{"agent_id":"watson","agent_name":"John B. Watson","slug":"radical-environmentalism","label":"Radical environmentalism: are talent and character built by conditioning rather than inherited?","topic":"Radical environmentalism","question":"Are talent and character built by conditioning rather than inherited?","position":"The hereditarians of my day looked at a capable man and pronounced him well-bred, and looked at a failure and pronounced him ill-bred, and called this science. I say the human infant comes into the world with a few reflexes and three rough emotional reactions and nothing more — no inherited talents, no inherited temperament, no inherited \"gifts,\" no inherited faculty for music or mathematics or leadership. What a man becomes is built, response by conditioned response, out of the world we put him in. Give me a dozen healthy infants and my own world to raise them in, and I will take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I select — doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief, or beggar-man and thief — regardless of his talents, his tendencies, his abilities, and the race of his ancestors. I said, when I wrote that, that I was going beyond my facts; and I said in the same breath that the advocates of the contrary have been going beyond theirs for many thousands of years. It is a wager thrown down against a hereditarianism that had never proved its own case, and I threw it down deliberately. The burden is not on the man who says a child can be shaped; it is on the man who says the child's fate is sealed in his blood.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"The hereditarians of my day looked at a capable man and pronounced him well-bred, and looked at a failure and pronounced him ill-bred, and called this science.","n":[]},{"t":"I say the human infant comes into the world with a few reflexes and three rough emotional reactions and nothing more — no inherited talents, no inherited temperament, no inherited \"gifts,\" no inherited faculty for music or mathematics or leadership.","n":[]}],[{"t":"What a man becomes is built, response by conditioned response, out of the world we put him in.","n":[]},{"t":"Give me a dozen healthy infants and my own world to raise them in, and I will take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I select — doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief, or beggar-man and thief — regardless of his talents, his tendencies, his abilities, and the race of his ancestors.","n":[]}],[{"t":"I said, when I wrote that, that I was going beyond my facts; and I said in the same breath that the advocates of the contrary have been going beyond theirs for many thousands of years.","n":[]},{"t":"It is a wager thrown down against a hereditarianism that had never proved its own case, and I threw it down deliberately.","n":[]},{"t":"The burden is not on the man who says a child can be shaped; it is on the man who says the child's fate is sealed in his blood.","n":[1,2,3,4]}]],"texts":"Behaviorism (1925, the 'dozen healthy infants' passage and the general case for the plasticity of the human being under conditioning); Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist (1919, the account of habit as the builder of personality from a slender innate base). Reception: the nature-nurture debate of the twentieth century, in which Watson became the emblem of extreme nurturism against the hereditarians and eugenicists of his day; the behavior-genetic and later evidence for substantial heritability of intelligence and temperament that told against the strong claim; the political uses of environmentalism (its appeal to reformers who saw in it a warrant against fixed racial and class hierarchies).","works":["Behaviorism (1925, the 'dozen healthy infants' passage and the general case for the plasticity of the human being under conditioning)","Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist (1919, the account of habit as the builder of personality from a slender innate base)"],"reception":"the nature-nurture debate of the twentieth century, in which Watson became the emblem of extreme nurturism against the hereditarians and eugenicists of his day; the behavior-genetic and later evidence for substantial heritability of intelligence and temperament that told against the strong claim; the political uses of environmentalism (its appeal to reformers who saw in it a warrant against fixed racial and class hierarchies).","status":"Watson's most famous and most quoted claim, and the one that made him the emblem of environmentalism in the century's nature-nurture war. It was, in its moment, a direct challenge to the hereditarian and eugenic mainstream (McDougall's, among others), and it carried a democratic and reformist charge — the denial that class and race fix a person's possibilities. The strong form did not survive the evidence: twentieth-century behavior genetics established substantial heritability of intelligence, temperament, and much else, and the \"blank slate\" became a byword for overreach. Yet the qualification Watson attached — that he was going beyond his facts, as the hereditarians had gone beyond theirs — is almost always stripped from the quotation, and the underlying dispute over how far environment can shape human outcomes remains one of the most contested in all of psychology.","era":"1878-1958","discipline":"Psychology","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Behaviorism","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"We have not the facts to build up statistics on the inheritance of special types of behavior, and until the facts have been brought out by the study of the human young, all data on the evolution of different forms of human behavior and eugenics must be accepted with the greatest caution. Our conclusion, then, is that we have no real evidence of the inherit- ance of traits.","label":"Behaviorism"},{"n":2,"work":"The Ways of Behaviorism","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"We have not the facts to build up statistics on the inheritance of special types of behavior, and until the facts have been brought out by the study of the human young, all data on the evolution of different forms of human behavior and eugenics must be accepted with the greatest caution. Our conclusion, then, is that we have no real evidence of the inherit- eB ance of traits.","label":"The Ways of Behaviorism"},{"n":3,"work":"Behaviorism","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"Other inheritances are color of hair, color of eyes, texture of skin, Albinism (very light individuals with little or no pigment in hair and eyes—vision always being defective). The biologist, knowing the makeup of the parents and grandparents, can predict many of even the finer structural characteristics of the offspring. So let us hasten to admit—yes, there are heritable differences in form, in structure.","label":"Behaviorism"},{"n":4,"work":"The Ways of Behaviorism","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"Other inheritances are color of hair, color of eyes, texture of skin, Albinism (very light individuals with little or no pigment in hair and eyes—vision always being defective). The biologist, knowing the makeup of the parents and grandparents, can predict many of even the finer structural characteristics of the offspring. So let us hasten to admit—yes, there are heritable differences in form, in structure.","label":"The Ways of Behaviorism"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"radical-behaviorism","label":"Radical behaviorism: should psychology throw out consciousness and study only behavior?"},{"slug":"the-little-albert-experiment","label":"The Little Albert experiment: are the emotions built by conditioning from a few unlearned reactions?"},{"slug":"behaviorist-childrearing","label":"Behaviorist childrearing: should children be conditioned into good habits and spared affection?"},{"slug":"thinking-as-subvocal-behavior","label":"Thinking as subvocal behavior: is thought talking to oneself rather than a stream of inner images?"}]}