John B. Watson, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
Habit formation is the process by which a vast, diffuse repertoire of unlearned responses gets pared down and integrated into a circumscribed, efficient sequence. The organism does not begin with nothing; it begins with more unit responses than it will ever use.1 What conditioning does is select from that surplus — discard the useless movements, retain and pattern the useful ones, until what was a sprawling, wasteful performance becomes a single smooth act.
Watch the rat in the problem box. Hungry, confronted with a latched wire cage it has never seen, it runs, bites, pokes, pulls, smells — the whole repertoire on display at once.2 Out of fifty or a hundred such movements, only four are needed: run to the door, raise the head to knock the latch, pull the door with the claws, climb over the sill to the food.3
Given enough trials, the animal stumbles onto this sequence by accident; given more trials still, every response except those four disappears, and what remains is the habit — a new, conditioned response built from the wreckage of the old unconditioned ones.4 The mechanism that drives this selection is, I believe, frequency and recency. The successful response — the one that ends the trial and delivers the food — is the one most often repeated across trials, and it is always the most recent response before reward; so it appears earlier and earlier in the next trial's sequence.5
Critics, among them Peterson and Bertrand Russell, have pressed on this account, and I will grant that no experimental test I consider truly crucial has yet settled the matter.6 Most psychologists, to their discredit, have not even seen that there is a problem to settle — they speak of pleasure "stamping in" successful movements, or of tiny servants of Vulcan running through the nervous system with hammer and chisel digging new trenches, as though that were explanation rather than metaphor.7
The theoretical relationship between the simple conditioned reflex and the full habit is, to my mind, the relationship of part to whole: the conditioned reflex is the unit out of which the whole habit is constructed.8 When you analyze a complicated habit completely, each unit of it is a conditioned reflex. That is the architecture — not Thorndike's pleasure-pain fairy tale, not new neural pathways conjured by verbal magic, but stimulus-response units chained and integrated by the conditions of practice until the whole runs off as one.
The organism starts out life with more unit responses than it needs. Relatively few of its vast resources, numerous as its organized complicated acts seem to be, are ever utilized.Behaviorism
What does it do? It runs round and round, bites at the wire, pokes its nose between meshes, pulls cage toward it, sticks claws into moving door, raises head and smells about the cage.Behaviorism
They are (1) walking or running to the door, (2) raising the head (which if done at a given point will result in knocking the latch up), (3) pulling at the moving door with the claws, (4) climbing over the sill to the food.Behaviorism
When integration, patterning or conditioning is complete, all other responses except 1-2-3-4 disappear. We would correctly speak of this 1-2-3-4 response as being a new and conditioned response. We usually call this process the formation of a habit.Behaviorism
Act number 50 is therefore the one most frequently repeated—more frequently, that is, than any of the other 49 acts. Again, since act number 50 is always the last response in the previous trial, there is some reason for believing that it will appear sooner in the series of acts on the next succeeding trial. This is what is called the factor of recency.Behaviorism
The recency and frequency factors as explanations of the formation of habit have been criticized by some writers—among others: Professor Joseph Peterson, of George Peabody College, Nashville, Tennessee, and Professor Bertrand Russell. No experimental test, that I consider crucial at any rate, has ever been made in this very important field.Behaviorism
Thorndike speaks of pleasure stamping in the successful movement and displeasure stamping out the unsuccessful movements. Most of the psychologists talk, too, quite volubly about the formation of new pathways in the brain, as though there were a group of tiny servants of Vulcan there who run through the nervous system with hammer and chisel digging new trenches and deepening old ones.Behaviorism
The conditioned reflex is the unit out of which the whole habit is formed. In other words, when a complicated habit is completely analyzed, each unit of the habit is a conditioned reflex.The Ways of Behaviorism