"The strong view of behaviorism is everything you know, everything you are, is the result of experience. There's no real human nature. Rather, people are infinitely malleable. There's a wonderful quote from John Watson and in this quote John Watson is paraphrasing a famous boast by the Jesuits. The Jesuits used to claim, "Give me a child until the age of seven and I'll show you the man," that they would take a child and turn him into anything they wanted. And Watson expanded on this boast:
"Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed and my own specified world to bring them up and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train them to become any type of specialist I might select — doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant, chief, and yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations and race of his ancestors."
Now, you could imagine — You could see in this a tremendous appeal to this view because Watson has an extremely egalitarian view in a sense. If there's no human nature, then there's no sense in which one group of humans by dint of their race or their sex could be better than another group. And Watson was explicit. None of those facts about people will ever make any difference. What matters to what you are is what you learn and how you're treated. And so, Watson claimed he could create anybody in any way simply by treating them in a certain fashion."
© Paul Bloom
Yale Lectures on Introduction to Psychology, 2007
"Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed and my own specified world to bring them up and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train them to become any type of specialist I might select — doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant, chief, and yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations and race of his ancestors."
Now, you could imagine — You could see in this a tremendous appeal to this view because Watson has an extremely egalitarian view in a sense. If there's no human nature, then there's no sense in which one group of humans by dint of their race or their sex could be better than another group. And Watson was explicit. None of those facts about people will ever make any difference. What matters to what you are is what you learn and how you're treated. And so, Watson claimed he could create anybody in any way simply by treating them in a certain fashion."
© Paul Bloom
Yale Lectures on Introduction to Psychology, 2007
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