John Broadus Watson (January 9, 1878 – September 25, 1958) was an American psychologist who popularized the scientific theory of behaviorism, establishing it as a psychological school.

[2][6] His father, Pickens Butler Watson, was an alcoholic and left the family to live with two Indian women when John was 13 years old—a transgression which he never forgave.

[7] His mother, Emma Kesiah Watson (née Roe), was a very religious woman who adhered to prohibitions against drinking, smoking, and dancing,[2][6] naming her son John after a prominent Baptist minister in hopes that it would help him receive the call to preach the Gospel.

In bringing him up, she subjected Watson to harsh religious training that later led him to develop a lifelong antipathy toward all forms of religion and to become an atheist.

[8] Moving from an isolated, rural location to the large urbanity of Greenville proved to be important for Watson, providing him the opportunity to experience a variety of different types of people, which he used to cultivate his theories on psychology.

[16] Historian John Burnham interviewed Watson late in life, presenting him as a man of strong opinions and some bitterness towards his detractors.

[18] Despite his poor academic performance and having been arrested twice during high school—first for fighting, then for discharging firearms within city limits—Watson was able to use his mother's connections to gain admission to Greenville's Furman University at the age of 16.

After graduating, Watson spent a year at Batesburg Institute, the name he gave to a one-room school in Greenville, at which he was principal, janitor, and handyman.

In 1908, Watson was offered and accepted a faculty position at Johns Hopkins University and was immediately promoted to chair of the psychology department.

Introspection forms no essential part of its methods, nor is the scientific value of its data dependent upon the readiness with which they lend themselves to interpretation in terms of consciousness.

The behavior of man, with all of its refinement and complexity, forms only a part of the behaviorist's total scheme of investigation.In 1913, Watson viewed Pavlov's conditioned reflex as primarily a physiological mechanism controlling glandular secretions.

He had already rejected Edward L. Thorndike's 'law of effect' (a precursor to B. F. Skinner's principle of reinforcement) due to what Watson believed were unnecessary subjective elements.

It was not until 1916 that he would recognize the more general significance of Pavlov's formulation, after which Watson would make such the subject of his presidential address to the American Psychological Association.

[citation needed] Analyses of Watson's film footage of Albert suggest that the infant was mentally and developmentally disabled.

[32] On January 25, 2012, Tom Bartlett of The Chronicle of Higher Education published a report that questions whether John Watson knew of cognitive abnormalities in Little Albert that would greatly skew the results of the experiment.

He uses invalidism to support his warning, contending that, since society does not overly comfort children as they become young adults in the real world, parents should not set up these unrealistic expectations.

[38] He would reason such views by saying that "all of the weaknesses, reserves, fears, cautions, and inferiorities of our parents are stamped into us with sledge hammer blows,"[8] inferring that emotional disabilities were the result of personal treatment, not inheritance.

[39] His emphasis on child development started to become a new phenomenon and would influence some of his successors, though the field had already been delved into by psychologists prior to Watson.

His most famous concept, the storm and stress theory, normalized adolescents' tendency to act out with conflicting mood swings.

[40] Although he wrote extensively on child-rearing, including in Psychological Care of Infant and Child, as well as in many popular magazines, Watson later regretted having written in the area altogether, conceding that he "did not know enough" to do a good job.

[39] How much Rosalie Rayner agreed with her husband's child-rearing ideas has also been an important question, as she later penned an article entitled "I am a Mother of Behaviorist Sons", [41] in which she wrote about the future of their family.

[43] Suzanne Houk (2000) shared similar concerns while analyzing Watson's hope for a businesslike and casual relationship between a mother and her child.

[36] Houk points out that Watson only shifted his focus to child-rearing when he was fired from Johns Hopkins University due to his affair with Rayner.

From this experiment, Watson concluded that parents can shape a child's behavior and development simply by a scheming control of all stimulus-response associations.

[citation needed] Watson has been misquoted in regards to the following passage, which is often presented out of context and with the last sentence omitted, making his position appear more radical than it actually was: 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.In Watson's Behaviorism, the sentence is provided in the context of an extended argument against eugenics.

That Watson did not hold a radical environmentalist position may be seen in his earlier writing in which his "starting point" for a science of behavior was "the observable fact that organisms, man and animal alike, do adjust themselves to their environment by means of hereditary and habit equipments.

[7] Thanks to contacts provided by E. B. Titchener, an academic colleague, Watson subsequently began working late in 1920 for U.S. advertising agency J. Walter Thompson.

He learned the advertising business' many facets at ground level, including a stint working as a shoe salesman in an upscale department store.

He has been widely but erroneously credited with re-introducing the "testimonial" advertisement after the tool had fallen out of favor (due to its association with ineffective and dangerous patent medicines).