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Drawing from his research on conditioning fear in an infant, behaviorist John B. Watson became an ad man.

Watson's stock in trade was developing ad campaigns based on engendering fear of physical or social harm.

With no concern for the truth of claims, fear-based advertising is today widely used in political campaigns.

These methods pose an existential challenge to the maintenance of democracy in many countries.

When I was an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins University, I heard the story about how John B. Watson, a psychologist who is considered the father of the classical conditioning strand of American behaviorism (a term that he coined), was fired from a tenure-track position for having a sexual relationship with his 21-year-old graduate assistant, Rosalie Rayner. An earlier example of a very esteemed scholar who was fired by Hopkins for similar prurient reasons (in both cases they later married their girlfriends after becoming divorced from their first wives) involved the great philosopher, mathematician, and logician Charles Sanders Peirce. Neither man ever attained another academic post. While Watson went on to have great success outside of academia, Peirce continued as an independent scholar who lived in abject poverty, relying on financial support from many admirers, most notably his former JHU doctoral student William James, considered the father of American psychology and the co-developer, with Peirce, of the philosophical school of pragmatism.

The 1920 experiment for which Watson, assisted by Rayner, became famous (a year before they fired him, Hopkins doubled his salary in an attempt to keep him from leaving) involved an infant later known as “Little Albert.” The experiment exposed Albert, at age nine months, to various neutral stimuli–including a white rat, monkeys, and dogs–thus demonstrating his absence of fear. At age 11 months, every time that Albert........

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