ABSTRACT
John Broadus Watson boasted he could fashion any child into a lawyer, a doctor or a thief. When I wrote a biography of Watson, I interviewed his two surviving children – Polly Hartley, his eldest daughter by his first marriage, and James, his youngest son by his second wife, Rosalie Rayner. Twenty years after their father died both had strong feelings and mixed memories. Watson came to his views early in his career. His own childhood was far from ideal. He was born in Greenville, South Carolina in 1878, which was described as ‘a village of 20,000 souls’. Souls was apt because Greenville was a gospel village. In 1825, the Baptist Theological College was set up there. Watson’s mother, Emma, was a devout Baptist. His father, however, was a confirmed sinner – and proud of it. Pickens drank to excess, chased women and finally ran away to live with a Native American woman. His 13-year-old son was devastated and began being ‘somewhat insubordinate at school’. Cheeking teachers was the least of it. Watson and a friend, Joe Leech, boxed each other when their teachers were not looking. School over, the lads would cause mayhem on their way home; they often engaged in the charming Southern pastime of ‘nigger fighting’. Watson only got into serious trouble, though, when he fired a gun in the middle of Greenville. Somehow he escaped jail, however. Watson never explained how, during the next two years, he calmed down, but he did so and became an excellent student. Then, he somehow persuaded the president of the local university, Furman, to accept him. Watson buckled down to his books and fellow students nicknamed him ‘Swats’, which he hated. After Pickens left, the family was poor so Watson had to take on many odd jobs to pay for his education. He grumbled but he worked; the wild teenager had taken the first steps to becoming a respectable academic – for the next 20 years at least. His troubled childhood left its mark, though. Watson was often insecure. He slept always with a
night light on, for example, and was frightened of thunderstorms. The irrational fears of psychologists deserve a study perhaps. Watson was 21 when he got his degree from Furman. He wanted to leave Greenville but his mother was desperately ill. To make a living, Watson taught in a local school. There he began the work which would make him one of the key psychologists of the twentieth century. At the Batesburg Institute, he kept ‘a house of rats’, partly to amuse the children and partly because he liked observing and training the animals. When his mother died in July 1900, Watson was free to pursue his studies. He persuaded the ever pliable president of Furman to write glowing letters of recommendation to two top universities, Princeton and the University of Chicago. Both were willing to accept him as a graduate student; Watson chose Chicago. A month after his mother died, Watson left Greenville with just $50 in his pocket. He never went back. Watson’s doctoral dissertation, Animal Education (1903), analysed the relationship between brain and the development of behaviour, mainly learning, in rats. This research would influence his views on children – and the way he eventually brought up his own. Watson was always good with his hands and built a series of ‘puzzle boxes’ for the rats. One box had hidden entrances, which the baby rats had to find to reach food. The rat had to pull a string to open a latch to get at the food. Later he made a more elaborate contraption, a plank the rats had to walk. At a certain point on the plank, their weight counterbalanced the latch and sprang open the door so they could reach the food. Young rats – those who were 30 days old – mastered these tasks quicker than rats who were 75 days old, Watson found. Learning was not an even process. One rat took 12 minutes the first time before he ‘realized’ he needed to pull the string to open the latch. The second time the same rat got the solution in 12 minutes again, but then he solved the problem in three minutes, in eight minutes, in two minutes, then in three minutes again. After that, there was a sudden burst of insight as the rat took 0.35 minutes, 0.33, 0.16, 0.08, 0.108 minutes to spring the latch. Watson had made an important discovery about learning; the process was jagged. Rats reached their peak of performance between 23 and 27 days, he also discovered. ‘It is a pleasure to watch them’, he wrote, ‘they fly from place to place trying everything’. Watson became the youngest person to obtain a doctorate at Chicago. There, he wrote 35 years later in a brief autobiographical note, ‘I first began a tentative formulation of my later point of view’. In 1902, however, the formulation was not just tentative but private and triggered considerable anxiety. As he was completing his doctorate, Watson had some kind of breakdown. Studying the rats led him to believe psychology had to be an objective science which relied on observation, and nothing but observation. People should be observed just like rats. His fellow psychologists, however, believed one had to use introspection to understand the human mind. And rats were not rat-ional enough to introspect. At the time introspection was not about understanding your feelings but trying
to pin down the ‘atoms of the mind’, the basic elements of thinking. Psychologists were trying to imitate physicists in their search for these atoms. Watson knew his ideas conflicted with everyone else in the field, and that made him very nervous. The breakdown was also the result of rejection. Watson proposed to a young woman who refused him. He soon found another love though. One student in his laboratory, Mary Ickes, came from a wealthy and rather grand family. Her brother, Harold Ickes, would become Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Secretary of State. Ickes saw Watson as an adventurer who was not good enough for his sister. When he realized Mary was keen on the psychologist, he sent her away to Altoona in Pennsylvania. Watson was not going to be put off so easily, however; he followed Mary and proposed to her, though he only had a modest salary of $600. She accepted him despite her family’s objections. Their first son, John, was born in 1904 and their daughter, Polly, two years later. The children were fun to be with and to watch grow up, but Watson did not observe them in any formal way. Two years after Polly was born, Watson moved from Chicago to Johns Hopkins and became professor of psychology when he was only 28 years old. The next 12 years were very productive – and that owed something to his stable marriage. Their daughter Polly told me that her parents hardly ever quarrelled, or at least that they took care to do so when they were alone. Polly, who would lead a troubled life herself, was not happy, however. Her mother was not particularly demonstrative and neither she nor her father tended to go in for much hugging and kissing. When Polly was a child it seemed to her just to be their natural style; it was not then a philosophy of parenting based on Watson’s theories. By 1913 Watson had done significant work on many aspects of animal behaviour and had started to study a few human behaviours which included studies of how accurately people typed and shot with bows and arrows when they were drunk. Watson, however, had seen that psychologists kept on contradicting each other when they discussed their introspections. These contradictions, Watson argued, made it impractical to rely on dreams, memories and associations to understand why we do what we do. Look at the behaviour instead, he insisted. The paper that established him as a major figure, ‘Psychology as the behaviourist views it’, argued that psychology had ‘failed signally . . . during the fifty-odd years of its existence as an experimental discipline to make its place in the world as an undisputed natural science’. He blamed the fact that there was
something esoteric in its methods. If you fail to reproduce my findings, it is not due to some fault in your apparatus or in the control of your stimulus, but it is due to the fact that your introspection is untrained.
