John B.
Watson
1878 — 1958
The South Carolina farm boy who banished the mind from psychology, conditioned fear in a baby, and then sold cold cream and coffee with what he learned.
Twice arrested as a boy in Greenville, he talked his way into Furman at sixteen, took his doctorate at Chicago on the learning of white rats, and at thirty was a full professor at Johns Hopkins. In 1913 one lecture made psychology the science of behaviour and threw out consciousness. In the winter of 1919 he and his student Rosalie Rayner taught an eleven-month-old to fear a white rat. The affair ended his career in 1920; he spent the next twenty-five years at the J. Walter Thompson agency, and wrote Behaviorism for the public.
He told American parents never to kiss their children. His own sons paid for it, and he said late in life that he had not known enough to write the book.