Little Albert experiment

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The Little Albert experiment was an experiment showing empirical evidence of classical conditioning. This study was also an example of stimulus generalisation. It was conducted in 1920 by John B. Watson along with Rosalie Rayner, his assistant whom he later married. The study was done at Johns Hopkins University.

John B. Watson, after naturally observing children, was interested in finding support for his notion that children reacted in fear whenever they heard loud noises. Furthermore, he reasoned that this fear was innate or due to an unconditioned response. He felt that following the principles of classical conditioning, he could condition a child to fear another distinctive stimulus which normally would not be feared by a child.

1 Methodology
2 Ethics
3 See also
4 References

[edit] Methodology

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Albert B., was recruited for this study at the age of nine months from a hospital where he had been raised from birth. He was chosen for the experiment because he was a placid child who rarely cried or seemed unhappy.

Before the start of the experiment, when Albert was 9 months old, Watson and Rayner ran Little Albert through emotional tests. The infant was confronted briefly and for the first time to a white rat, a rabbit, a dog, a monkey, masks with and without hair, cotton wool, burning newspapers etc. The infant at no time showed any fear.

The experiment began by placing Albert on a mattress on a table in the middle of a room. A white laboratory rat was placed near Albert and he was allowed to play with it. At this point, the child showed no fear of the rat. In fact, like all small children, he began to reach out to the rat and gurgle as it roamed around him. In later trials, Watson and Rayner made a loud sound behind Albert's back by striking a hammer suspended on a steel bar when the rat was presented to him. Not surprisingly in these occasions, Little Albert cried and showed fear as he heard the noise. After several such pairings of the two stimuli, Albert was again presented with the rat alone. Now, however, he became very distressed as the rat appeared in the room. He cried, turned away from the rat and tried to move away. Apparently, the baby boy had associated the white rat (original neutral stimulus, now conditioned stimulus) with the loud noise (unconditioned stimulus) and was producing the fearful or emotional response of crying (originally the unconditioned response to the noise, now the conditioned response to the rat).

Loud sound (US) => Fear (UR) Natural response.

Loud sound (US) + Rat (NS) => Fear (UR) After pairing them.

Rat (CS) => Fear (CR) Learning occurs. Notice how the response never changes.

What was even more problematic about this experiment was that Little Albert seemed to generalise his response so that when Watson sent a (non-white) rabbit into the room seventeen days after the original experiment, Albert also became distressed. He showed similar reactions when presented with a furry dog, a seal-skin coat and even when Watson appeared in front of him wearing a Santa Claus mask with white cotton balls as his beard, although he did not fear everything with hair.

Albert was adopted and was scheduled to leave the hospital in the near future. Therefore, all testing was discontinued for a period of 31 days. Watson and his colleagues had planned to attempt to recondition little Albert and eliminate these fearful reactions. However, Albert left the hospital on the day these last tests were made, and, as far as anyone knows, no reconditioning ever took place. Nothing is known of his later life. Hence the opportunity of developing an experimental technique for removing the Conditioned Emotional Response was denied. However, Watson himself stated later that he knew the boy would depart one month before the trial ended. Had the opportunity existed, they would have tried several methods: i) constantly confronting the child with those stimuli which produced the responses, in the hope that habituation would occur ii) trying to "recondition" by showing objects producing fear responses (visual) while simultaneously stimulating the erogenous zones (tactual), first the lips, then the nipples, and, as a last resort, the sexual organs. iii) trying to "recondition" by feeding him candy or other food just as the animal is shown iv) building up "constructive" activities around the object by imitation and putting the hand through the motions of manipulation.

A recent detailed review of the original study and its subsequent (mis) interpretations, (Harris, Ben. "Whatever Happened to Little Albert?" see reference below) concluded

"It may be useful for modern learning theorists to see how the Albert study prompted subsequent research [...] but it seems time, finally, to place the Watson and Rayner data in the category of 'interesting but uninterpretable' results."

[edit] Ethics

Albert was 11 months and three days old at the time of the first test. Because of his young age, the experiment today would be considered unethical. Since this experiment, and others which pushed the boundaries of experimental ethics, the American Psychological Association has banned studies considered unethical.

Watson's experiment was unethical for several reasons. His mother was not informed of the experiment. It was performed without her consent. Researchers today are required to obtain fully informed consent from participants or in the case of infants/children, from their parents/guardians before any study can begin.

It is also unethical to evoke responses of fear in a laboratory setting, unless a participant has given informed consent to being intentionally frightened as part of an experiment. Experiments should not cause the participants to suffer any distress or harm in any way. If a participant was to become distressed during an experiment, the researcher is required to abandon the study and immediately address the needs of the participant. The welfare of the participants must always be the paramount consideration in any form of research.

Furthermore Albert was never systematically desensitized to the conditioned emotional response and Albert may have suffered permanent psychological damage because of the emotional trauma resulting from the experimental procedures to which he was subjected. However, as the phobia was never reinforced after the experiment, it may have faded over time in a psychological process known as extinction.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

Watson, John B. & Rayner, Rosalie (1920). "Conditioned emotional reactions". Journal of Experimental Psychology, 3(1), pp. 1-14. (The little Albert study, on-line)
Harris, Ben. "Whatever Happened to Little Albert?" American Psychologist, February 1979, Volume 34, Number 2, pp. 151-160. (on-line)

Abstract: "Using published sources, this article reviews the study's actual procedures and its relationship to Watson's career and work. The article also presents a history of psychologists' accounts of the Albert study, focusing on the study's distortion by Watson himself, general textbook authors, behavior therapists, and most recently, a prominent learning theorist. The author proposes possible causes for these distortions and analyzes the Albert study as an example of myth making in the history of psychology."