John B. Watson's Little Albert Experiment

John Brown, born and raised in Virginia by Joe and Nancy, was a slave often called by the name of Fed. Being born into slavery John was under the ownership of many masters throughout his life. When his master Thomas Stevens fell ill, John’s real problems begin. Dr. Thomas Hamilton treated Thomas Stevens and so a moral debt was owed. Master Stevens offered Dr. Hamilton any favor he may ask. Dr. Hamilton needed a subject to be part of his experiments. No details were given to Stevens who did not bother to ask anyway. John Brown was in no position to decline such request but he was not given the details of his participation in these experiments regardless. The first experiment was part of Dr. Hamilton’s research to find a remedy for sun-strokes. Dr. Hamilton tested his

Little Albert an 11 month old boy was chosen as the participant. Watson identified that a white rat did not provoke any fear response in Albert, so it was a neutral stimulus. Little Albert was then exposed to the white rat, but every time he reached out to touch it Watson would make a loud noise. Albert would get frightened and start to cry. After repeating this several times, Albert started getting frightened just by seeing the rat. Just like the bell in Pavlov's experiment, the white rat had become a conditioned stimulus to Albert. Watson therefore concluded that even complex behaviour such as fear was a learned response.

In 1920, John B. Watson and Rosalie Rayner set out to support their revolutionary behaviorist ideology, seeking to explain all behavior as conditioned by environmental influences and to prove environmental influences can condition any behavior into man or beast, through the groundbreaking and controversial “Little Albert” experiment. An 8- month-old infant informally named Little Albert was previously shown to be of remarkably stable disposition and to innately fear none of many selected animals serving as neutral stimuli, and Watson and Rayner demonstrated they could condition Little Albert to fear a white rat and, through generalization and second-order conditioning, animals and objects similar in enough respects to trigger the same conditioned

The experiment undertaken by Stanley Milgram in 1963 was supposed to answer some questions about obedience and raised some questions and answered some. At the time, that Milgram underwent the experiment, a Nazi war criminal was being trialed. Milgram wanted this experiment to answer whether this Nazi criminal and his followers were just accomplices to Hitler during the Holocaust or did they have some responsibility to it as well.

The Little Albert experiment has become a famous case study that has been discussed by a plethora of professionals in the psychology industry. In 1920, behaviorist John Watson and his assistant Rosalie Rayner began to conduct the first experiment that had been done with a child. Watson and Rayner chose Albert because they thought he was stable; he was accustomed to a hospital environment due to his mother’s career as a wet nurse, he was healthy and showed little emotion. Stability played a major factor in choosing Albert for this case study because Watson wanted to ensure that they would do as little harm as possible with the experiment. The conditioning of Albert began with a series of emotional tests that became part of a routine in which Watson and Rayner were “determining whether fear reactions could be called out by other stimuli than sharp noises and the sudden removal of support” (-----). Watson’s method of choice for this experiment was using principles of classic conditioning to create a stimulus in children that would result in fear. Since Watson wanted to condition Albert, he used a variety of objects that would otherwise not scare him. These objects included white rat, dog, blocks, rabbit, fur coat, wool and a Santa Claus mask.

In 1920, John Watson and his student Rosalie Rayner performed the famous Little Albert experiment where they conditioned an infant to fear a white rat and other furry animals. This experiment helped to prove the theory of behaviorism, specifically in terms that fears could be taught or “conditioned” as opposed to inheritance from biology. However, if John Watson and Rosalie Rayner performed this experiment today, the experiment would violate multiple ethical standards set in place by the American Psychology Association including 8.07b and 8.08c. 8.07b means that any deception used in an experiment cannot inflict severe emotional or physical distress on participants. To relate this standard to the Little Albert experiment, Watson and Rayner

Watson’s most infamous work was the Little Albert study he conducted with Rosalie Rayner. The study illustrated that humans can be taught to fear objects through classical conditioning, ultimately providing a foundation for phobias. Watson and Rayner were looking to answer several questions: (1) Is it possible to teach an infant to pair a sound made by striking a steel bar with an animal, and if so will the sight of the animal then make the infant fret? (2) Can the feared response transfer to other animals or objects? (3) After some time, will the infant stop associating the noise with the animal? (4) What can be done to extinguish the fear, given that it doesn’t disappear on its own (Watson & Rayner, 1920)?

