Assignment 2 LASA 1 Impact of StructuralismThis week you read an.docx

Assignment 2: LASA 1: Impact of Structuralism
This week you read and learned about Titchener’s structuralism.
As an approach, structuralism attempted to break down
consciousness into elements of consciousness for study. It
assumed that studying these parts of consciousness would lead
to an understanding of the whole.
Analyze the limitations and strengths of the method of studying
consciousness in parts.
Identify and discuss one of the main criticisms of
structuralism.
Briefly compare and contrast structuralism and behavioralism.
How did structuralism influence the creation of behaviorism?
How has structuralism impacted psychology today? As you
consider this question, keep in mind the history and culture of
the period in which Titchener practiced compared to your
understanding of psychology today.
Write an essay that is 3-5 pages in length. Remember to support
your arguments with information drawn from the
online content, the textbook, and other credible, scholarly
sources to substantiate the points you are making
. Apply APA standards for writing and citations to your work.
**Hint:
a useful article for comparing and contrasting structuralism
with behavioralism is found in the AUO library and referenced
in your textbook:
Rilling, M. (2000). How the challenge of explaining learning
influenced the origins and development of John B. Watson’s
behaviors. The
American Journal of Psychology, 113
(2), 275-301. Retrieved from
http://search.proquest.com.libproxy.edmc.edu/docview/2248423
67/fulltext/12E26E325F56462A087/8?accountid=34899
The paper should be
double-spaced 12-point
typescript, Times Roman font, with

1-inch margins
all around, and free from grammatical errors. Your paper needs
to include a cover page, abstract, and reference list in APA
format.
Submit your response to the
M3: Assignment 2 Dropbox
by
Week 3, Day 7
. Name your assignment as follows:
LastName_FirstInitial_PSY450_M3A2.doc
Assignment 2 Grading Criteria
Maximum Points
Analyzed limitations and strengths of structuralism.
32
Identified and discussed one main criticism of structuralism.
32
Compared and contrasted structuralism with behavioralism.
32
Explained how structuralism influenced the development of
behavioralism.
32
Described the impact of structuralism on psychology today,
with consideration of the culture of the time period in which
Titchener practiced.
28
Style (4 points): Tone, audience, and word choice
Organization (12 points): Introduction, transitions, and
conclusion
Usage and Mechanics (12 points): Grammar, spelling, and
sentence structure
APA Elements (16 points): In text citations and references,
paraphrasing, and appropriate use of quotations and other
elements of style
44
Total:
200

This is the article.
How the challenge of explaining learning influenced the origins
and development of John B. Watson's behaviorism
Rilling, Mark
.
The American Journal of Psychology
113.2
(Summer 2000): 275-301.
Full text
Full text - PDF
Abstract/Details
Abstract
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Abstract
Before he invented behaviorism, John B. Watson considered
learning one of the most important topics in psychology.
Watson conducted excellent empirical research on animal
learning.
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Before he invented behaviorism, John B. Watson considered
learning one of the most important topics in psychology.
Watson conducted excellent empirical research on animal

learning. He developed behaviorism in part to promote research
and elevate the status of learning in psychology. Watson was
much less successful in the adequacy and originality of the
mechanisms he proposed to explain learning. By assimilating
the method of classical conditioning and adopting Pavlov's
theory of stimulus substitution, Watson linked behaviorism with
a new method that could compete with both Titchener's method
of introspection and Freud's methods of psychoanalysis.
Watson's interest in explaining psychopathology led to the
discovery of conditioned emotional responses and a
behavioristic explanation for the learning of phobic behavior.
Watson established learning as a central topic for basic research
and application in American psychology.
Learning in animals is probably the most important topic in the
whole study of behavior (Watson, 1914, p. 45).
No experimenter has yet set his experimental problems in such a
way as to construct from his data a guiding theory of habit
formation (Watson, 1925, p. 25).
In 1930, when he revised Behaviorism for the last time, Watson
expressed satisfaction that behaviorism was strongly entrenched
as a point of view in American psychology. He took the
occasion to repeat a major theme of his career, the contrast
between the old psychology of James's and Titchener's
introspection and what he called the new psychology of
behaviorism. From his point of view, Watson had achieved great
success in his primary goal of changing the subject matter of
psychology from consciousness to behavior. After telling his
readers that consciousness was the subject matter of the old
psychology, Watson repeated the main point of his manifesto on
behaviorism (Watson, 1913a), that "behaviorism, on the
contrary, holds that the subject matter of human psychology is
the behavior of the human being" (1930, p. 2).
What historical factors led Watson to propose a change in the
subject matter of psychology from consciousness to behavior?
Although many factors, both in American culture at large and in
American psychology, contributed to the origins of behaviorism

(Burnham, 1968; Mills, 1998; O'Donnell, 1985), the challenge
of explaining learning was central to the origins and subsequent
development of John B. Watson's behaviorism. By 1930 Watson
could also take satisfaction that not only behaviorism, but also
the topic of learning, was strongly entrenched in American
psychology.
For Watson, behaviorism represented much more than a change
in the subject matter of psychology. Many topics in psychology
could be approached objectively. Indeed, in one of the first of a
genre of critiques of behaviorism, Titchener (1914, p. 5)
pointed out that calls for objective psychology were common in
the history of psychology, so "Watson's behaviorism is neither
so revolutionary nor so modern as a reader unversed in history
might be led to imagine." The target of Watson's behaviorism
was all introspectionists, especially Titchener. In order to
replace the method of introspection, Watson issued a call for the
adoption of new methods in psychology for the study of
behavior. A corollary of behaviorism was Watson's call for the
adoption of new methods for the study of Learning.
Behaviorism elevated the status of learning as a topic of
research by psychologists. Behaviorism became Watson's
chosen vehicle for calling attention to research on learning.
Watson's (1925) popular book, Behaviorism, was a showcase for
research on learning, especially Watson's own research on
emotional learning in children. For Titchener, the most
important topics in psychology were sensation and perception.
(See Tweney, 1987, for the details of Titchener's program of
research in experimental psychology.) For Watson, behaviorism
was a platform from which he attempted to persuade his
colleagues and the public that learning was a more important
topic for research than were sensation and perception.
In contrast with Watson's success in changing the subject matter
of psychology from consciousness to behavior, and as Boakes (
1994) pointed out, Watson was much less successful as a
learning theorist. The quotation from Watson with which this
article begins indicates that he eventually recognized that his

