Prediction and Control

A cat in a box, a baby and a white rat — how psychology threw out the mind and promised to engineer a person instead.

A course on the thought of Thorndike & Watson.

Course outline

1. The Cat in the Box — Everyone who owns an animal has a story about how clever it is. A graduate student with a stopwatch and some crates decided to find out what the stories were actually worth.
2. The Law of Effect — A mechanism needs a statement. Here it is, in the form I published in 1913 — and it is still running, under other names, in most of the software you used today.
3. Throw Out the Mind — In 1913 Watson proposed that psychology stop studying consciousness altogether. Not bracket it. Not defer it. Stop.
4. Albert B. — The most notorious study in the history of psychology: an eleven-month -old, a white rat, and a steel bar struck behind his head.
5. A Dozen Healthy Infants — The most-quoted sentence in psychology, the retraction attached to it that almost nobody quotes, and the childrearing advice that followed.
6. What Survived — The ledger. What behaviorism got right is now so standard it is invisible; what it got wrong is what everybody remembers.

Part of the Simposeum course library.