The Behaviorist Manifesto

To understand empty child theory, you have to visit with behaviorists. Their meal ticket was hastily jerry-built by the advertising agency guru John Watson and by Edward Lee Thorndike, founder of educational psychology. Watson’s The Behaviorist Manifesto (1913) promoted a then novel utilitarian psychology whose "theoretical goal is the prediction and control of behavior."[p.1]¹ Like much that passes for wisdom on the collegiate circuit, their baby was stitched together from the carcasses of older ideas. Behaviorism (Thorndike’s version, stillborn, was called "Connectionism") was a purified hybrid of Wilhelm Wundt’s laboratory at Leipzig and Comte’s positivism broadcast in the pragmatic idiom of the Scottish common-sense philosophers. We needn’t trace all the dead body parts pasted together to sigh at the claim of an originality which isn’t there—reminiscent of Howard Gardner’s fashion as seer of multiple intelligence theory—an idea as ancient as the pyramids.