John B. Watson
Education

Despite his poor academic performance and having been arrested twice during high school—first for fighting, then for discharging firearms within city limits—Watson was able to use his mother's connections to gain admission to Greenville's Furman University at the age of 16. There, he would complete a few psychology courses, though never excelling. He would also consider himself to be a poor student, holding a few jobs on campus to pay for his college expenses. Others thought him as quiet, lazy, and insubordinate, and, as such, he continued to see himself as "unsocial," making few friends. Nevertheless, being a precocious student, Watson would leave Furman with a master's degree at the age of 21.

After graduating, Watson spent a year at Batesburg Institute, the name he gave to a one-room school in Greenville, at which he was principal, janitor, and handyman. Watson entered the University of Chicago after petitioning the University President. The successful petition would be central to his ascent into the psychology world, as his college experience introduced him to professors and colleagues who would be integral to his success in developing psychology into a credible field of study. Watson began studying philosophy under John Dewey on the recommendation of Furman professor, Gordon Moore. The combined influence of Dewey, James Rowland Angell, Henry Herbert Donaldson, and Jacques Loeb, led Watson to develop a highly descriptive, objective approach to the analysis of behavior, an approach he would later call behaviorism. Wanting to make psychology more scientifically acceptable, Watson thought of the approach as a declaration of faith, based on the idea that a methodology could transform psychology into a scientific discipline. Later, Watson became interested in the work of Ivan Pavlov (1849–1936), and eventually included a highly simplified version of Pavlov's principles in his popular works.
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