efforts to develop a behavioristic theory of habit formation were
not successful. Watson failed to find a behavioristic substitute
for Thorndike's law of effect. He also failed to develop a
heuristic explanation for maze learning. After writing an
editorial calling for research in comparative psychology on
imitation (Watson, 1904), Watson (1908, p. 172) may have been
slightly embarrassed when he reported that with respect to his
own research on imitation in monkeys, "I unhesitatingly affirm
that there was never the slightest evidence of inferential
imitation manifest in the actions of any of these animals." Thus,
imitation represented a failure in Watson's efforts to advance
comparative psychology by investigating learning. Watson
(1925) simply adopted Pavlov's theory of stimulus substitution
as an explanation for Pavlovian conditioning. Thus Watson does
not rank with Pavlov and Thorndike as a learning theorist.
Watson's major contribution to learning theory was the
prediction and discovery that emotional responses could be
conditioned (Watson & Rayner, 1920). With the exception of
the discovery of conditioned emotional responses, Watson's
enduring achievement for learning was an increase in the status
of the topic. By identifying the mechanisms of trial and error
learning and maze learning as unsolved problems in
experimental psychology, Watson paved the way for the
neobehaviorism of Hull, Tolman, and Skinner in the 1930s.
The topic of learning has been neglected in prior scholarship on
Watson (for an exception, see Malone, 1990a). Todd (1994)
identified Watson's extension of the province of learning as one
of the topics requiring additional historical analysis. He asked,
"Could behaviorism have become an important philosophy
without specific empirical principles?" (1994, p. 165). The
answer is "yes." Even with very few wellestablished principles
of learning, Watson's behaviorism achieved its collateral
objective of increasing the attention paid to the topic of
learning. Therefore, an exploration of the role of learning in
John B. Watson's published papers provides an additional key
for placing classic behaviorism in a proper historical context.

How Watson spotlighted the topic of learning
Learning is mentioned only obliquely in Watson's ( 1913a)
famous manifesto for behaviorism, "Psychology as the
Behaviorist Views It." The purpose of this paper was to change
the subject matter of psychology from consciousness to
behavior, so it represented more of an attack on Titchener's
structuralism and the functional psychology Watson had been a
part of at Chicago than a vehicle for presenting fresh data on
learning. Watson mentioned an eclectic melange of several
topics for research that could be approached behavioristically.
The list included the study of learning and habit formation,
instincts, the comparative study of sensory processes including
vision in both animals and humans, and a set of applied
problems including psychopathology. In his manifesto of 1913,
Watson's characterization of the areas of basic research in
psychology was a lament about what he believed to be
experimental psychology's low status among the natural
sciences, which he put as follows:
I do not wish unduly to criticize psychology. It has failed
signally, I believe, during the fifty-odd years of its existence as
an experimental discipline to make its place in the world as an
undisputed natural science. Psychology, as it is generally
thought of, has something esoteric in its methods. ( 1913a, p.
163)
The key to understanding this quotation is Watson's use of the
word methods. Watson's goal was to replace the method of
introspection with "objective" methods. Consider the topics of
sensation and perception, which were an important area of
research for Titchener and his students (Tweney, 1987). Watson
could have simply called for a behaviorism that represented a
return to Fechner's objective methods of psychophysics, but he
did not. In his manifesto, Watson did not single out any
particular topic in experimental psychology for special favor.
After the manifesto for behaviorism, Watson's next major
opportunity to advance the agenda of behaviorism was his book
on comparative psychology. He used this book as a platform

from which to elevate the status of learning as a topic for
research by psychologists. Consider Watson's comments about
learning in his treatise on comparative psychology, Behavior:
An Introduction to Comparative Psychology (1914). One might
expect that instinct would emerge as a key concept in a textbook
on comparative psychology. Watson defined an instinct as a
behavior on the part of an animal that did not require learning,
and he devoted two chapters in Behavior to a discussion of
instincts. (See Dewsbury, 1994, for a portrait of Watson as a
comparative psychologist, including his interests in instincts.)
However, Watson reserved the most praise in Behavior not for
instincts, but for the topic of learning, whose importance he
described as follows:
On account of its bearing upon human training, learning in
animals is probably the most important topic in the whole study
of behavior. Entirely apart from this connection, this division
contains the behaviorist's most important group of problems,
since by means of habit formation he finds the most direct way
of controlling animal activity. (1914, p. 45)
Consider three points in the preceding quotation. First, notice
that Watson was not interested in animal learning per se as a
topic for scientific exploration, but primarily as the topic
related to human learning. Second, because the goal of Watson's
( 1913a) behaviorism was the prediction and control of behavior
Watson found the topic of learning relevant because it provided
him with a tool for controlling behavior. Third, Watson
described the topic how called learning as habit formalion.
Habit formation is no longer used as a synonym for learning. As
Malone (1990b) pointed out, Watson borrowed the concept of
habit formation from William James (1890/1950).
Watson ( 1917a) had another opportunity to spotlight learning
when he reviewed Holt's (1915) book on psychoanalysis. Holt
was an American psychologist from Harvard who attended
Freud's lectures at
Clark University
in 1909. After he returned to Harvard he wrote a book on ethics

that was influenced by Freud's idea of wish fulfillment. Holt
called his book The Freudian Wish and Its Place in Ethics. The
book contained a discussion of the Meynert problem, a
hypothetical and philosophical explanation of how a child might
learn not to put his or her finger into a candle flame despite the
impulse to reach out and touch an attractive object. Holt
highlighted the topic of emotional learning in children in his
book and pointed out that "fear is a normal and necessary
ingredient of the learning process" ( 1915, p. 71 ) . However,
Holt did not of fer any data, and his discussion of learned fear
in children was philosophical. The significance of Holt's book
was that after listening to Freud, Holt talked about learned fear
as a psychological topic worthy of the attention of
psychologists. Holt (1915, p. 74) went on to conclude his
theoretical discussion of the Meynert problem with the
statement that "the mechanism of learning is by no means
understood as yet."
In a review of Holt's book, Watson's response to the challenge
of Freudian psychoanalysis was a call for psychologists to turn
to research on learning. Watson (1917a, p. 86) believed that
psychoanalytic concepts, which he considered mystical entities,
could be explained in terms of "well-known principles of habit
formation." Watson followed Holt and discussed the Meynert
problem. In the context of understanding the mechanism by
which children's fears were acquired, Watson made another call
for elevating the status of the topic of the mechanisms of
learning within experimental psychology:
In these few experiences a genuine learning process is involved
and the explanation of this learning process-regardless of
whether the act is acquired in few of many trials-is what I
consider one of the chief problems in psychology. (1917a, p.
89)
Watson has transformed his research interest in children's fears
from an old philosophical conundrum, how children learn to
keep their hands out of a burning candle, into "one of the chief
problems of psychology."

