John
B. Watson conditioning a child to fear Santa Claus. With a properly controlled environment, he felt that children can be conditioned to think and behave in any way desired
After
peaking in the mid-19th century, antiracism fell into decline in the U.S.,
remaining dominant only in the Northeast. By the 1930s, however, it was clearly
reviving, largely through the efforts of the anthropologist Franz Boas and his
students.
But
a timid revival had already begun during the previous two decades. In the
political arena, the NAACP had been founded in 1910 under the aegis of WASP
and, later, Jewish benefactors. In academia, the 1920s saw a growing belief in
the plasticity of human nature, largely through the behaviorist school of
psychology.
The
founder of behaviorism was an unlikely antiracist. A white southerner who had
been twice arrested in high school for fighting with African American boys, John
B. Watson (1878-1958) initially held a balanced view on the relative importance
of nature vs. nature. His book Psychology
from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist (1919) contained two chapters on
"unlearned behavior". The first chapter is summarized as follows:
In
this chapter, we examine man as a reacting organism, and specifically some of
the reactions which belong to his hereditary equipment. Human action as a whole
can be divided into hereditary modes of response (emotional and instinctive),
and acquired modes of response (habit). Each of these two broad divisions is
capable of many subdivisions. It is obvious both from the standpoint of
common-sense and of laboratory experimentation that the hereditary and acquired
forms of activity begin to overlap early in life. Emotional reactions become
wholly separated from the stimuli that originally called them out (transfer),
and the instinctive positive reaction tendencies displayed by the child soon
become overlaid with the organized habits of the adult.
By
the mid-1920s, however, he had largely abandoned this balanced view and
embraced a much more radical environmentalism, as seen in Behaviorism (1924):
Our
conclusion, then, is that we have no real evidence of the inheritance of
traits. I would feel perfectly confident in the ultimately favorable outcome of
a healthy, well-formed baby born of a
long line of crooks, murderers and thieves, and prostitutes (Watson, 1924, p. 82)
[...]
Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to
bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to
become any type of specialist I might select—doctor, lawyer, artist,
merchant-chief, and yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents,
penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors. I am
going beyond my facts and I admit it, but so have the advocates of the contrary
and they have been doing it for many thousands of years. (Watson, 1924, p. 82)
Everything
we have been in the habit of calling "instinct" today is a result
largely of training—belongs to man's learned behavior. As a corollary from this
I wish to draw the conclusion that there is no such thing as an inheritance of
capacity, talent, temperament, mental constitution, and characteristics. These
things again depend on training that goes on mainly in the cradle. (Watson,1924, p. 74).
Why
the shift to extreme environmentalism? It was not a product of ongoing academic
research. In fact, Watson was no longer in academia, having lost his position
in 1920 at Johns Hopkins University after an affair with a graduate student. At
the age of 42, he had to start a new career as an executive at a New York
advertising agency. Some writers attribute this ideological shift to his move
from academia to advertising:
Todd
(1994) noted that after Watson lost his academic post at Johns Hopkins, he
abandoned scientific restraint in favor of significantly increased stridency
and extremism, such that there were "two Watsons—a pre-1920, academic
Watson and a post-1920, postacademic Watson" (p. 167). Logue (1994) argued
that Watson's shift from an even-handed consideration of heredity and
environment to a position of bombast and extreme environmentalism was motivated
by the need to make money and the desire to stay in the limelight after he left
academia. (Rakos, 2013)
There
was another reason: the acrimonious debate in the mid-1920s over immigration,
particularly over whether the United States was receiving immigrants of dubious
quality. Rakos (2013) points to Watson's increasingly harsh words on eugenics
and the political background: "It is probably no coincidence that only in
the 1924 edition of the book—published in the same year that Congress passed
the restrictive Johnson-Lodge Immigration Act—did Watson express his belief
that behaviorism can promote social harmony in a world being transformed by
industrialization and the movement of peoples across the globe."
