Worked Example Effect
- PDF / 479,526 Bytes
- 40 Pages / 547.087 x 737.008 pts Page_size
- 51 Downloads / 161 Views
Watson, John B. (1878–1958) NORBERT M. SEEL Department of Education, University of Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany
Life Dates John Broadus Watson was born in 1878 in Greenville, South Carolina. Due to the divorce of the parents he became a troublemaker in school and everyday life. However, despite his laziness and violence in school he was accepted to Furman University at the age of 15. After graduation he decided to go the University of Chicago in 1900. Here, Watson studied especially the British empiricists and he took some philosophy classes of John Dewey but confessed that he did not understand Dewey. The functionalist James Angell and neurologist Henry Donaldson had the greatest influence on him. In 1903, Watson received his doctorate at the age of 25 as the youngest person who ever attained a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago. At this time, he began a correspondence with Robert Yerkes who was involved in animal research but never accepted Watson’s behaviorist position despite the friendship with him. In 1906, Watson began his collaborative research with Harvey Carr, a prominent functionalist at that time, on complex maze learning of rats. In 1907, Watson accepted an offer from the Carnegie Institute to study the migratory instinct of terns. This research was done in collaboration with Karl Lashley, later a leading figure in the field of neuropsychology. In consequence of this research
efforts, Watson had national reputation when he was offered a position at Johns Hopkins University which he accepted. Due to a private scandal in 1920, Watson was asked to resign and he did. That marked the end of his scientific career in psychology. He now started with a career in advertising with enormous success until his retirement in 1945 at the age of 67. Watson died in 1958.
Theoretical Background In the first years of the twentieth century, the field of psychology was in disagreement over the ideas of the nature of consciousness and the methods of studying it. Influenced by the Russian objective psychology and American functionalism, a new school of psychology emerged: the behaviorism. Watson can be considered as a pioneer of behaviorism. Watson began thinking about behaviorism in 1902 and submitted his doctoral thesis with the title Animal Education: The Psychical Development of the White Rat in 1903. In 1913 at Columbia University, Watson delivered a lecture entitled “Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It” and coined the term Behaviorism. Behaviorism assumes that behavior is observable and can be correlated with other observable events. There are events that precede and follow behavior. The goal of research is to explain relationships between antecedent conditions (stimuli), behavior (responses), and consequences (reward, punishment, or neutral effect). In opposition to methods of introspection, Watson proclaimed the idea of an objective study of behavior. His view of behaviorism was considered radical and was known for its extreme anti-mentalism and its radical reduction of thinking to implicit response. Although Watso
Data Loading...