Watson was explicit in indicating that behaviorism represented
a shift in the importance of the topics psychologists selected for
research. For Watson's behaviorism represented a shift away
from sensation and perception toward a focus on learning and
habit formation. Watson described the change as a shift from
the structural analysis of the unit of sensation toward the units
of learning and habit formation. He rejected
the introspectionist unit concept [of] sensation. The reason for
the omission is clear. When a unit changes in a science the
problems and points of interest shift . . .The mechanism of habit
formation . . must await the working out of just those factors
which the behaviorists insist upon. ( 1917a, p. 92).
Here Watson offered to set the theoretical agenda for successive
generations of behavioristic learning theorists. Thus a
characteristic of Watson's rhetoric was to call attention to the
importance of learning as a topic for research within
experimental psychology. Another illustration of this practice
occurs in a paper on maze learning, where Watson wrote, "The
control of habit is one of the most vital problems in every
system of psychology" (1917b, p. 59). Although Watson was a
great salesman for research on the topic of learning, he was less
successful as a learning theorist. His first theoretical failure was
with maze learning.
Watson's failure to explain maze learning behavioristically
Why did Watson abandon consciousness as an explanatory
concept? One good place to start considering this question is by
comparing the discussions of Small and Watson on maze
learning in the rat. Small (1901 ) constructed a maze for white
rats from a diagram of the Hampton Court Maze in the
Encyclopedia Britannica. He placed food at the center of the
maze and found that his rats rapidly learned to run from the
start location, through a complex series of passages, until they
reached the food. Looking down on the uncovered maze, Small
recorded the errors when a rat entered a cul-de-sac and the
amount of time the rat required to find the food. The maze was
complicated and Small was impressed by the proficiency with

which the rats mastered the task. Watson (1907) duplicated
Small's maze, replicated Small's experiment, and began an
experimental analysis of the factors that influenced maze
learning in rats. Watson and Small obtained essentially the same
data, but their interpretations of the mechanism of learning and
even their choices for presenting the data were profoundly
different. Small did not trust the learning curve of Thorndike
(1898) as an adequate representation of the process of learning,
but Watson proudly filled his paper with beautiful learning
curves. Watson found that the average length of time to find the
food was 16 min on the first trial and that the time dropped to
about 1 min after only 10 trials. For both Small and Watson, the
question was, What is the mechanism underlying the process of
learning?
Small's mechanisms for maze learning: Consciousness and
sensations
In Small's and Watson's day, comparative psychologists were
sharply divided over anthropomorphism and the law of
parsimony. Small was an eclectic theorist who belonged in the
camp of those who were willing to attribute components of
human consciousness to animals. Unlike Thorndike (1898), he
thought animals could reason and he chided the advocates of
parsimony as inflexible extremists in very clear language:
Some modern comparative psychologists' abhorrence of
anthropomorphism leads to the opposite extreme. . . . .Is not a
certain amount of chastened anthropomorphism a wholesome
specific, a kind of saving grace against scientific pedantry?. . . .
The law of parsimony is important no doubt, but it may be
employed too rigorously. (Small, 1901, p. 228)
Small used what would now be called cognitive language to
describe the process of maze learning: "The selection of paths
begins to be purposive" (Small, 1901, p. 212). In other words,
Small anticipated the language of Tolman's (1932) purposive
behaviorism to the extent of using the term purposive. Small
never mentioned the construct of Tolman's (1948) cognitive
map, but he did use a similar cognitive concept, imagery, to

describe maze learning when he wrote, "There seemed to be
some kind of an image in his mind that he was trying to follow .
.He apparently knew when he was on the right and when on the
wrong road" (Small, 1901, pp. 212-213). Small mentioned
consciousness frequently in his discussion.
Small's explanation of maze learning also included a second,
much more molecular level of analysis. He discussed the
various modalities of sensation, including smell, sight, and
tactual motor sensations. The tone of this discussion was quite
different from the discussion of consciousness. Small believed
that the rats acquired a motor memory in learning the maze.
This memory included a representation of distance intervals and
proper turns. Small concluded his paper with a call for other
researchers to consider the possibility of thinking about maze
learning in tactual motor terms. Watson answered Small's call
for a sensory analysis of maze learning.
Watson's mechanism for maze learning: Kinesthetic sensations
only
Simply put, Watson applied the law of parsimony to Small's
mechanisms by rejecting Small's discussion at the level of
consciousness. In other words, Watson was willing to run what
Small called the risk of "scientific pedantry." Watson (1907, p.
94) rhetorically asked, "Why, then, in the case of the rat, need
we assume the presence of motor images?" Watson followed
Small by concluding that the rat learned the maze on the basis
of kinesthetic sensations. Watson recognized that he arrived at
this conclusion by a process of eliminating other sensory
candidates. Watson rejected all of Small's cognitive processes
such as imagery as follows: "No one would dream of affirming
that such a complexity in the cortical processes as this would
call for could exist in the case of the rats" (Watson, 1907, p.
94). Of course, we now know from the work of O'Keefe and
Nadel (1978) and other neuroscientists that the hippocampus is
the structure in the brain of rats that is involved in maze
learning, but this information was not available to Watson.
Watson discovered that extramaze visual cues were important in

maze learning for normal rats. When he rotated the maze by 180
for normal rats, he found that these rats were "absolutely lost"
(1907, p. 87). However, this discovery was made rather late in
the collection of the data and Watson decided to simply present
the data rather than to speculate about a possible interpretation.
In conclusion, Watson's research on maze learning was basically
empirical. Although Watson rejected interpretations of the data
that included consciousness, he left the problem of maze
learning without a satisfactory explanation.
Although the Chicago school of maze learning in rats produced
several additional publications (Carr & Watson, 1908; Peterson,
1917) the theoretical interpretation of the results in terms of
Watsonian concept remained vague. At the end of an extensive
monograph on maze learning, Peterson, who had worked as a
graduate student with Watson at Chicago, reluctantly concluded
that "the great problem of how learning takes place is yet
largely unsolved" (1917, p. 46). Watson sought to impress the
readers of Behaviorism (1925) with the learning abilities of rats
in the maze by presenting an impressive learning curve for maze
learning, but he remained fixated on his theoretical position that
habit formation could be reduced to a kinesthetic sensation in
which "the muscular stimuli coming from the movements of the
muscles themselves are all we need to keep our manual
responses occurring in proper sequence" (1925, p. 176).
Watson's school of maze learning came to a dead end before
1920. In Behaviorism, Watson (1925) reprinted the learning
curve from his paper of 1907 and then concluded that the
mechanism underlying maze learning and other manual habits
"have never been worked out in a wholly satisfactory manner"
(1907, p. 171). Watson's legacy was to pass along to the next
generation of researchers in animal learning the problems he
had been unable to solve.
Most historians of learning theory would conclude that the
problem of maze learning remained unsolved until Tolman
(1948) introduced the construct of the cognitive map. After
discussing and rejecting the point of view advocated earlier by

Watson, Tolman advocated a point of view called field theory
that assumed that "in the course of learning [a maze,] something
like a field map of the environment gets established in the rat's
brain" (1948, p. 191). Tolman's (1932) purposive behaviorism
represented a return to the kind of theorizing Small had
introduced into learning theory at the beginning of the 20th
century. However, Small does not appear in Tolman's writing as
the source of purposive behaviorism. Tolman (1932, p. 12)
credited McDougall (1926) for the origin of the term purposive
behaviorism. After Watson's failure to explain maze learning,
Tolman successfully proposed a cognitive explanation of maze
learning that remains viable today.
Watson's failure to improve on Thorndike's law of effect
Thorndike, with a bit of hubris, called the identification of the
mechanism of associative learning, "perhaps the greatest
problem of both human and animal psychology" (1898, p. 103).
The law of effect was Thorndike's well-known explanation for
the trial-and-error learning in the puzzle box. Thorndike's
interpretation of his data was that satisfaction increased the
preceding response and dissatisfaction decreased it. Watson
quoted Thorndike's law of effect in his book on comparative
psychology, but he was skeptical of Thorndike's assumption that
"the successful act is pleasant, and the unsuccessful act is
unpleasant" (1914, p. 256). Watson believed that Thorndike's
law of effect was dangerously close to venturing into inferences
about consciousness in animals. Similarly, Watson's student
Harvey Garr (1914) was skeptical of the law of effect. Carr
simply did not believe Thorndike's assumption that "all
eliminated acts are unpleasant and that all surviving acts are
pleasant" (1914, p. 164).
In addition to the maze, Thorndike's puzzle box provided
another preparation for the study of animal learning by
behaviorists. Inspired by Thorndike's ( 1898) puzzle boxes,
Watson developed a sawdust box in which sawdust was placed
beneath a box with a hole in the floor. Watson placed food in
the box and measured the time required for the rat to burrow

