the British social philosophers John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer and by the Austrian philosopher and physicist Ernst Mach. The positivists today, who have rejected this way of thinking prefer to call themselves logical empiricists in order to dissociate themselves from the emphasis of the earlier thinkers on scientific verification. They maintain that the verification principle itself is philosophically unverifiable. John Watson, 1878-1958, will no longer be shopping with us today. “Humans can learn to fear seemingly unimportant stimuli when the stimuli is paired with unpleasant experiences.” The American psychologist John B. Watson first developed behaviorism in the early 20th century. The dominant view of that time was that psychology is the study of inner experiences or feelings by subjective, introspective methods. Watson did not deny the existence of inner experiences, but he insisted that these experiences could not be studied because they were not observable. He was greatly influenced by the pioneering investigations of the Russian physiologists Ivan P. Pavlov and Vladimir M. Bekhterev on conditioning of animals (classical conditioning). Watson proposed to make the study of psychology scientific by using only objective procedures such as laboratory experiments designed to establish statistically significant results. The behavioristic view led him to formulate a stimulus-response theory of psychology. In this theory all complex forms of behavior—emotions, habits, and such—are seen as composed of simple muscular and glandular elements that can be observed and measured. He claimed that emotional reactions are learned in much the same way as other skills.Watson's stimulus-response theory resulted in a tremendous increase in research activity on learning in animals and in humans, from infancy to early adulthood. Between 1920 and midcentury, behaviorism dominated psychology in the United States and also h...
