John Broadus Watson [1878-1958] was an exceptional salesman. In the fall of 1920, he joined the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency in New York where his first job was to study the preferences for rubber boots (wellies in the UK) of people living along the Mississippi. Then in 1921 he sold coffee to retailers and wholesalers, and a stint selling shoes at Macy’s department store in New York, both jobs designed to help him learn what consumers wanted. By 1924, he was made Vice President and in 1936 moved to a rival agency, the William Esty Co., for the rest of his career. Watson is often credited with several advertising innovations including personal testimonials, diverse client services, market research, and, surprisingly, the grilled cheese sandwich. He also realized early on that consumers made emotional choices, rarely considering any facts.
But what, you might well ask, does this have to do with ornithology? Bear with me because—before becoming an adman—Watson was a famous psychologist who conducted research on rats, monkeys, humans, and, oddly enough, Noddies (Anous minutus) and Sooty Terns (Onychoprion fuscatus). For his PhD at the University of Chicago, Watson studied the relationship between learning and neuroanatomy in rats, but also benefitted from interactions with some of the leading philosophers and psychologists of the day. In those days, philosophy and psychology were cognate disciplines with no clear distinction between them.
Through his early research, Watson developed a ‘new’ approach to psychology that he called ‘Behaviorism’ based on detailed observations, experiments, and objective analysis of behaviour, rather than the more subjective, anecdotal and philosophical foundations of the discipline. Many of Watson’s ‘new’ methods and ideas had been anticipated by other psychologists but Watson was a better salesman (and writer), bringing together the various new approaches into a series of influential papers (e.g., Psychology as the behaviorist views it; Watson 1913) and books (e.g., Behavior: An Introduction to Comparative Psychology; Watson 1914).
In 1908, Watson joined the faculty at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. He was almost immediately promoted to Head of Department when the incumbent was forced to resign after being rounded up in a police raid on a brothel. It was in those years at Johns Hopkins that Watson did his most influential work. Nonetheless, his ideas about human behaviour were particularly controversial—as are such ideas even today—leading to a general rejection of behaviorism as a worthwhile approach to understanding human psychology. But Watson persevered and by 1920 was one of the most famous psychologists worldwide.
In 1920, however, his wife discovered love letters that Watson had written to one of his graduate students, Rosalie Rayner. The subsequent scandal was front page news in the Baltimore and Washington newspapers, and Watson was forced to resign his faculty position. As the Washington Times, breathlessly declared: ‘John W. [sic] Watson, Noted Hopkins Scientist, Marries After Divorce Sensation’. By then, Watson had moved to New York to work for the Thompson agency.
Although Watson had famously studied animals in captivity (rats, monkeys, humans), he was persuaded in 1907, by his colleague Alfred G. Mayer, to study the terns breeding on the Dry Tortugas, a small group of coral islands at the western end of the Florida Keys.
Watson conducted his tern research on Bird Key in the summers of 1907, 1910, 1912 and 1913, joined in 1913 by his student Karl Lashley. Watson’s studies of Noddies and Sooty Terns hold up even today as an outstanding research project, involving detailed observations designed to answer specific questions about development, learning, parental care, foraging, mating, and the nesting cycle, as well as some sophisticated experiments to describe the spectral sensitivities of the bird’s visual system. In a 1908 review of Watson (1907) the ornithologist A. A. Allen (1909) declared that “Such a minute and detailed study, conducted with scientific exactness, of the activities of any species of wild bird has doubtless never before been made…”.
Figure 1. Bird Key and terns (Watson and Lashley 1915).
Watson seemed to view all behaviours through the lens of natural selection, much as Darwin (1872) had done in his The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, an approach foreign to psychology in the early 1900s. As Watson said in 1916: “…from now on, the evolutionary study of behavior will yield far more fruitful results for the guidance of human conduct than will further studies on morphology alone…”
His studies of development in the terns suggest that Watson understood imprinting, a phenomenon not explicitly described and studied until the 1930s by Konrad Lorenz and later Niko Tinbergen. He also conducted some interesting experiments on how birds learned the locations of their nests and how they navigated to get back to them after a period of absence to forage. Systematic ringing (bird-banding) was in its infancy at the turn of the twentieth century and colour marking was unheard of in avian research. To recognize individuals—a necessity in modern avian research—Watson put a daub of paint on the nape of his study birds, and thus began one of the first studies of the nesting behaviours of colour-marked individuals.