through the sawdust to obtain the food.
Watson conducted an experiment on delay of reward that was
designed to provide an empirical test of Thorndike's law of
effect. Watson reasoned that if Thorndike were correct, the
pleasure from an immediate reward would be greater than the
dissatisfaction from a delayed reward. Using his sawdust box
and two groups of rats, Watson (1916a) compared the learning
curves for a group of rats that received an immediate reward
upon entering the box with a second group where the reward
was delayed for 30 s. Watson reported that the learning curves
for the two groups of rats were almost exactly identical, a
somewhat puzzling result. Years later, Grice (1948) discovered
that a delay of reward as short as 0.5 s was effective in
producing a decrement in the acquisition of the behavior of
lever pressing. In Watson's study, the ef fectiveness of the delay
of reward may have been ineffective because the food was
visible in the dish during the delay. Watson noted that his rats
were very active during the delay, trying to get at the food.
Nevertheless, Watson's (1917b) data led to skepticism among
classic behaviorists about the validity of Thorndike's law of
effect.
Watson never developed a behavioristic alternative to
Thorndike's law of effect. After reviewing research on motor
habits in Behaviorism, Watson remained scornful of the idea
that pleasure and displeasure were associated with successful
and unsuccessful movements during learning. Watson attacked
Thorndike as follows:
Only a few psychologists have been interested in the problem.
Most of the psychologists, it is to be regretted, have even failed
to see that there is a problem. They believe that habit formation
is implanted by kind fairies. For example, Thorndike speaks of
pleasure stamping in the successful movement and displeasure
stamping out the unsuccessful movements. Most of the
psychologists talk quite volubly about the formation of new
pathways in the brain, as though there were a group of tiny
servants of Vulcan there who run through the nervous system

with hammer and chisel digging new trenches and deepening old
ones. (1914, p. 166)
This passage demonstrates that Watson's rhetoric of attack on
Thorndike was relentless, but Watson did not have a
behavioristic alternative to Thorndike's law of effect. Only
when Skinner (1938) developed the concept of the operant and
the principle of reinforcement did behaviorists have an
alternative to Thorndike's law of effect.
Watson's use of James's concept of habit in preference to
learning
The term learning does not appear in the index of the revised
edition of Watson's (1930) Behaviorism, but habit formation is
listed. There were no chapters called "Learning" in any of
Watson's books, but each edition of Behaviorism contained a
chapter on habits. Therefore, at least as a title for a chapter,
Watson was more comfortable with the concept of habit than he
was with the concept of learning. When Watson wrote about
habits, he was building on a conceptual framework he inherited
from William James.
Although Watson's ideas about learning have frequently and
correctly been linked with Pavlov, it was James who had the
most influence on Watson's early thinking about learning. In
1937, John Watson wrote an informative letter to Ernest Hilgard
in which he described the development of his early thinking
about learning. One can infer from Watson's letter that Hilgard
asked Watson about the influence of Pavlov and Bechterew on
his early thinking about learning. Watson's reply was that
neither Pavlov nor Bechterew "had much influence in shaping
my early convictions" (Letter from Watson to Hilgard, February
18, 1937). On the contrary, Watson wrote, "I had worked the
thing out in terms of HABIT formation" (Letter from Watson to
Hilgard, February 18, 1937). If neither Bechterew nor Pavlov
influenced Watson, that leaves the question of whose ideas
about habit first influenced Watson's thinking about learning.
The answer is William James.
In his autobiography, Watson (1936) wrote that he learned his

James as a graduate student at the
University of Chicago
under James Angell. Angell was strongly influenced by James's
Principles of Psychology ( 1890/ 1950) and Angell received a
master's degree in psychology at Harvard under James. After
Watson arrived at Hopkins, James's concepts influenced the
organization of his teaching because "for two years at Hopkins I
taught a modified James type of general psychology" (Watson,
1936, pp. 276-277). Thus Watson was very familiar with the
conceptual framework and chapter titles James used to organize
Principles of Psychology. In his books on behaviorism, Watson
was inclined to use the same titles for chapters that James had
used. James had chapters on habit, instinct, and emotions, and
in Behaviorism Watson also has chapters on habit, instinct, and
emotions.
Watson proposed a simplified and selective adaptation of
James's ideas about learning. Watson was not willing to follow
James beyond the mechanism of the reflex arc. For example,
James ( 1890/1950) used the concept of contiguity as a
mechanism for forming associations, but for Watson there was
"no necessity for speaking of `associations"' (1914, p. 260).
Watson's classic behaviorism carried with it the implication that
"there are no reflective processes (centrally initiated
processes)" (1913a, p. 174). Therefore, Watson rejected any
mechanism of learning that appeared to involve centrally
initiated processes, and this included James's use of associative
mechanisms. The elimination of centrally initiated mechanisms
left Watson with very few theoretical processes for explaining
learning. His initial list was limited to "terms of stimulus and
response, in terms of habit formation, habit integrations and the
like" (Watson, 1913a, p. 167).
James's use of the reflex as the foundation unit of habit
James's theoretical treatment of habit was analytic. He used a
metaphor from chemistry in which a habit was compared with a
chemical compound similar to plastic and the task of the
scientist was to identify the elements from which the habit was

constructed, which permitted the behavioral plasticity. What
was the unit similar to the element in chemistry from which a
complex habit was constructed? James's answer was that a habit
was "nothing but a reflex discharge . .The most complex habits
are . . nothing but concatenated discharges in the nervecenters,
due to the presence there of systems of reflex paths" ( 1890/
1950, pp. 107-108). Thus James reached within the nervous
system to the concept of the reflex arc, with its sensory and
motor paths, for his explanation of how learning occurred. For
James, learning a habit at first required conscious attention to
whole chain of reflexes. Then with practice the habit became
automatic, so that each muscular contraction produced a
sensation, which elicited the next muscular contraction, and so
on, so that consciousness was no longer required for the
performance of well-learned habits.
Watson's analysis of motor habits simply followed James, but
omitted James's discussion of consciousness. Thus Watson's
(1914) analysis of how a rat learned to run a maze for food
focused on the stimuli and responses involved in the chaining of
reflexes. The learning theorist's task was to specify "(1) the
number, location, and serial order of functioning of the reflex
arcs until food is reached; and (2) the stimulus which releases
each arc" (Watson, 1914, p. 207).
The publication of Watson's book on comparative psychology
marked the end of the first phase of Watson's interest in the
topic of learning. Although Watson published further occasional
papers in comparative psychology, his major research interest
underwent a profound switch from animal learning to emotional
learning in infants. A major problem in the historiography of
Watson's behaviorism is to account for this shift.
Why did Watson abandon comparative psychology for emotional
learning with infants?
Watson's most famous experiment in learning was the discovery
of conditioned emotional responses in the laboratory experiment
with Little Albert (Watson & Rayner, 1920). This experiment
was designed to demonstrate that classical conditioning

