Jb Watson

J. B. Watson In 1878 John Broadus Watson was born to Emma and Pickens Watson. A poor family in Greenville, South Carolina. 1913 was the year he published his famous paper on behaviorism, which was pretty controversial. In 1919, Rosalie Rayner graduated from Vassar and came to Johns Hopkins as a grad student. She collaborated with Watson on the famous Little Albert study of conditioned emotional responses in 1920. She collaborated with him. The â€Å"Little Albert† experiment was a famous psychology experiment conducted by behaviorist John B. Watson and graduate student Rosalie Raynor. Previously, Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov had conducted experiments demonstrating the conditioning process in dogs. Watson was interested in taking Pavlov's research further to show that emotional reactions could be classically conditioned in people. The participant in the experiment was a child that Watson and Raynor called â€Å"Albert B. , but is known popularly today as Little Albert. Around the age of nine months, Watson and Raynor exposed the child to a series of stimuli including a white rat, a rabbit, a monkey, masks and burning newspapers and observed the boy's reactions. The boy initially showed no fear of any of the objects he was shown. The next time Albert was exposed the rat, Watson made a loud noise by hitting a metal pipe with a hammer. Naturally, the child began to cry after hearing the loud noise. After repeatedly pairing the white rat with the loud noise, Albert began to cry simply after seeing the rat. Watson and Raynor wrote: â€Å"The instant the rat was shown, the baby began to cry. Almost instantly he turned sharply to the left, fell over on [his] left side, raised himself on all fours and began to crawl away so rapidly that he was caught with difficulty before reaching the edge of the table Some other things he did†¦ â€Å"I was a product of schools and colleges. I knew nothing of life outside the walls of a university. † To get to understand the Consumer better, he spent the summer as a clerk at Macy's. Soon he brought his background as a student of human nature to bear on problems in the world of advertising. He did research showing that different brands of a product were indistinguishable to consumers; their buying decisions must be based on the product's image instead of on the product itself. He thus arrived at the basic tenet of modern advertising: sell the image!