WATSON, JOHN BROADUS

an American psychologist. Watson attained his PhD from the University of Chicago, where he studied biology and neurophysiology, in addition to philosophy and psychology. He subsequently became a teacher and leader of the university's psychological lab. He spent some time heading up the experimental psychology program at Johns Hopkins University, but forcibly resigned as an outcome of a heated and scandalous divorce. Following this, he worked for the J. Walter Thompson advertising company in New York City while persisting to write popular psychological accounts. Watson, an imperative figure within the formative history of comparative psychology, is most widely recognized as the first proponent of behaviorism, which criticized the then-present stress on the study of consciousness via the technique of introspection and preferred an unbiased presumption of viewable, measurable actions, shaped on the techniques of natural science.