Insight into the Mystery of Behavior: Watson's Behaviorism

Author: Gao Fengqiang
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2000-01-01
Features: This is the ninth book in the "Twentieth Century Psychology Masters Series," introducing the life and thought of the twentieth-century psychologist John B. Watson. Watson (1878-1958) had a highly dramatic life; at the age of thirty, he was appointed as a professor at Johns Hopkins University, then became a renowned animal behaviorist in the United States, and founded the revolutionary behaviorist psychology. In 1920, due to a divorce scandal sparked by a romantic relationship with a student, Watson's reputation was ruined; he then turned to the advertising industry, applying psychological perspectives to commercial advertising, demonstrating the powerful influence of behaviorism and significantly altering the nature of the American advertising industry. The behaviorism founded by Watson advocated analyzing all human and animal behavior using the "stimulus-response" formula, aiming to make psychology a natural science and eliminate all subjective terms such as feelings, desires, beliefs, etc. Behaviorism held dominant in Western psychology for over half a century, and the author of this book even hailed Watson as the Prometheus of the psychology world.