provided a mechanism for explaining phobic behavior in
humans. Furthermore, Rilling (2000) has also interpreted this
experiment as a psychoanalytically inspired attempt to capture
in the laboratory a simplified analogue of Freud's concept of
displacement, specifically the "transference" of emotion from
rat to rabbit in an infant. It represented a switch from basic
research in comparative psychology to the application of
Pavlovian learning theory to a problem in psychopathology.
How is this major transition from basic research with animals to
applied research with humans to be explained?
A clue to Watson's early thinking about the future direction of
his career emerges from a letter he wrote in 1908 to E. B,
Titchener at time when his primary commitment was to
comparative psychology. Although Watson in 1913 became
famous by attacking Titchener's psychology, Watson and
Titchener maintained an intimate and very warm correspondence
that began in 1906 while Watson was at the
and ended in 1925 with Watson working in advertising at the J.
Walter Thompson company in New York City.
Early in his career and before he developed behaviorism,
Watson was a great admirer of the scientific rigor and
dedication Titchener brought to experimental psychology.
Watson acknowledged his debt to Titchener as follows: "After
these two men [Angell and Donaldson] I have always placed
your work and what I know of you personally. I am not so sure
that I owe you as much as I owe them" (Letter from Watson to
Titchener, December 19, 1908). In particular, Watson admired
the rigor of Titchener's textbook on experimental psychology. In
addition, Watson indicated that Munsterberg, Jastrow, and
Cattell, a set of psychologists who were interested in the
application of psychology, "might never have lived so far as
influencing my work" (Letter of Watson to Titchener, December
19, 1908). Note that this correspondence took place before
Watson wrote his manifesto attacking Titchener's school of
psychology. (See Larson and Sullivan, 1965, for additional

details about Watson's relationship with Titchener and the
development of behaviorism.)
Watson's correspondence with Titchener also reveals that he
was considering abandoning the field of comparative
psychology for research on humans as early as 1908. Watson's
lament about low academic salaries provided the context within
which his letter to Titchener was written. Evidently Titchener
believed that he might receive an offer to leave Cornell for
Yale. As a biographical footnote, Watson scholars have been
interested in the cause of his stress at the
and the reason for his unhappy marriage to Mary Ickes. Watson
got married while at the
under the illusion that a married man with the additional
responsibilities of a family would receive a higher salary than a
single man. "I know what it is to be hard run. I ran into debt to
the extent of $2300 in order to get my degree. Then thinking
that I should be advanced financially faster than I was I got
married. Ever since then I have been on pins and needles"
(Letter from Watson to Titchener, December 19, 1908). Watson
thought of himself as overworked and underpaid. In the same
letter, Watson asked for career advice and mentoring from
Titchener:
In the summer if I can come [to Cornell] I want to talk over the
field with you. Some people tell me that I am making a mistake
in not doing work on the human side. Perhaps I am. But I am
sure no one can do good human work and good animal work at
the same time. I get discouraged because I can't. I sometimes
think that a reputation won on animal work must be very
ephemeral . .I should value a frank statement from you.
(Letter from Watson to Titchener, December 19, 1908).
This letter reveals that Watson's colleagues were urging him to
drop comparative psychology in favor of research with human
subjects. In this very intimate letter of 1908, Watson told
Titchener that his reputation would last longer if it were based

on research with humans rather than on research with animals.
History has shown that Watson's self assessment was correct.
Thus Watson appears to have turned away from comparative
psychology in part to enhance his reputation and the standing of
behaviorism in American psychology.
Behaviorism began simply enough as an objective point of view
in comparative psychology that rejected inferences of
consciousness and called instead for the study of behavior
(Watson, 1909). After the publication of his famous manifesto
(1913a), Watson's strategy for building behaviorism was to
extend the method from animals to humans. He knew that his
reputation and the standing of behaviorism would be enhanced
by an extension of behaviorism to a problem that could be
addressed with human subjects.
Affection and emotion as research topics for behaviorism
Watson's strategy was to search for a topic that had been
investigated with the methods of introspection and then to
propose to study the topic behavioristically. Shortly after the
publication of "Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It" (
1913a), Watson ( 1913b) published a follow-up paper in which
he identified imagery and affection as topics that appeared to
his colleagues as stumbling blocks to the acceptance of
behaviorism. Watson never conducted research on imagery, but
affection came to dominate Watson's research program by 1920.
As was often the case with Watson, his initial discussion of a
topic was an attack on his colleagues. Titchener and other
psychologists used the technique of introspection to investigate
the topic of the emotions. Not surprisingly, Watson attacked
Titchener's use of introspection and said, "I have no sympathy
with Titchener's view" (Watson, 1913b p. 426). Watson's
approach to emotion was to describe affection as a sensation
that could be investigated peripherally, but he was vague on the
methods that could be used to investigate the topic.
Watson continued to assert that affection was open to
experimentation, and for the first time he used Pavlov's new
theoretical concept of stimulus substitution to explain how

phallic symbols and fetishes in humans could be explained by
this mechanism of Pavlovian conditioning. As Watson put it,
"Certainly many objects. . . . do not in the beginning arouse
these groups, but through this ordinary mechanism of habit
come later to arouse faintly the one or the other (substitution)"
(1914, p. 25). This is an early example of a characteristic
pattern in Watson's behaviorism. An interesting phenomenon in
human behavior, here phallic symbols and fetishes, is
"explained" without any data by invoking a mechanism from
animal learning, Pavlov's theory of stimulus substitution, as an
explanation. It took Watson 7 years of hard conceptual and
empirical work to make the transition from these few
speculative comments about affection and bring the
phenomenon into the laboratory with the experiment with Little
Albert (Watson & Rayner, 1920). Much of this ef fort involved
Watson's struggle to bring together the conditioned reflex and
behaviorism.
Three phases of Watson's thinking about the conditioned reflex
At the conclusion of the excellent historical book on John B.
Watson and classic behaviorism, Todd (1994) identified
unraveling the role of the conditioned reflex at the various
stages of Watson's thinking about behaviorism as a topic for
further historical analysis. This section addresses Todd's
question.
Today, every student who has taken a course in introductory
psychology has been exposed to Pavlov's idea of the
conditioned reflex. In Wat son's day the conditioned reflex was
a new and arcane topic whose literature, for the most part, was
buried in obscure Russian journals. Pavlov's (1927/1960) major
book, Conditioned Reflexes, was not translated into English
until 1927, long after Watson's most productive period. Thus
Watson faced a formidable cultural barrier in his struggle to
assimilate the Russian literature into the culture of American
behaviorism.
With the exception of Pavlov's ( 1906) Huxley Lecture, very
few translations into English of the original Russian papers on

