Rethinking John B. Watson's Legacy

As the founding father of the Behaviorist perspective, teaching students about John B. Watson and his contribution to the field of psychology is a cornerstone of any introductory course. However, the more that I read about his contributions and the way in which he went about studying psychology, the more I wonder about elevating the status of a researcher who was ethically questionable regarding his work and promoting some dangerous theories regarding child-rearing. Why does Watson continue to persist in the psychology canon, and should he be presented to students with qualifiers as an example of how not to behave as a researcher and psychologist?

Let’s start with his often cited (and now infamous) study that is commonly referred to today as the “Little Albert” study. As is known, this is the name given to a 9-month old infant whose identity is still debated to the present day. This infant was used as a test subject in an experiment where Watson and his 21-year old graduate student Rosalie Raynor applied the principles of classical conditioning to test whether they could get the baby to develop a fear response to different furry animals.

In addition to the premise itself being ethically questionable given how young the subject was, after demonstrating that they could effectively cultivate a phobia in the baby, Watson never attempted to extinguish (meaning get rid of or treat) the fear he had conditioned in the infant. Moreover, the fear became so severe in Little Albert that he developed stimulus generalization—meaning he was not just fearful of furry animals that he was exposed to during the conditioning phase; his fear also extended to objects that were similar to furry creatures, such as a fur coat, white mask, etc.

To the present day, controversy remains regarding identifying who the baby in the study actually was, and whether or not Watson and his colleague actually obtained informed consent from his mother. There is evidence to suggest coercion regarding the participation of the infant. These are clear ethical breaches, in addition to the fact that no follow-up was provided to make sure the infant did not suffer long-term harm from the conditions he was exposed to in the study. As if this isn’t bad enough, new research suggests that Watson may have selected a baby who was not actually healthy to begin with.

For instance, an article published by The American Psychological Association, an organization Watson presided over as president in his day, reported:

"New evidence suggests that the baby boy known as Little Albert—the subject of John B. Watson's and Rosalie Rayner's famous 1920 emotion-conditioning investigation at Johns Hopkins University—may not have been the ‘healthy,’ ‘normal’ boy Watson touted, but a neurologically impaired child who suffered from congenital hydrocephalus.

What's more, supporting evidence suggests that Watson suppressed that information to augment the study's findings, perhaps reasoning that an unresponsive child would provide a better baseline for later strong reactions and help deflect accusations of child maltreatment." (DeAngelis, 2012, para 1-2)

If, in fact, Little Albert was this child as suspected, the article goes on to note that he died at the age of 6. In fact, the investigators into this infant’s identity conclude that: "Because Watson and Rayner tried to condition fear in an infant and made no effort to follow him after discharge and insure his well-being, the Little Albert study has always led us to consider basic issues of experimental ethics," he [researcher Fridlund] says. "But now it forces us to confront deeper, more disturbing issues like the medical misogyny, the protection of the disabled, and the likelihood of scientific fraud. It's a story all psychologists can learn from" (as reported by DeAngelis, 2012, para 10).

As if Watson’s suppression of the truth and his blatant disregard for the health of Little Albert is not enough to rethink his legacy, it appears that he was morally questionable in his personal life as well. Watson famously divorced his wife after he became engrossed in a scandal that eventually led to his being fired from Johns Hopkins University. Apparently, he was having an affair with Raynor, although rumors persist to the present day that the real reason he was fired was that he was conducting sex-related experiments (e.g. Chamberlin, 2012). Watson left academia in the aftermath of the scandal, never to return.

So perhaps we shouldn’t scrutinize the personal lives of our psychological icons—nobody is perfect, and they should be remembered for their contributions to the field, right? I find it ironic, however, that Freud is the more controversial figure from the perspective of him being viewed as "hypersexual" or somehow sexually deviant for his theories, given that by all accounts, he lived a very chaste private life with his wife. Certainly, in comparison to Watson, Freud was never engrossed in any scandals of indecency for that time period.

And finally—and perhaps most disturbingly—is the fact that Watson erroneously applied principles of behaviorism to the notion that mothers should let their infants “cry it out” if they did not sleep through the night, without offering any legitimate social scientific support for such a theory. This misinformation persists to the present day, with sleep consultants, pediatricians and a host of other “experts” advising parents who are interested in learning about sleep training that they should let their babies cry—even if it takes hours—as a way to enable them to learn how to fall asleep on their own.

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Fellow PT writer Darcia Narvaez documents the damaging effects of such erroneous theorizing when she writes, “He [Watson] applied the mechanistic paradigm of behaviorism to child-rearing, warning about the dangers of too much mother love” (Narvaez, 2011, para 2). In fact, she goes on to report that such a behaviorist view was “completely ignorant of human development” and has no legitimacy from a research perspective.

So there we have it: Rather than a John B. Watson free of scandal and working tirelessly to develop a paradigm that would dominate the field in the 20th century—as I learned about him—the real Watson, in addition to being ethically questionable in his research, was also promoting dangerous views regarding child-rearing and developmental psychology not grounded in science or facts. These theories persist to the present day, making them all the more dangerous.

Perhaps when he is introduced to students of psychology today, John B. Watson should be taught as a cautionary tale when “men of science” are given free rein to do as they see fit without any accountability or standards of ethics to uphold. Indeed, I find it disturbing that a figure like Sigmund Freud has historically been shrouded in controversy within the field despite the significant and groundbreaking ways he revolutionized the field when in fact the research that he conducted in no way crossed any of the ethical boundaries clearly evident in Watson’s work. We should scrutinize the founding architects of these perspectives more thoroughly, as just because they are historical figures today does not mean we should not hold them accountable for morally reprehensible behaviors or whitewash the more shady parts of their biographies.

Copyright Azadeh Aalai 2015