JOHN B. WATSON’S 1913 “BEHAVIORIST MANIFESTO”:SETTING THE STAGE FOR BEHAVIORISM’S SOCIAL ACTION LEGACY

Abstract

 John B. Watson’s 1913 article “Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It” is widely known as the “behaviorist manifesto” that initiated behaviorism as a discipline and academic field of study. While the intent of the paper was to present behaviorism as psychology’s path to becoming a natural science, Watson also insisted that empirical data and principles generated by such a natural science must be applied to solving human and social problems if the science was to have substantial meaning and validity. He suggested several areas of social interest (education, medicine, law, business) that were ripe for an application of behavioral principles. In subsequent writings over the next decade, Watson expanded his focus on social problems and their behavioral remedies, culminating in his 1924 book Behaviorism, which aggressively confronted the eugenic fervor sweeping the United States during the first quarter of the century by espousing an extreme and at times polemical environmentalism. Watson’s environmentalism and advocacy of social interventions reflected his comfort with the Progressive ideology of the time — a heritage that embodied Skinner’s work and the rise of operant interventions in the 1960s