In 1913 John B Watson, chair of the Psychology Department at Johns Hopkins University, presented a lecture that became known in history books as the ‘Behaviorist Manifesto’, in which he advocated abandoning ‘All Talk Of Mental States’ and proposed that the only scientifically valid psychology should be the study of behavior. He argued that it was impossible to investigate mental processes directly, and suggested that any attempt to do so would inevitably involve subjective interpretation. He had a radical but very influential stance on how psychology should be done. In addition, he thought that it was impossible to understand what people were thinking. Therefore, he completely rejected the idea of associating an action with a stimulus that would cause a person to act. Instead, he believed that people just respond to stimuli and do things without any thought. Because of this, he did not believe in the Law of Effect (i.e., learning through association) and instead focused on classical conditioning.
Where Pavlov’s experiments had been based on conditioning dogs to salivate at the sound of a bell – an involuntary action – Watson stated that emotional reactions were much stronger influences on behavior. He believed that we could be conditioned to feel three basic emotions – fear, anger, and desire in response to stimuli as well.