Figure 2. Sooty Terns and nest marker. Terns are marked with paint on their nape. (Watson and Lashley 1915).
Watson also conducted an innovative series of experiments on the long-distance homing behaviour of the terns. In 1907, he took three Noddies and two Sooty Terns from their nest sites, marked them individually and took them to Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, where they were released at sea 18 miles (29 km) offshore. Cape Hatteras is 1080 miles (1740 km) by sea from Bird Key but almost all the birds returned to their nests within five days. In subsequent clever experiments he ruled out the possibilities that the birds followed visible currents or landmarks, thereby suggesting some as-yet-unknown sensory mechanism that would take most of the next century to uncover.
The Sooty Tern may be the most abundant seabird worldwide, with more than 40 million birds and several colonies numbering more than a million pairs. Even so, several large colonies have disappeared in the past century due to introduced predators and human activities. On the Seychelles, Hawaii, Madagascar, and several islands like Bird Key in the Caribbean, their tasty eggs were—and still are—harvested for human consumption. Even today, a government controlled harvest on the Seychelles takes three-quarters of a million eggs each year for local consumption. Currently worldwide populations seem stable despite these egg harvests (Inch et al. 2024).
After leaving academia under a cloud, John Watson continued to publish popular articles on psychology—particularly about infant and child development—in prominent American magazines. But the scandal of his divorce meant that he was forever blacklisted by the community of academic psychologists and could not publish in scientific journals. In retrospect, we might feel that he was sorely mistreated. Certainly a great mind was lost to science, but John Watson—and the Noddy and Sooty Tern—deserve recognition for their early contributions to the discipline we now call behavioural ecology. His research “is a good example of the methods of the student of behavior in eliminating complicating factors and avoiding the unwarranted conclusions into which the untrained investigator rushes blindly.” (Stone 1916).
Further Reading
Allen, A.A. (1909) Watson’s ‘The behavior of Noddy and Sooty Terns’. The Auk 26: 209–214.
Inch, T., Nicoll, M.A.C., Feare, C.J. & Horswill, C. (2024) Population viability analysis predicts long-term impacts of commercial Sooty Tern egg harvesting to a large breeding colony on a small oceanic island. Ibis 166: 1296–1310.
Stone, W. (1916) Watson and Lashley on homing and related activities of birds. The Auk 33: 83–84.
Watson, J. B. (1907a). A résumé of a study upon the behavior of noddy and sooty terns carried on at Bird Key during the spring of 1907. Carnegie Institution of Washington Yearbook 6: 120–121.
Watson, J. B. (1907b). Report of John B. Watson in the condition of the Noddy and Sooty Tern Colony, Bird Key, Tortugas, Florida. Bird Lore 9: 307–316.
Watson, J.B. (1908). The behavior of noddy and sooty terns. Papers from the Marine Biological Laboratory at Tortugas, Carnegie Institution of Washington 2: 189–255
Watson, J.B. (1910). Further data on the homing sense of noddy and sooty terns. Science 32: 470–473. doi: 10.1126/science.32.823.470.
Watson, J.B., & Lashley, K.S. (1913). A study of the homing instinct in the noddy and the sooty tern which nest upon Bird Key, Tortugas. Carnegie Institution of Washington Yearbook 12: 179–180.
Watson, J.B., & Lashley, K.S. (1915). An historical and experimental study of homing. Papers from the Department of Marine Biology of the Carnegie Institution of Washington 8: 8-61.
Watson, J.B. (1915). Studies on the spectral sensitivity of birds. Papers from the Department of Marine Biology of the Carnegie Institution of Washington 8: 85–104.
Image credits
Top right: Watson in the 1890s. Public domain.
Middle: Washington Times headline. Public domain.
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