Personality and Conditioning

Abstract

“Considering their dense ignorance of psychology” (J.B. Watson announced to his 1925 audience), “the signers of that document (the American Declaration of Independence) were nearer right than one might expect. They would have been strictly right had the clause at birth been inserted after the word equal”. Thus, in a lecture entitled, rather quaintly ‘Presenting the Thesis that Our Personality Is But the Outgrowth of Our Habits’ (Watson 1925), he laid the foundation for several decades of neglect of individual differences in the investigation of human conditioning. If you believe that ‘every healthy individual starts out equal’ (p. 217) and subsequently develops from ‘each unit of unlearned behaviour’ ‘an ever expanding system of habits’ (p. 218) which eventually constitutes his personality, then there is very little point in the investigation of personality variables in conditioning. In short, if personality is entirely the result of habit formation, it cannot also influence habit formation in any interesting way. Today, we are well aware that behaviour can be studied objectively without recourse to the pejorative attitudes of the early Behaviourists, and individual differences are a respectable, if still neglected, source of variance in the study of conditioning.