classical conditioning were available. American psychologists
may have first learned the basic ideas about classical
conditioning from an important article by Yerkes and Morgulis
(1909) called "The Method of Pawlow in Animal Psychology"
that appeared in the Psychological Bulletin. This article
provided an overview of the Russian work for an American
audience. This article contained the drawing of the dog in the
Pavlov harness that has been reproduced in so many texts that it
has become one an icon of experimental psychology. Though
generally informative, Yerkes and Mogulis's article was
somewhat vague about the procedural details necessary to
replicate the Russian work on conditioned reflexes.
The key word in Yerkes and Morgulis's paper was method. At
first, American psychologists such as Watson were not
interested in Pavlovian conditioning as a tool for conducting
research on the basic mechanisms of learning. It was a
methodological tool that was considered useful for addressing
other problems. For example, in his 1914 book on comparative
psychology, Watson's discussion of classical conditioning took
place in the context of a description of discrimination learning
in a Pavlovian preparation as a tool for comparative research on
the sensory capacities of animals. Watson was skeptical about
the utility of Pavlov's method for research on animal
psychophysics because he felt that the data from the preparation
were not as reliable as the students of Pavlov claimed.
For purposes of historical clarity, the development of Watson's
thinking about the conditioned reflex is described in three
phases. The first phase was an empirical phase in which Watson
tried, with very limited success, to replicate the Russian work.
The second phase was connecting behaviorism with
psychopathology. This phase was the brilliant zenith of
Watson's career and was both a theoretical and an empirical
success. The final phase was the role the conditioned reflex
played as the unit of learning in Watson's popular book,
Behaviorism (1925). This phase was speculative and notably
free of new data. In this final phase of behaviorism, classical

conditioning replaced William James's habit as the unit of
learning and Watson appealed to classical conditioning to
support his extreme environmentalism. Each of these phases is
considered in the sections that follow.
The empirical phase: The American Psychological Association
presidential address and the failure to replicate Pavlov
As Boakes (1984) and Coleman ( 1988) pointed out, it was
Bechterew, not Pavlov, who had the greater initial influence on
Watson. When he became interested in classical conditioning,
Watson's strategy was to read the literature and then attempt to
replicate the Russian work in his laboratory at Johns Hopkins.
In 1914 Watson called the attention of his graduate seminar to
the French edition of Bechterew ( 1913) and the class set about
translating and discussing the book. Carl Lashley was a student
in the seminar and he described the events that led Watson to
conduct experiments on classical conditioning as follows:
In the spring I served as a sort of unpaid assistant and we
constructed apparatus and planned experiments together. We
simply attempted to repeat Bechterew's experiments. We worked
on withdrawal reflexes, knee jerk, pupil. Watson took the
initiative in all this, but he was also trying to photograph the
vocal cords, so I did much of the actual experimental work. I
devised drainage tubes for the parotid and planned the salivary
work which I published. (Letter of Lashley to Hilgard, May 14,
1935)
In 1915, Watson gave his presidential address to the American
Psychological Association (APA) on "The Place of the
Conditioned-Reflex in Psychology." The purpose of this paper
was a proposal from Watson for replacing the method of
introspection with the method of classical conditioning as a
methodological tool for conducting research on humans. Watson
was explicit on this point: "Since the publication two years ago
of my somewhat impolite papers against current methods in
psychology I have felt it incumbent upon me before making
further unpleasant remarks to suggest some method which we
might begin to use in place of introspection" (1916a, p. 89).

Thus the context in which Watson turned to the method of
classical conditioning was his goal of extending behaviorism
from a narrow point of view in comparative psychology to a
broader point of view that was relevant to psychology as a
whole. Watson was never particularly interested in the study of
the mechanisms of classical conditioning in laboratory animals.
An examination of Watson's published papers (see Todd,
Dewsbury, Logue, & Dryden, 1994, for Watson's bibliography)
reveals that he never published an empirical paper on classical
conditioning in animals other than the brief mention of research
with one dog and seven chickens in his presidential address
(Watson 1916a).
Watson was much more optimistic in print about the
applicability of the method of classical conditioning to
problems involving humans than was his collaborator, Carl
Lashley. In his published remarks about classical conditioning,
Watson concluded his presidential address with enthusiasm: "In
conclusion I must confess to a bias in favor of this method.
Time may show that I have been over-enthusiastic about it"
(1916a, p. 105). In fact, careful scrutiny of Watson's
presidential address reveals that the data Watson had to present
were very meager. Privately and retrospectively, Lashley's
appraisal of the research was decidedly less optimistic than
Watson's. In contrast with Watson, Lashley described the
project as a failure to replicate the Russian work:
As we worked with the method I think our enthusiasm for it was
somewhat dampened. Watson tried to establish conditioned
auditory reflexes in the rat and failed. I could not get stable
conditioned salivary reflexes. Our whole program was then
disrupted by the move to the lab. in Meyer's clinic. There were
no adequate animal quarters there. Watson started work with the
infants as the next best material available. (Letter of Lashley to
Hilgard, May 13, 1935)
Watson's rhetoric about classical conditioning as a
methodological tool did not match the poor quality of his data
on classical conditioning. Watson's empirical phase of interest

in classical conditioning was basically a failure. Today, thanks
to the recent historical research on Pavlov by Todes (1997), it is
easy to understand why Watson failed to replicate the Russian
work. Pavlov had a two-story building, designed to his
specifications. Pavlov had a substantial budget for his
laboratory that was five times greater than that of any other
Russian physiologist. Pavlov had a labor force of praktikanty,
physicians who temporarily worked in Pavlov's laboratory on
doctoral dissertations. In the years between 1891 and 1904,
about 100 coworkers passed through Pavlov's laboratory. At the
time that Watson became interested in classical conditioning,
Pavlov had one of the best equipped and staffed laboratories in
the world for neuroscience research. In contrast, Watson had
limited funds and an unpaid research assistant. Even those
meager resources were lost when one of America's best
comparative psychologists found himself in 1916 without a
laboratory for conducting research with animals. Against this
background of failure, Watson turned to the topic of
psychopathology and to the idea of conditioning emotional
responses in infants.
Watson's psychopathology phase: How the conditioned reflex
became Watson's unit of psychopathology
Behaviorism has often been described by its critics as a narrow
approach to psychology. In contrast with his critics, Watson
considered behaviorism a framework for expanding the scope of
experimental psychology beyond the range of topics of
Titchener's structuralism. An important goal for Watson was
expanding the scope of behaviorism to include applied topics,
especially psychopathology. In a footnote to his presidential
address on the conditioned reflex, Watson hinted toward his
future interest in extending behaviorism to psychopathology
when he wrote,
I wish I had time here to develop the view that the concept of
the conditioned reflex can be used as an explanatory principle
in the psychopathology of hysteria and the various `ticks' which
appear in so-called normal individuals. It seems to me that

