Little Albert experiment Totally Explained

Everything about The Little Albert Experiment totally explained

The Little Albert experiment was an experiment showing empirical evidence of classical conditioning in humans. 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 observing children in the field, was interested in finding support for his notion that the reaction of children, whenever they heard loud noises, was prompted by fear. 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 wouldn't be feared by a child.

Methodology

Albert B. was chosen for this study at the age of nine months from a hospital. His mother was a wet nurse at the Harriet Lane Home for Invalid Children. Before the start of the experiment, Little Albert was given emotional tests. The infant was exposed, 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. Prior to the experiment, Little Albert showed no fear toward these items in each of the tests.
   Watson and his colleague didn't begin to condition fear into Little Albert until approximately two months later, when he was just over 11 months old. 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. 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 suspended steel bar with a hammer when the baby touched the rat. 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 (Unconditioned Stimulus) -> Fear (Unconditioned Response) Natural response. Rat (Neutral Stimulus) + Loud sound (Unconditioned Stimulus)-> Fear (Unconditioned Response) During pairing them. Rat (Conditioned Stimulus) -> Fear (Conditioned Response) 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 didn't fear everything with hair.
   Albert was taken from 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 desensitize (pair the white rat with warm milk which babies love) little Albert and eliminate these fearful reactions. However, Albert left the hospital on the day these last tests were made, and, no desensitizing 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'd 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 study on reconditioning a child was conducted several years later by Mary Cover Jones (1924), being one of the first studies on behavioral therapy. The child was selected to take part in study because it was found to be similar to little Albert. As author notes:

Critique

A recent detailed review (Harris, 1979) of the original study and its subsequent misinterpretations, found that:
As author concluded:
It was also found that most of textbooks "suffer from inaccuracies of various degrees" while referring to Watson and Rayner's study. Texts often misrepresent and maximize the range of Albert's post-conditioning fears.
According to some text books, Albert's mother worked in the same building as Watson and didn't know the tests were being conducted. When she found out, she took Albert and moved away, letting no one know of where they were going. To this day, nobody knows who/where "Little Albert" is.

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 that pushed the boundaries of experimental ethics, the American Psychological Association has banned studies considered unethical.
   By present-day standards, Watson's experiment was unethical for several reasons. Albert's mother wasn't 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 today considered 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 shouldn't 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.

In popular culture

A similar method of conditioning children appears in Aldous Huxley's science fiction novel Brave New World (published in 1932). There children of lower castes are described as conditioned to dislike books and various objects associated with nature, like flowers, in order better to fit into their caste's assigned lifestyle.

Further Information

Get more info on 'Little Albert Experiment'.

External Link Exchanges

Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:

<a href="http://little_albert_experiment.totallyexplained.com">Little Albert experiment Totally Explained</a>

Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned.