Before Watson and Rayner could attempt to "cure" Little Albert, he and his mother moved away. Role of a Conditioned Response in the Classical Conditioning Process, Real-World Examples of the Conditioned Stimulus, Why Ivan Pavlov Was So Influential in the Field of Psychology. 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. Around the age of 9 months, Watson and Rayner exposed the child to a series of stimuli including a white rat, a rabbit, a monkey, masks, and burning newspapers and observed the boy's reactions. [9] The original report had stated that the baby's mother was a wet nurse at the hospital, who may have felt coerced and unable to turn down a request for her baby to be used in Watson's experiment. Some envisioned the boy growing into a man with a strange phobia of white, furry objects. Watson took Pavlov's research a step further by showing that emotional reactions could be classically conditioned in people. Hist Psychol. In his most famous and controversial experiment, known today as the "Little Albert" experiment, John Watson and a graduate assistant named Rosalie Rayner conditioned a small child to fear a white rat. A biography of Mary Cover Jones. Albert responded to the noise by crying and showing fear. & Smithson, C. Correcting the record on Watson, Rayner and Little Albert: Albert Barger as ‘Psychology’s lost boy.’ American Psychologist. ", "A New Twist in the Sad Saga of Little Albert". In basic terms, this means that a stimulus in the environment has produced a behavior / response which is unlearned (i.e., unconditioned) and therefore is a natural response which has not been taught. However, this stimulus generalization did not extend to everything with hair.[4]. For the experiment proper, by which point Albert was 11 months old, he was put on a mattress on a table in the middle of a room. "Our search of seven years was longer than the little boy’s life," Beck wrote of the discovery. [2] Watson followed the procedures which Pavlov had used in his experiments with dogs.[3]. A detailed review of the original study and its subsequent interpretations by Ben Harris (1979)[20] stated: Critical reading of Watson and Rayner's (1920) report reveals little evidence either that Albert developed a rat phobia or even that animals consistently evoked his fear (or anxiety) during Watson and Rayner's experiment. [10] Recent research has shown, however, that Douglas Merritte may not have been "Little Albert",[11] who may in fact have been young William Barger. Little Albert was harmed during this experiment—he left the experiment with a previously nonexistent fear. [4], In further experiments, Little Albert seemed to generalize his response to the white rat. Ever wonder what your personality type means? It is stated that the study's authors were aware of the child's severe cognitive deficit, abnormal behavior, and unusually frequent crying, but continued to terrify the sick infant and generalize their findings to healthy infants, an act criticized as academic fraud. [5] For example, it had only a single subject and no control subjects. He just wanted to study the behaviorthat he could actually observe. When she found out, she took Albert and moved away, letting no one know where they were going. [16][17] Under the NCPHS standards set in the late 1970s, an experiment such as Watson's would not have been allowed. (1979). The Wright Institute, Los Angeles, CA. [18][19] There are also regulations now put in place by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 and the Public Health Service Act, as well as required education since 2000 in the use of human research participants required by the National Institutes of Health.[15]. Genetic, unconscious, or instinctive elements made no sense to him. In 2012, Beck and Alan J. Fridlund reported that Douglas was not the healthy, normal child Watson described in his 1920 experiment. They presented convincing evidence that Watson knew about and deliberately concealed the boy's neurological condition. [12], Experiment providing information on classical conditioning of human infantile subject. In an interview, Barger's niece stated that she and her uncle had been quite close throughout his life, acknowledged Barger's antipathy toward dogs as a well-known fact that family members would tease him about (the researchers noted there was no way to determine whether or not this behavior was linked to Watson's experiment), and stated that she did not recall any other phobias. According to some textbooks, Albert's mother worked in the same building as Watson and didn't know the tests were being conducted.