There are countless scenarios in which a young child could develop a classically conditioned fear of bugs. The most well-known example of instilling an emotional response in a child via classical conditioning is the Little Albert experiment. This experiment was Conducted by John B. Watson and his graduate student Rosalie Rayner, and the results were published in the February 1920 issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology. The study used a subject named Albert who was around 9 months old. They exposed him to various unconditioned stimuli such as a monkey, masks, a white rat, etc. They observed his reactions, then the next time Albert saw the rat, they added a loud noise that caused the child to cry. After numerous times of the rat being shown with

The subject would need to be deconditioned and followed at regular intervals to ensure there was no lasting harm (in this case, phobia of rodents or other furry animals). If an adult was not a proper subject, the child would need to be older to have a certain level of comprehension of what the experiment entailed for said child to enter the experiment in a voluntary fashion. The informed consent of the child’s primary guardian would be necessary. It would be critical to evaluate the guardian as well, ensuring they are acting in the child’s best interest. Like the Robber’s Cave Experiment, fidelity is also questionable as this relates to the honesty between psychologist and subject

I found that the little Albert experiment to be interesting and how fear can be classically conditioned. I found it interesting that Watson was able to make Albert be afraid of a white rat by using a loud sound that Albert already didn’t like, but also howAlbert’s fear of the white rat generalized to other things as well. Though I would have liked to know if Albert’s fear stayed with him throughout his life or if the fear eventually went away.

Almost every Introductory Psychology textbook mentions Watson’s work with the infant Albert because it’s a very important factor in classical conditioning. I think the theoretical point made by this experiment was to prove that the classical conditioning principles can be utilized to condition the emotional response of fear. I believe this experiment was unethical, simply because it did not protect Albert from any psychological harm whatsoever. I also believe that it could have been approached in a totally different way.

Human experimentation has a history of scandal that often shapes people’s views of the ethics of research. Often the earliest cited case is English physician Edward Jenner’s development of the smallpox vaccine in 1796,where he injected an eight-year-old boy child with pus taken from a cowpox infection and then deliberately exposed her to an infected carrier of smallpox. Although Jenner’s experiment was successful and it confirmed his theory, the method of

Inspiration. Although John Watson made tremendous waves in the study of behavioral psychology, he was not the first to explore it. Much of his inspiration was drawn from the ideas of Ivan Pavlov, one of his most known achievements being the conditioning of dogs. In the experiment, Pavlov was testing to see if he could make dogs, which would salivate in the presence of food, salivate over the sound of a bell by ringing it in the once the dogs were to be fed (How to Train a Brain, 2014).

The reasoning behind why Watson's work on the infant Albert is in almost all psychology books is because is was so incredibly significant. It's a great example of how classical conditioning can be used to cause an emotional response. Every textbook includes it because it could've possibly led to a treatment to phobias. Also, it showed that fears could be taught over time, that actions or thoughts could be forced in or forced out. It clearly contradicted the idea that biology is everything, and gave solid evidence for the importance of nurture. Perhaps back in the 20's the experiment did not raise any ethical concerns, but I believe if it was done today, it would absolutely be unethical. Today, there are rules and codes of ethics, like "Do no

In the most famous behaviorism experiment done by Watson and Rayner (1920) showed that the overall theory of behaviorism is in fact true. The subject of the experiment was Little Albert, a 9 month old little boy. He was tested and observed on his reactions to different stimuli. Little Albert was presented with a white rat, a rabbit, a monkey and other objects. In the beginning Watson and Rayner noted that the little boy showed no fear or emotion when presented with