ABSTRACT
A teenager with a quirk becomes an overnight YouTube ‘influencer’, and a politician surges ahead in opinion polls following snide remarks about Mexicans, Muslims and women. Meanwhile, pioneering psychologists like Watson can still be derided as ‘terrible’ and ‘dark’ sixty years after passing away. Even prominent psychologists such as Martin Seligman, Joseph Wolpe and Hans Eysenck seem to have ‘exaggerated the persistence of the fear reaction established in Albert’. A capitalist crisis promotes ‘fake psychologists’ who then set about regurgitating convenient myths to ‘Make Psychology Great Again’. It is convenient to think of Watsonian behaviourism as passe. It is a convenience that many critical psychologists have made use of for far too long. The truth is, in the landscape of social science, only the good die young; the bad may take an enforced leave of absence, but they always return with a healthy suntan and a self-satisfied smile.