Eugenics
is mentioned, negatively, in his 1924 book:
But
you say: "Is there nothing in heredity-is there nothing in eugenics-[...]
has there been no progress in human
evolution?" Let us examine a few of the questions you are now bursting to
utter.
Certainly
black parents will bear black children [...]. Certainly the yellow-skinned
Chinese parents will bear a yellow skinned offspring. Certainly Caucasian
parents will bear white children. But these differences are relatively slight.
They are due among other things to differences in the amount and kind of
pigments in the skin. I defy anyone to take these infants at birth, study their
behavior, and mark off differences in behavior that will characterize white
from black and white or black from yellow. There will be differences in
behavior but the burden of proof is upon the individual be he biologist or
eugenicist who claims that these racial differences are greater than the
individual differences. (Watson, 1924, p. 76)
You
will probably say that I am flying in the face of the known facts of eugenics
and experimental evolution—that the geneticists have proven that many of the
behavior characteristics of the parents are handed down to the offspring—they
will cite mathematical ability, musical ability, and many, many other types. My
reply is that the geneticists are working under the banner of the old
"faculty" psychology. One need not give very much weight to any of
their present conclusions. (Watson, 1924, p. 79)
Conclusion
Antiracism
did not revive during the interwar years because of new data. Watson's shift to
radical environmentalism took place a half-decade after his departure from
academia. It was as an advertising executive, and as a crusader against the
1924 Immigration Act, that he entered the "environmentalist" phase of
his life. This phase, though poor in actual research, was rich in countless
newspaper and magazine articles that would spread his behaviorist gospel to a
mass audience.
The
same could be said for Franz Boas. He, too, made his shift to radical
antiracism when he was already semi-retired and well into his 70s. Although
this phase of his life produced very little research, it saw the publication of
many books and articles for the general public. As with Watson, the influence
of external political events was decisive, specifically the rise of Nazism in
the early 1930s.
In
both cases, biographers have tried to explain this ideological shift by
projecting it backward in time to earlier research. Boas' antiracism is often
ascribed to an early study that purported to show differences in cranial form
between European immigrants and their children (Boas, 1912). Yet Boas himself
was reluctant to draw any conclusions at the time, merely saying we should
"await further evidence before committing ourselves to theories that
cannot be proven." Later reanalysis found no change in skull shape once
age had been taken into account (Fergus, 2003). More to the point, Boas
continued over the next two decades to cite differences in skull size as
evidence for black-white differences in mental makeup (Frost, 2015).
Watson's
radical environmentalism has likewise been explained by his Little Albert
Experiment in 1920, an attempt to condition a fear response in an 11-month-old
child. Aside from the small sample size (one child) and the lack of any replication, it
is difficult to see how this finding could justify his later sweeping
pronouncements on environmentalism. There were admittedly other experiments,
but they came to an abrupt end with his dismissal from Johns Hopkins, and little
is known about their long-term effects:
Watson
tested his theories on how to condition children to express fear, love, or
rage—emotions Watson conjectured were the basic elements of human nature. Among
other techniques, he dropped (and caught) infants to generate fear and
suggested that stimulation of the genital area would create feelings of love.
In another chilling project, Watson boasted to Goodnow in summer 1920 that the
National Research Council had approved a children's hospital he proposed that
would include rooms for his infant psychology experiments. He planned to spend
weekends working at the "Washington infant laboratory." (Simpson,2000)
Watson
did apply behaviorism to the upbringing of his own children. The results were
disappointing. His first marriage produced a daughter who made multiple suicide
attempts and a son who sponged off his father. His second marriage produced two
sons, one of whom committed suicide (Anon, 2005). His granddaughter similarly
suffered from her behaviorist upbringing and denounced it in her memoir Breaking the Silence. Towards the end of
his life Watson regretted much of his child-rearing advice (Simpson, 2000).
References
Anon
(2005). The long dark night of behaviorism, Psych
101 Revisited, September 6
http://robothink.blogspot.ca/2005/09/long-dark-night-of-behaviorism.html
Boas,
F. (1912). Changes in the Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants, American Anthropologist, 14, 530-562.
