The father of behaviourism burned his papers, leaving historians in the dark
John B. Watson turned psychology towards observable behaviour with a single 1913 lecture at Columbia and became one of the most cited psychologists of the century. Late in life he destroyed his letters and personal papers, erasing a key record of how behaviourism began and of the troubled man behind it.
Watson was born in 1878 in Travelers Rest, South Carolina. His father, an alcoholic, walked out when John was 13. His mother, strictly religious, named him after a Baptist minister in hope he would preach; her harsh religious training instead left him a lifelong atheist. Seeking a way out of poverty, she sold the farm and moved to Greenville, then a town of about 8,000, where he met a far wider range of people. He also held racist views considered extreme even then and was arrested over attacks on Black residents, escaping consequences through his mother's church connections.
A poor and insubordinate student, he was arrested twice in high school, yet entered Furman University at 16 and left at 21 with a master's degree. After a year running a one-room school where he was also janitor, he talked his way into the University of Chicago. Studying under John Dewey and scientists including Jacques Loeb, he developed a strictly objective way to describe behaviour, which he saw almost as a declaration of faith that method could make psychology a science. He later folded simplified versions of Pavlov's ideas into his popular writing.
His name is tied to the controversial Little Albert experiment, and he also applied his methods to child rearing and advertising. In 1920 an affair with his student Rosalie Rayner became front-page news in Baltimore, and Johns Hopkins asked him to resign; he married Rayner the following year.
His home life was shadowed. His children and a granddaughter, the actor Mariette Hartley, struggled with psychological difficulties, and Hartley attributed hers to being raised on his theories. The American Psychological Association gave him a Gold Medal in 1957. He died in 1958, aged 80.
Source: John B. Watson