hysterical motor manifestations may be looked upon as
conditioned reflexes. (1916b, p. 95).
In this passage Watson provides a preview of his strategy for
expanding behaviorism into the arena of mental health. An
explanatory principle developed in the laboratory with animals
is generalized to human behavior without data from human
subjects. Pavlovian conditioning was about to become a weapon
in Watson's propaganda war with psychoanalysis. In order to
understand why Watson turned to classical conditioning to
explain psychopathology, it is necessary to consider how Adolf
Meyer and E. B. Titchener reacted to Freud's visit to
Clark University
in 1909.
Adolf Meyer's unsuccessful search for a unit of
psychopathology
Freud's visit to
Clark University
in 1909 was the equivalent of an intellectual earthquake,
tremors from which are still reverberating in American
psychology. The details of the visit have been ably described by
Rosenzweig (1992). Adolf Meyer (1910) and E. B. Titchener
(1910) also presented papers at Clark. Adolf Meyer became one
of the most important figures in 20th-century psychiatry, and he
was Watson's colleague at Hopkins. Meyer and Titchener shared
a skepticism of psychoanalysis that led to correspondence about
the definition of American psychology (Leys & Evans, 1990).
At the meeting, Titchener privately told Meyer that Freud's
psychology was an obsolete psychology of static associationism.
Naturally, Titchener considered his psychology of structuralism
a valid contemporary theory of psychology and psychoanalysis
as an upstart. After he returned to Hopkins, Meyer asked
Titchener to provide him with an explanation "as to how you
think the problems of Freud and Jung would have to be
formulated in order to receive a card of admission to the
domains of legitimate enquiry" (Letter of Meyer to Titchener,
September 18, 1909, from Leys & Evans, 1990, p. 116).

Meyer rejected the biological psychiatry of his day, which
involved a futile search for a missing lesion of the brain that
might cause psychopathology. The rejection of biological causes
led Meyer to search for psychological causes of
psychopathology and to propose a psychological unit for
psychopathology. Meyer chose habit conflicts as his unit of
psychopathology. Meyer wanted Titchener to validate his
explanation of psychopathology. For Titchener, the sensation
was the unit of structuralism. However, Meyer considered this
unit too small for applied research on psychopathology.
Similarly, Meyer considered research on psychophysics to be
divorced from the practical problems faced by psychiatry.
Meyer began with the adjustment of an individual to the
environment and then considered how life experiences could
produce maladjustment. Meyer called his approach
psychobiology, and naturally Meyer considered his approach
superior to psychoanalysis. Meyer proposed his theory of
psychopathology to Titchener as follows:
Psychopathology needs definite dynamic units in the life of the
patients determining the developments. These must be
psychobiological. Let us begin with habit conflicts and their
influence on the stream of events. (Letter from Meyer to
Titchener, September 23, 1909, from Leys & Evans, 1990, p.
135).
Notice that Meyer simply borrowed James's idea of the stream
of consciousness and his concept of habit, so that a maladaptive
habit becomes a habit conflict.
Titchener called Meyer an amateur psychologist and was not
impressed with Meyer foray from psychiatry into psychology. In
reply to Meyer, Titchener wrote, "Psychopathology, again, has
every right to use its habit-conflicts . .But before habit-conflicts
are accepted in psychology, we want to know what they mean"
(Letter from Titchener to Meyer, September 25, 1909, from
Leys & Evans, 1990, p. 143). In other words, Meyer failed to
provide an operational definition of habit conflicts that would
assist a psychologist who was interested in using the concept

for research on psychopathology.
Watson adapts Meyer's formulation from habit conflict to the
conditioned reflex
Watson lived during a cultural period between 1910 and 1920
when the manifesto was a literary form for advancing new ideas
in the arts, politics, and science (Heller & Rudnick, 1991).
During this period, Watson wrote three manifestos in which he
outlined his program for behaviorism. At first behaviorism was
simply a point of view in comparative psychology (Watson,
1909). Then behaviorism became a point of view for psychology
as a whole (Watson, 1913a). Finally, in this third manifesto,
Watson (1916b) generalized behaviorism into the area of
psychopathology so that he could compete with concepts from
Adolf Meyer's psychopathology and Freud's psychoanalysis.
The hallmark of Watson's three manifestos was that they were
long on optimistic rhetoric about a program of research based
on behaviorism and short on data demonstrating the validity of
the approach.
"Behavior and the Concept of Mental Disease" ( 1916b) is a
founding document for the field that has come to be called
behavior modification. Watson's style was first to attack any
idea that smacked of mentalism and then to propose a
behavioristic conceptual framework as an alternative. Naturally,
Watson attacked the physician's concept of mental disease for
the simple reason that Watson rejected the word mental. Watson
gave credit to his colleague Adolf Meyer "for describing
`mental diseases' wholly in terms of twisted habits" (1916b, p.
594). However, Watson did not think Meyer had gone far
enough. Instead, Watson proposed replacing Meyer's vague
concept of twisted habits with the concept of the conditioned
reflex. Watson agreed with Freud that childhood trauma was the
cause of psychopathology during adulthood. Watson simply
translated Freud's idea into the language of Pavlovian
conditioning, thereby providing experimental psychologists with
a familiar conceptual system for approaching psychopathology
See Rilling (2000) for additional details of how Watson

explained Freud in terms of his behavioristic learning theory
Here is Watson's translation of Freud's theory into the language
of Pavlovian conditioning:
All such disturbances of habit-superfluous and useless
conditioned reflexes-may be found to date back to some primary
stimulus (possibly sex trauma, exposure, masturbation, etc., in
childhood) which is the conditioning cause operating just as the
electric shock given jointly with a visual stimulus operates in
forcing the visual stimulus finally to release a group of
responses which, until the current was applied, brought none of
them. (1916b, p. 593)
In this passage Watson simply extended the remarks he made in
his presidential address to the APA. Watson did not present any
data demonstrating that trauma during childhood produced
psychopathology during adulthood. He simply accepted the
psychoanalytic theory of trauma-induced neurosis.
To summarize this section, the conditioned reflex became
Watson's unit of psychopathology through the following
conceptual evolution. William James began with the concept of
habit. Adolf Meyer, building on James, developed the concept
of the habit conflict. Watson, building on Meyer and James,
turned from the habit conflict to the conditioned reflex.
The context of Watson's discovery of conditioned emotional
reflexes
The discovery of conditioned emotional reflexes by Watson and
Rayner (1920) was Watson's most original contribution to
learning theory. A conditioned emotional response is the
conditioning of an emotion to a previously neutral stimulus
after pairing of the neutral stimulus with an unconditioned
stimulus that elicits the reflex. For Watson this meant the
conditioning of Little Albert's fear of a rat by associating the
touching of the rat with a loud sound that elicited an
unconditioned fear response. The context in which the discovery
was made involved two steps; the first was theoretical and the
second was empirical. Watson introduced this original concept
in his paper "Behavior and the Concept of Mental Disease"

