Sixty-seven years ago today, on September 25, 1958 (August 13, 1958 lunar calendar), American psychologist John Watson died. John B. Watson (1878-1958) was born on January 9, 1878, on a farm outside Greenville, Carolina, USA. He began his education in school. Watson admitted that he was not a good student as a child, a little lazy, disobedient, aggressive, and did not perform well academically, and could only barely advance. It was only after he entered the local Volman University that he changed. In 1894 he entered Volman University, and five years later he received a master's degree. Later he chose the University of Chicago, with the goal of obtaining a Doctor of Philosophy. However, during his studies, his enthusiasm for philosophy quickly disappeared, and he even had difficulty understanding the thoughts of his mentor Dewey. However, under the influence of Angel, he began to take an interest in psychology and made neurology a second associate subject. He also studied biology and physiology under Loeb. In 1903 he received a doctorate in philosophy and married. Until 1908, he worked as a lecturer at the University of Chicago. During these years, he studied and worked, did a lot of animal behavior experiments, and showed a preference for studying behavior with animals as subjects. He began to form his belief in the direction of behaviorism. In 1908, when Watson became an assistant professor at the University of Chicago, he was appointed as a full professor at Hopkins University. Although Watson was nostalgic for the University of Chicago, these advantages led to his eventual arrival at Hopkins University, where he spent the best years of his academic career until 1920, when he was offered a better salary than the University of Chicago for directing the laboratory. For a long time, Watson kept thinking about how to make psychological research more objective, and in 1908 he first publicly reflected on this issue in a handout. In 1912, he gave a series of lectures at Columbia University at the invitation of Cartel, in which he addressed the issue again. In 1913, he published an article in the journal Psychological Review entitled "Psychology in the Mind of a Behaviorist", which officially announced the birth of behaviorist psychology, marking the beginning of the behaviorist revolution. In 1914, he published his first monograph on behaviorism systematically, "Behavior: An Introduction to Comparative Psychology". The publication of the article and the publication of the monograph had a significant impact on the American psychological community, especially by the majority of young psychologists. Two years later, when Watson was 38 years old, he was elected president of the American Psychological Association. This also shows from one side that Watson's behaviorism has been welcomed by the psychological community. In 1919, he published his second monograph, "Psychology from the Perspective of a Behaviorist". This book is the most comprehensive and systematic exposition of his behaviorist views. In 1920, a sensational divorce at the time forced Watson to resign from Hopkins University, causing him to interrupt his once-popular academic experience. The young man entered the business world in 1921, and he used behaviorist methods for advertising. He found that "the growth of the sales curve of new products is strikingly similar to the growth of the learning curve of animals or humans." He also spent a lot of time popularizing behaviorism. He wrote articles on behaviorism for many magazines and even lectured himself on the psychology of behaviorism. In 1925 his book "Behaviorism" was published, which was a popular expression of Watson's behaviorism. In 1930, he revised the book, which was his last professional work in psychology. In 1947, he retired from business and spent the last years of his life on a farm in Connecticut. In 1957, the American Psychological Association, in a commendatory text honoring him, praised his work as "one of the most important determinants of the form and content of modern psychology, and the starting point for an enduring and fruitful line of research." Watson rejoiced at this official recognition. He died on September 25, 1958, at the age of 80. Main points of Watson's behaviorism 1. The object of psychology is not consciousness but behavior. Watson adheres to the basic principle of objectivity common to general science. The basic feature of his behaviorist psychology is to deny the object of traditional psychology - the mind or consciousness - and replace it with behavior. Behavior is the combination of various bodily responses that an organism uses to adapt to changes in its environment. Watson has distinguished human responses into cosmetic habitual responses (such as opening a door or playing a ball), implicit habitual responses (such as thinking, which is silent language), cosmetic hereditary responses (such as blinking, grasping), and implicit hereditary responses (such as the secretion of endocrine glands). Watson attributed psychology or consciousness to implicit and mild behavior. He pointed out that thoughts and emotions that have always been considered purely conscious are actually implicit and minor bodily changes. Thinking is the internal and minor response of the muscles of the whole body, especially the laryngeal muscles. In fact, he regards "thought" and "habits of the larynx" as synonymous. Emotions are changes in bodily institutions, especially internal organs and glands, and are a form of implicit, mild behavior. Watson claims that behaviorism is the only thorough and logical functionalism. According to the philosophical basis of functionalism, pragmatism, the only criterion for testing the fitness of consciousness can only be the fitness of behavior. Since behaviorism is complete functionalism, it can certainly examine behavior without consciousness, but not without behavior. 2. The task of psychology is to predict and control behavior. Watson believes that the basis for behavior is the individual's external reactions, but the formation and change of reactions are attributed to the stimulus received by the organism, and the response follows the stimulus. This led to a simplified behavioral formula for stimulus-response. In his book Behavior: An Introduction to Comparative Psychology, Watson wrote that "all human and animal behaviors can be analyzed as stimuli and responses." He believed that the most basic stimulus-response connection is called reflex. No matter how complex the behavior is, it is nothing more than a set of reflexes. Watson emphasized that psychology must conform to the basic principles of prediction and control shared by general science. The task of psychological research on behavior is to identify the regular relationship between stimuli and responses, so as to predict and control the behavior of animals and people based on stimuli and responses. 3. The research method of psychology should be an objective method rather than an introspective method. The reason why Watson studied psychology and replaced it with an objective method was, of course, that he did not believe in the accuracy of introspection, but it was also a corollary of his denial of consciousness with respect to psychological objects. There were four objective methods that he clearly stated, namely observation with and without instrument control, conditioning, verbal reporting, and testing. Conditioning is the most important research method of behaviorists. In his writings, Watson thanked Pavlov and Bekhterev for the conditioning method. He used the term "stimulus substitution" to describe conditioning. He said that a response becomes conditional when it is connected to a stimulus that did not originally cause it (the dogs in Pavlov's experiment salivated when they heard the bell rather than when they saw the food, which was a conditioned response). Watson greatly appreciated Pavlov's conditioning method because it allowed subjective experiences like sensory discrimination to be transformed into objective facts about differences in responses. The conditioning method gave Watson a completely objective method of analyzing behavior. Watson was vehemently opposed to introspection, but he was criticized for using verbal reporting as one of the objective methods. After he violently threw introspection out the front door, he picked it up through the back door with verbal reporting. He listed speech reporting as one of the objective methods, which treats speech as a reaction, so listening to the verbal response of others after receiving a certain stimulus does not violate the objective principles adhered to by behaviorism. It is worth noting that Watson wants to strictly limit the use of speech reporting to situations that can be verified. 4. An individual's behavior is not inherited, but determined by the acquired environment. Watson's position on the role of innate inheritance in behavior was changed from the initial acceptance of the role of innate inheritance to the categorical denial of the role of innate inheritance. This latter position was announced in 1925. He believed that behavior can ultimately be analyzed and reduced to a response caused by a stimulus, and stimulus cannot be inherited from innate inheritance, so of course behavior cannot be inherited from innate inheritance. He believed that all those aspects of human behavior that seemed to act instinctively were in fact conditioned responses formed in society. In "Nursery Testimony for Instinct" (1925), he asserted that "in the catalogue of human reflexes, there is no equivalent to what psychologists and biologists call instincts". Watson believed that the acquired environment had an overriding influence on behavior. No matter what the child was born with, by controlling the environment, the child can be trained to become the person we expect. He experimented with the emotional behavior of infants, causing their love and fear to change through changes in conditioned reflexes. He proposed the establishment of an experimental ethics of behaviorism. Watson developed environmental determinism and the panacea of education.