Marketing in the Republic (part 5)

In 1913 Watson began the movement known as classical behaviorism, and in 1938 Skinner proposed a different version known as radical behaviorism. Together with their Russian predecessors, Sechenov, Bekhterev and Pavlov, they introduced a commitment to the study of overt behavior as opposed to internal states, and coined a vocabulary of conditioned reflexes, including processes of reinforcement, extinction and generalization. Although initially Watson was well disposed towards Freud's theories, he later described it and other forms of analysis based on introspection as voodooism. In establishing the behaviorist platform, Watson sought to establish psychology as a natural science, asking:

Why don't we make what we can observe the real field of psychology? Let us limit ourselves to things that can be observed and formulate laws about only things. Now what can we observe? Well we can observe behavior -what the organism does or says.

(Watson, 1931)