as little as do the sciences of chemistry and physics. It is granted that the behavior of animals can be investigated without appeal to consciousness. Heretofore the viewpoint has been that such data have value only in so far as they can be interpreted by analogy in terms of consciousness. The position is taken here that the behavior of man and the behavior of animals must be considered on the same plane; as being equally essential to a general understanding of behavior. It can dispense with consciousness in a psychological sense. The separate observation of 'states of consciousness', is, on this assumption, no more a part of the task of the psychologist than of the physicist. We might call this the return to a non-reflective and have use of consciousness. In this sense consciousness may be said to be the instrument or tool with which all scientists work. Whether or not the tool is properly used at present by scientists is a concern for philosophy and not for psychology.

3. The study of the behavior of amoebae have value in and for themselves without reference to the behavior of man. Biological studies of race differentiation and inheritance form a separate division of study which must be evaluated in terms of the laws found there. The conclusions so reached may not hold in any other form. Regardless of the possible lack of generality, such studies must be made if evolution as a whole is ever to be understood. Similarly the laws of behavior of a particluar species, the range of responses, and the determination of effective stimuli, of habit formation, persistency of habits, interference and reinforcement of habits, must be determined and evaluated in and of themselves, regardless of their generality, or of their bearing upon such laws in other forms, if the phenomena of behavior are ever to be brought within the sphere of scientific control.

4. By eliminating states of consciousness as proper objects of investigation, Watson sought to remove the barrier of subjectivity from psychology which exists between it and the other sciences. The findings of psychology become the functional correlates of structure and lend themselves to explanations in physico-chemical terms.

5. Psychology will have to neglect but few of the really essential problems with which psychology as an introspective science now concerns itself. In all probability even this residue of problems may be phrased in such a way that refined methods in behavior eventually will lead to their solution.

http://www.psy.pdx.edu/PsiCafe/KeyTheorists/Watson.htm

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