(1916b). Watson predicted that a new category of conditioned
reflex in addition to salivary reflexes and motor reflexes could
be produced by pairing any initially nonemotional stimulus with
an emotionally exciting stimulus. The prediction was confirmed
in Watson's experiment with Little Albert (Watson & Rayner,
1920) in what has become psychology's most famous experiment
in human classical conditioning (Todd, 1994). Watson's purpose
in the experiment with Little Albert was not primarily as an
empirical demonstration of classical conditioning in a human
subject, but as a vehicle for demonstrating that phobic behavior
could be explained in terms of a mechanism of classical
conditioning. By 1920, Watson's research on problems
involving learning was intended to further the application of
behaviorism to applied problems, especially psychopathology.
The final phase: The conditioned reflex becomes Watson's unit
of learning
In Behaviorism (1925), Watson's approach to learning relied
heavily on explaining examples of human behavior in terms of
the mechanism of classical conditioning. His chapter "How to
Study Human Behavior" contained an extensive discussion of
classical conditioning and Pavlov's theory of stimulus
substitution. The narrative was constructed from a series of
anecdotes from human behavior, each of which was then
explained in terms of classical conditioning. For example,
Pavlov's theory of stimulus substitution was used to explain
how the response of screaming in a 2-year-old child could be
substituted for the initial response of fondling and playing with
a pet dog. The unconditioned stimulus was that the child was
bitten by the dog. The unconditioned response of crying was
then produced by the sight of the dog. Watson's popular style
was not to review the literature on classical conditioning, but to
propose classical conditioning as a mechanism by which human
behavior could be explained in terms of a antecedent stimulus
that preceded the response.
The conditioned reflex as a unit of habit formation
In Behaviorism, the most creative theoretical advance was the

use of the conditioned reflex as the unit from which a whole
habit was formed. Watson was challenged for years by the
problem of explaining how complex manual habits were formed.
Watson was particularly interested in learning during infancy,
and he selected for explanation the hypothetical problem of a
baby's reaching for a bottle of milk. In a thought experiment,
Watson described how one could nearly perfect the habit by
giving the child 10 trials a day for 30 days. For Watson, "the
conditioned reflex is the unit out of which the whole habit is
formed. In other words, when a complicated habit is completely
analyzed, each unit of the habit is a conditioned reflex" (1925,
p. 166). Thus, for Watson the conditioned reflex had become the
unit of learning.
Watson described the development of his thinking that led to his
identification of the conditioned reflex as the unit of habit as
follows:
Even in 1911 and 1912 when I was publishing my own views,
neither [Pavlov nor Bechterew] had helped me much. I had
worked the thing out in terms of HABIT formation. It was only
later, when I began to dig into the vague word HABIT that I saw
the enormous contribution Pavlov had made, and how easily the
conditioned response could be looked upon as the unit of what
we had all been calling HABIT. I certainly, from that point on
gave the master his due credit. (Letter from Watson to Hilgard,
February 18, 1937)
Because it was James who had formulated learning in terms of
habits, Watson was describing a transition in his thinking in
which ideas borrowed from Pavlov gradually replaced ideas he
inherited from James. After Watson, researchers gradually
began to write more about the topic of learning and conditioned
reflexes as the older discussions of habit were gradually
replaced (Malone, 1990a) . By popularizing classical
conditioning, in what Coleman (1988) called a Watsonian
speculative phase, Watson's behaviorism helped create the
intellectual climate for a subsequent phase of empirical research
on the mechanisms of classical conditioning by the next

generation of American experimental psychologists.
Conclusion
Watson's contributions to learning are conveniently divided into
two major phases: a phase of research and theory in comparative
psychology with animals and a phase of research and theory
based on the idea of classical conditioning with humans. During
the phase of comparative psychology, Watson conducted
research on maze learning with rats. Small's maze and
Thorndike's puzzle boxes were the two preparations for
studying what is now called instrumental learning that most
stimulated Watson's early interest in learning. Small was an
eclectic theorist whose explanation for maze learning included
both consciousness and sensory mechanisms. Watson applied
the law of parsimony to Small's work, thereby eliminating
consciousness from his vision of learning but retaining an
unmeasured concept of kinesthetic sensations as the explanation
of maze learning. Inspired by Thorndike's puzzle boxes, Watson
developed a sawdust box in which a rat had to burrow through
sawdust in order to obtain food that was located in a box above
the pile of sawdust. Although Watson rejected Thorndike's law
of effect, he acknowledged that he did not have a superior
behavioristic explanation for trial-and-error learning.
When Watson developed behaviorism in 1913, his research
program in comparative psychology was running out of steam.
He was unable to continue his research in comparative
psychology because he lost his space for animal work in the
Department of Psychology at John Hopkins. Watson turned to
human subjects, in part because he correctly recognized that a
reputation based on research and application with human
subjects would earn him a more enduring reputation in the
history of psychology than a reputation won primarily on animal
work in comparative. psychology. Desperate to identify new
methods for studying behavior with human subjects that could
compete with the dynamic concepts of psychoanalysis and with
Titchener's use of introspection, Watson turned to classical
conditioning for methodological and theoretical salvation.

Watson identified emotional learning in infants as a problem
worthy of the application of the new method of Pavlovian
conditioning.
Watson's interest in classical conditioning is conveniently
divided into three phases. The first phase was an empirical
collaboration with Carl Lashley in which these researchers
failed to replicate the Russian work in their laboratory at Johns
Hopkins. The second phase, the zenith of Watson's career in
learning, predicted and then confirmed in the experiment with
Little Albert the existence of conditioned emotional responses
(Watson & Rayner, 1920). This work represented the
behavioristic application of well-established principles of
classical conditioning to a new area, psychopathology. After his
exile from academic life, Watson proposed the conditioned
reflex as the unit of habit, thereby replacing William James's
vague formulation with a new framework that encouraged the
possibility of experimental analysis. After Watson, habit was
abandoned as a theoretical concept and was replaced by the
concept of learning.
Watson's ideas about the mechanisms of learning were not
competitive with Pavlov's or Thorndike's. Watson identified the
explanation of what is now called instrumental learning as an
unsolved problem. The neobehaviorists Skinner and Tolman
were able to propose explanations for maze learning and operant
behavior, respectively, that succeeded where Watson had failed.
Throughout the origins and development of his classic
behaviorism, Watson remained true to his vision of the primacy
of the topic of learning within American psychology.
Footnote
Notes
Footnote
I thank the Archives of the History of American Psychology for
the correspondence between Carl Lashley and Ernest Hilgard
and between John Watson and Ernest Hilgard. I thank the rare
and manuscript collections of the Carl A. Kroch Library of
Cornell University for the correspondence between John Watson

and E. B. Titchener.
Correspondence concerning this article may be addressed to
Mark Rilling, 6365 West Reynolds Road, Haslett, MI 48840 (e-
mail:
[email protected]
). Received for publication August 1998; revision received
September 23, 1998.
References
References
References
Bechterew, W. (1913). La psychologie objective [Objective
psychology]. Paris: Felix Alcan.
Boakes, R. ( 1984) . From Darwin to behaviourism. New York:
Cambridge University Press.
Boakes, R. (1994). John B, Watson's early scientific career:
1907-1913. In J. T Todd & E. K. Morris (Eds.), Modern
perspectives on John B. Watson and classical behaviorism (pp.
145-150). Westport, CT: Greenwood.
Burnham, J. C. (1968). On the origins of behaviorism. Journal
of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 4, 143-151.
Carr, H. (1914). Principles of selection in animal learning.
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AuthorAffiliation
MARK RILLING
Michigan State University
Word count:
11133
Copyright University of Illinois Press Summer 2000

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