Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him 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.
John B. WatsonThere are... for us no instinctsโwe no longer need the term in psychology. Everything we have been in the habit of calling an 'instinct' today is a result largely of trainingโbelonging to man's learned behavior.
John B. WatsonMen are built, not born.... Give me the baby, and I'll make it climb and use its hands in constructing buildings of stone or wood.... I'll make it a thief, a gunman or a dope fiend. The possibilities of shaping in any direction are almost endless.
John B. WatsonThis dogma (the soul) has been present in human psychology from earliest antiquity. No one has ever touched the soul, or has seen one in a test tube, or has in any way come into a relationship with it as he has with the other objects of his daily experience.
John B. WatsonNo one knows just how the idea of a soul or the supernatural started... It probably had its origin in the general laziness of mankind.
John B. WatsonPsychology, as the behaviorist views it, is a purely objective, experimental branch of natural science which needs introspection as little as do the sciences of chemistry and physics.... The position is taken here that the behavior of man and the behavior of animals must be considered in the same plane.
John B. Watson