ABSTRACT

Prior to 1913, psychology was defined as the “science of the mind.” In 1913, the American psychologist John B. Watson advocated an alternative approach that he called behaviorism. Asserting that psychology should be redefined as the science of behavior, he published an influential paper in which he argued that most human activities could be explained as learned habits. After becoming familiar with the work of Pavlov and possibly Vladimir M. Bechterev, another Russian physiologist who studied learned reflexes independently of Pavlov, Watson (1916) adopted the conditioned reflex as the unit of habit. He argued that most complex activities were due to Pavlovian conditioning. Watson followed his 1916 paper with a classic experiment in collaboration with Rosalie Rayner that demonstrated Pavlovian conditioning of a fear response in an 11-month-old infant. In that experiment, Watson and Rayner first demonstrated that the child was not afraid of a white rat. Then, after several pairings of the white rat with a loud noise that caused the infant to cry and show other indications of fear, the child exhibited a conditioned reflex of fear to the rat (Watson & Rayner, 1920). As described in Chapter 1, this experiment was followed up by Mary Cover Jones (1924) who demonstrated the elimination of a child’s fear reactions to a rabbit by gradually moving the rabbit closer to the child over trials while the child was engaging in pleasurable activities.