Locke’s blank-slate empiricism directly prefigured Watson’s behaviorism

Evidence

John Locke (1632–1704), an Enlightenment thinker, rejected the idea that human nature has any fixed characteristics and posited instead that the individual is born as a tabula rasa onto which training and experience are inscribed. Locke’s position foreshadowed J.B.Watson’s (1878–1958) behaviorist movement in psychology, which emphasized the primacy of learned experience over “innate ideas” in determining behavior. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 98