Little Albert

We've finally made it to the least ethical experiment of all time. The one where you take an orphaned baby, teach him to be terrified of anything white and furry and then kick him out on the streets. Congratulations John Watson! Which of the experiments do you think is worst?

	1920
	Are human emotional responses learned through experience?
	Give a tiny child a rat and then scare the b’jesus out of him every time he touches it.
	A traumatised baby. Hooray, emotional responses can be learned by Pavlovian conditioning.
	Terrifying an eleven-month-old baby to the point of hysteria and never curing him of his fears.
	5/5

More information
Little Albert was chosen in 1920, at the age of 9 months by psychologist John Watson to participate in a study about learning. Albert was taken from an orphanage, and therefore no parental consent for the experiment was given.

In the first trial, Albert was presented with a white rat and allowed to play with it. The next time this happened, Watson and his colleagues produced a loud, frightening sound behind the child (by striking a steel bar with a hammer) whenever he touched the rat.

Unsurprisingly, Albert was frightened by the noise was made, but after several pairings of the rat with the sound, he began to show the fear response as soon as the rat appeared. The association of the white rat with the frightening sound perfectly demonstrated classical (Pavlovian) conditioning, however, that wasn’t all.

Watson subsequently found Albert to be terrified of a non-white rabbit, a furry dog, a seal-skin coat and even the psychologist himself when wearing a Santa Claus mask with a white beard. Still evident seventeen days after the original conditioning, Albert’s fear had generalised to many different stimuli.

Perhaps the most unethical aspect of this experiment (yes, more so than deliberately and continually distressing an orphan baby), is the fact that Albert was taken away 31 days after the study began, and so was never desensitised to the objects that had terrified him.

Nothing is known of Albert’s later life, and it is possible that he remained petrified of beards.

Image: Witold Barski

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