At the time of Watson’s advocacy of behavioral psychology, many of his companions were supporting the idea of genetics. Watsons, however, opposed the notion, coming down firmly on the ‘nurture’ side of the nature versus nurture argument. Human behavior, he asserted, is shaped by conditioning rather than genetic inheritance; in his terms, all humans are born as blank slates.
He even stated that if given a dozen healthy infants, and a level playing field (in terms of food, shelter, education, medical care, and so forth), he could train any one of them to become an expert in any professional field. Although he admitted he may have overstated his case, he claimed that this was no longer controversial; that if you give people a fair chance they are capable of doing almost anything. Although he may have been exaggerating, he asserted that the same principles would hold true for humans for any stimulus-response conditioning. In his famous “Manifesto” lecture, he even explicitly stated that the aim of behaviorist psychology should be the prediction and control of behavior.
