John Watson's Theory Of Human Behavior

‘John Watson was one of the early American psychologists to break the Freudian notions that our unconscious mind was behind most of our behavior’ - Gary Gilles. John Watson was considered the ‘father’ of behaviourism, behaviorism is the scientific study of human behaviour (Schatzie, 2016). Watson was responsible for making Ivan Pavlov’s ideas and principles into part of a psychological norm by applying it to humans. He was impressed with Pavlov’s accurate measurement of observable behaviours and believed that Pavlov’s model could be extended towards diverse forms of learning and personality characteristics. Watson believed that the goal of psychology should be ‘the prediction and control of behavior’, meaning that one should be able to assume an upcoming behavioral action and ultimately learn how

Watson proposed that the process of classical conditioning (based on Pavlov’s observations) was able to explain all aspects of human psychology. The theory of classical conditioning involves learning a new behavior through a process of association. Meaning that two stimuli are linked together to create a newly learned response. There are three stages of classical conditioning, before conditioning, during conditioning and after conditioning (Mc Leod, 2014). Watson’s theory also involved the conditioning of emotions. He believed that from birth there are only thee emotional reactions that we inherit for our parents and surrounding environment - fear, rage and love. Though conditioning fear, rage and love, these three emotions become attached or associated with different things for different people. According to dictionary.com, fear is defined as ‘a distressing emotion aroused by impending danger.’