John B. Watson, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
Psychology as I found it was a branch of theology dressed in laboratory clothes — a science that took as its subject matter "consciousness," a thing no one could point to, observe in another, or measure, and that proposed to study it by introspection, a method in which each observer reports on a private show only he can see and no one can check.12
That is not a natural science; it is a parlor game. I proposed that psychology become what every other natural science is: the study of what can be publicly observed. What can be observed of a human being is his behavior — what he does, the movements he makes, the responses he gives to stimuli — and the whole task of a scientific psychology is to predict the response given the stimulus and to name the stimulus given the response.
I do not say there is no such thing as feeling; I say that "consciousness" as introspection conceives it is not a subject a science can work with, and that everything real in it — the man's actual doing, including his talking about his feelings, which is itself behavior — is captured when we study behavior. Throw out the soul, the mind, consciousness, the image; keep stimulus and response, habit and conditioning; and psychology at last takes its place among the sciences.345
This thing we call consciousness can be analyzed only 6 BEHAVIORISM by introspection—a looking in on what goes on inside of us. As a result of this major assumption that there is such a thing as consciousness and that we can analyze it by introspection, we find as many analyses as there are individual psychologists.Behaviorism
Psychology has failed signally during the fifty odd years of its existence as an experimental discipline to make its place in the world as an undisputed natural science. Psychology, as it is generally thought of, has something esoteric in its methods.Behavior, An Introduction to Comparative Psychology
Do I not forget things and remember things, imagine things, have visual images and auditory images of things I once have seen and heard? Can I not see and hear things that I have never seen or heard in nature? Can I not be attentive or inatten- tive? Can I not will to do a thing or will not to do it, as the case may be? Do not certain things arouse pleasure in me, and others displeasure?Behaviorism
That is to say we have both a mind (soul) and a body. This dogma has been present in human psychology from earliest antiquity. No one has ever touched a soul, or has seen one in a test tube, or has in any way come into relationship with it as he has with the other objects of his daily experience.The Ways of Behaviorism
Consciousness—Oh, yes, everybody must know what this "consciousness" is. When we have a sensation of red, a perception, a thought, when we will to do something, or when we purpose to do something, or when we desire to do something, we are being con- scious. All other introspectionists are equally illogical.The Ways of Behaviorism
The founding doctrine of behaviorism and one of the most consequential methodological decisions in the history of psychology. It captured the American field and held it for roughly forty years, reshaping the discipline around objective method, animal models, and learning. Skinner's radical behaviorism refined it, readmitting private events (thoughts, feelings) as behavior rather than banishing them and rejecting Watson's peripheralism. The cognitive revolution of the late 1950s reversed the exclusion: Chomsky's review of Skinner, the rise of information-processing models, and the study of internal representation restored the mind to psychology and made Watson's banishment of consciousness the standing example of a purge that threw out the phenomena with the bad method. The objective methodology Watson demanded, however, is now simply part of what psychology is.