Ethnographic Discourse Analysis and J.B. Watson: The Behaviourist as Propagandist

Abstract

In 1913, J.B. Watson published two key papers in the history of behaviourism. Versions of these articles formed the first chapter of Watson's 1914 book on the same topic. The present paper compares the articles with the book, and finds a large number of significant and consistent differences between them. This provides evidence for the thesis that Watson systematically reworked the papers to give the impression, in the book, that behaviourism was a monolithic and conceptually coherent movement, subscribed to by an intellectually self-conscious group of behaviourists, in contrast to the picture revealed by the papers themselves. These differences are accounted for in terms of an elementary model of the communication process, the one developed by Hymes for ethnographic discourse analysis. This finding is used to explain, in part, the paradox that while most contemporary opinion (particularly in cognitive psychology) has behaviourism dominating psychology from 1913 onwards, the historical evidence points in quite the opposite direction, at least up until the 1930's. The paper ends with a brief discussion of the general value of discourse analysis in historical research, particularly with its power to uncover the driving presuppositions behind past research in psychology.