A couple evenings ago my dad asked a question: if you could change anything in our country, what would it be?
We came up with a few answers, and I eventually decided that I liked my dad's idea of removing bullying from our culture. That would solve a lot of problems! But my first gut instinct response was something very different. I wanted to send a particular person to the Evil Baby Orphanage*.
The individual who I have in mind is John Watson (1878-1958). He was a behavioral psychologist who made a lot of advances in the field, and he successfully taught a baby to fear a harmless white rat. However, as bad as the rat incident is, the reason I think he is worthy of the Evil Baby orphanage is for another reason all together; after a scandal that made Watson leave his job at John Hopkins University, he took up a career in advertising.
Yes, this guy brought all his knowledge of behavioral psychology to advertising. And that is a sin that cannot be forgiven. I didn't like this guy when I read about him last fall in my psychology class, and he's the first thing I thought of when dad asked what I would change.
*The Evil Baby Orphanage is a place for evil babies to go so that they can just annoy each other and leave the rest of us alone. This would probably include people such as Hitler and Osama bin Laden.
4 comments:
Good candidate for the EBO! Sounds like we have him to thank for the manipulativeness of advertising.
They would probably have figured it out anyways, but I'm still grumpy with him.
I'm sure they would have figured it out anyway. Still, I can see why you feel that way; he helped speed up the process!
That he did.
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