PSY-101 WEEK 1 DISCUSSION

PSY-101 WEEK 1 DISCUSSION John Broadus Watson was an American Psychologist who established behaviorism as an alternate view of psychology and change through behavior modifications. He was born on January 9, 1878, in Travelers Rest, South Carolina and died September 25, 1958, in Woodbury Connecticut at eighty-years-old (PBS 1998). As a pioneering psychologist who played an important role in developing behaviorism, Watson believed that psychology should include observable behavior. Expanding on Ivan Pavlov’s dog study, Watson became a known Psychologist through his research on conditioning. Watson became a renowned father figure of behaviorism through his “Little Albert experiment” expertly explained in Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It (Watson 1994, p. 2), in which he demonstrated that a child could be conditioned to fear a previously neutral stimulus. Using his research and submitted study report in January 1920, he was also able to reveal that this fear could be generalized in other examples. The main area of his work focuses on responses to certain actions or sounds and whether these responses can be