Customer Reviews

Behaviorism

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This book changed forever our understanding of the mind and human behaviour. Skinner's ideas are now so widely used, it is easy to forget that they were revolutionary and controversial not long ago. Well written and easily understood, it is worth reading just for the freshness of his ideas.

John Broadus Watson (1878-1958) was an American psychologist who established the psychological school of behaviorism, after doing research on animal behavior.

Here are some representative quotations from the book:

"We believed then, as we do now, that man is an animal different from other animals only in the types of behavior he displays." (Introduction)
"I have never replied to a criticism. Only rarely has anyone taken up the cudgels for behaviorism. Each behaviorist has been too busy in presenting his experimental results or his generalizations to concern himself with answering criticisms." (Introduction)
"The behaviorist recognizes no such things as mental traits, dispositions or tendencies. Hence, for him, there is no use in raising the question of the inheritance of talent in its old form." (Chap. V)
"I should like to go one step further now and say, '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 doing it, but so have advocates for the contrary and they have been doing it for thousands of years." (Chap. VI)
"You have already grasped the notion that the behaviorist is a strict determinist---the child or adult has to do what he does do." (Chap. VII)
"No sane person can ever again use the old introspective method with which James and his immediate followers came so near wrecking this most thrilling part of psychology." (Chap. VIII)
"The behaviorist advances the view that what the psychologists have hitherto called thought is in short nothing but talking to ourselves." (Chap. X)
"(P)ersonality is but the end product of our habit systems." (Chap. XII)
"(Y)ou can by conditioning not only build up the behavior complications, patterns and conflicts in diseased personalities, but also by the same process lay the foundations for the onset of actual organic changes which finally result in infections and lesions---all without introducing the concepts of the mind-body relation..." (Chap XII)

John Watson's new idea for psychology, behaviorism went through this country like wildfire, mostly because of his book behaviorism. It is detailed, and for the most part, easy to read. Anyone who is enterested in behaviorism and its techniques should read this book.

This book was a little hard to get through, but of course Watson was a founding father for so much psychology.