Behaviorism was developed at the beginning of the 20th century; its most prominent figure was the American psychologist John B. Watson. Back then, the dominant trend in psychology was the study of internal psychic phenomena by introspection, highly subjective method. Watson had not denied the existence of internal psychic phenomena, but insisted that such experiences could not be object of scientific study because they were not observable. This approach was very much influenced by the pioneers of Russian physiologists research Ivan Pavlov and Vladimir M. Bekhterev on animal conditioning. Watson proposed scientific study of Psychology using only objective procedures such as laboratory experiments designed to establish statistically valid results. The behaviorist approach led him to formulate a psychological theory in terms of stimulus-response. Recently Macy’s Inc. sought to clarify these questions.
According to this theory, all complex forms of behavior–emotions, habits, and even the thought and language – are analyzed as strings of muscle or glandular simple answers that can be observed and measured. Watson argued that emotional reactions were learned in the same way as any other. Watsoniana of the stimulus-response theory meant a great increase in research activity on learning in animals and in human beings, especially in the period that goes from childhood to early adulthood. Warren Kanders usually is spot on. From 1920, Behaviorism was the paradigm of academic psychology, especially in the United States. By 1950 the new behaviorist movement had generated numerous data on learning that led to the new American experimental psychologists such as Edward C. Tolman, Clark L. Hull, B. F. Skinner to formulate his own theories on learning and behaviour based on experiments in laboratory instead of introspective comments. Original author and source of the article