Fergus,
C. (2003). Boas, Bones, and Race, May 4, Penn
State News
http://news.psu.edu/story/140739/2003/05/01/research/boas-bones-and-race
Frost,
P. (2015). More on the younger Franz Boas, Evo
and Proud, April 18
http://www.evoandproud.blogspot.ca/2015/04/more-on-younger-franz-boas.html
Rakos, R.F. (2013). John B. Watson's 1913 "Behaviorist Manifesto: Setting the stage for behaviorism's social action legacy, Revista Mexicana de analisis de la conducta, 39(2)
http://rmac-mx.org/john-b-watsons-1913-behaviorist-manifestosetting-the-stage-for-behaviorisms-social-action-legacy/
Simpson,
J.C. (2000). It's All in the Upbringing, John
Hopkins Magazine, April
http://pages.jh.edu/~jhumag/0400web/35.html
Watson,
J.B. (1919). Psychology from the
Standpoint of a Behaviorist,
http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/2009-03123-000/
Watson,
J. B. (1924). Behaviorism. New York:
People's Institute.
http://books.google.ca/books?hl=fr&lr=&id=PhnCSSy0UWQC&oi=fnd&pg=PR10&dq=behaviorism+watson&ots=tW26oNvzjs&sig=YtDpYTYq3hE80QHJfo1Q4ebsuPI#v=onepage&q=behaviorism%20watson&f=false
Has anyone explained IQ differences as being on a continuum and that some groups seem to proceed further down the developmental phase (and take longer to mature?)
ReplyDeleteWow. This guy sound like a real jerkface. Makes the Continuum Concept's recommendations look like hard science by comparison. His poor kids (and poor everyone else's kids.)
ReplyDeleteSince I am blacklisted at Unz Review, I will comment here. I just want to point out that a specific point of historical origin of anti-racism would have to be in Freemasonry. I point to the New Advent Catholic Online Encyclopaedia article on Masonry.
ReplyDeleteIn it you have the research of Gruben who preserves Masonic teaching: This "universal religion of Humanity" which gradually removes the accidental divisions of mankind due to particular opinions "or religious", national, and social "prejudices", is to be the bond of union among men in the Masonic society, conceived as the model of human association in general.
"Humanity" is the term used to designate the essential principle of Masonry. [30] It occurs in a Masonic address of 1747. [31] Other watchwords are "tolerance", "unsectarian", "cosmopolitan".
Notice that it says to end "social prejudice". This should give you more things to research and the proper historical setting. Also look up Adam Weishpalt, the founder of the Illuminati, a sect within Masonry, who prophesized that nations and kings will disappear from the earth. Masonry gets its roots in the Kabbalah along with the Hermetic Tradition.
The roots of anti-racism is found in Jewish messianism that is carried by the Kabbalah which influenced many people starting in the Renaissance. That is the foundation.
I forgot to specifically mention that Gruben is referencing documents from 1737 and earlier!
ReplyDeleteLooking at John Watson's Wikipedia page, it ends with him burning his papers and his personal correspondence. Was Watson himself a Mason? Masonry was big in the early 1900s. He opposed the 1924 Immigration Act. That is an important clue. Was he a member of the Unitarian Church? All of these could have influenced his writings but looking at his Wikipedia page we run across John Dewey and Jacques Loeb who were his academic advisors; Dewey who laid the groundwork to organize the NAACP and Loeb is Jewish. Dewey was a fervent democraphile. The universalist message is certainly carried by democracy.
You can most certainly social engineer humans just like man has done to domestic animals. Man can make "the lion lie down with the lamb". Watson was converted to a pseudo-faith. Dewey called himself a socialist. Socialism is a carrier of Jewish Messianism and I'm sure that Watson was influenced either thru heretical Christian sects, Masonry or Socialism or all three. But we will never know for sure but having Dewey and Loeb as influences, there is a wiff of smoke.