Historical story

Who was Little Albert? This experiment is one of the darkest pages in the history of psychology

Today no one can even imagine experiments that require ... scaring children. What if the object was a baby? The boy who went down in the history of psychology as Little Albert was exactly 11 months old - an anonymous orphan from the most famous study of the father of behaviorism, John Watson.

Where did the idea to frighten a child come from? It started with John Watson reading Psychology as the behaviorist sees it in 1913. He assumed that introspection [careful observation of experienced emotions - ed. Ed.] and consciousness analysis are too biased methods to be considered scientific, and reliable and authoritative research should focus on what is visible - stimulus and response.

This reading is considered to be the symbolic birth of a new trend in psychology, and its author - the father of behaviorism. Watson's inspiration, however, stretched far beyond the walls of John Hopkins University in Baltimore, where he lectured. Ivan Pavlov developed his research at a similar time , the Russian experimental medic. Based on the observations of fed dogs, he described the principles of classical conditioning, i.e. learning to respond to specific stimuli. Watson went one step further - he decided to test the theses of the scientist on people.

He assumed that a person is born with three basic feelings - fear, love and rage. Everything else is shaped by the environment. With his assistant, Rosalie Rayner, he asked three questions:

Can an infant be conditioned to fear an animal that comes along with a loud, fear-inducing sound? Can such fear be transferred to other animals or inanimate objects? How long will this fear last?

They only needed a child to get the answers.

They found them in the hospital, although some sources also mention an orphanage - scientists decided to anonymize the baby. It appears in reports as "Albert B." - healthy, calm boy. According to the employees' opinion, the child showed great indifference to the environment and was not very emotional as confirmed by preliminary research. Nine-month-old Albert was not afraid of fire, and the animals and objects shown to him interested him. He only started crying when he heard loud, unexpected sounds.

Will Albert touch the rat?

After the initial qualification, two months later, the boy was placed on a mattress for the first time, in the center of a bright room. The walls of the room muffled the crying of a frightened child for the next months. Watson and Rayner put a hospital white rat next to him, but whenever Albert wanted to play with him, someone behind him hit the metal bar with a hammer. This was to see if the boy would begin to fear the animal when the beep was not heard.

Watson's inspiration, however, stretched far beyond the walls of John Hopkins University in Baltimore, where he lectured. Ivan Pavlov developed his research at a similar time. Watson went a step further - he decided to test the theses of the scientist on people.

The first phase of the experiment was successful after seven trials split into two sessions. Between them, Albert had a week off. Less than a year old, the boy began to cry at the mere sight of a rat, although he was eager to touch it before conditioning. Five days later, it was checked whether there was a phenomenon of generalization [responding to a similar stimulus in the same way - ed. ed.]. It turned out that the infant's fear was transferred to other animals as well as to white, furry objects, although not everything consisting of hair made him anxious.

After a month, the reaction continued, but only slightly diminished over time. The study lasted almost a year, and in its final stages Albert was almost constantly afraid. Even at the sight of the Santa Claus mask, he would scream and cry.

The boy's conditioning was never reversed, although it is likely that the couple of scientists knew when the baby would leave the hospital. While the experiment was to get rid of fears, it was discontinued before it officially ended.

Again, depending on the sources, two non-mutually exclusive causes are mentioned. The first assumes that the child's mother was known - an employee of the center where Albert was staying. She was supposed to know about the study, and when she realized what it was, she took her son and left with him without revealing his new whereabouts to anyone. According to the second theory, the de-conditioning did not occur due to Watson's expulsion from the university. Assisting Rosalie Rayner was the scientist's lover (and later also the wife) . His then wife found out about the affair. She filed for divorce, and when she found the letters the couple had exchanged, she published excerpts from them in the newspaper. This caused a scandal that the university could not afford.

What happened to the baby?

William Barger or Douglas Merritte? The anonymization of Little Albert makes it much more difficult to trace the boy's fate. Two main hypotheses concern the mentioned names. If Albert B. was Douglas, his story ended early and sorry. The child that Beck, Levinson and Irons found in the 1920 censuses died at the age of six and suffered from congenital hydrocephalus.

The boy was born in a hospital at John Hopkins University, where Arvilla Merritte worked as a wet nurse. For one dollar, she allowed her son to participate in the study, most likely not knowing exactly how it was supposed to go. If this hypothesis were true, it would be the most serious of many charges against Watson - a sick child was involved in the experiment.

photo:Wellcome Images / CC BY 4.0 Watson was inspired by Pavlov's experiments on conditioning ... dogs.

It is different with William. As noted by Powell and Digdon, three of the hospital employees had a baby around the same time, and Pearl Barger's son fits the boy's description better. Interestingly, the family actually called him Albert and his fear of dogs was the subject of jokes. The man did not suffer from any congenital diseases and lived to the age of 87.

The question of the identity of the child from Watson's experiment remains unresolved to this day. The search is not made easier by ... the number of distortions in the available studies and descriptions of the experiment. The least significant discrepancies concern the age of the child and the name used by the researchers, as well as the species of the animal used (sometimes a rabbit appears instead of a rat).

There are academic texts that do not mention scientists' names and those that do so incorrectly. The course of research, the list of objects to which Albert's fear was transferred ... You can even find detailed descriptions of how the boy's de-conditioning proceeded.

It is not without fault that Watson himself changed some details in his own references to the study. The behaviorist has landed on the list of the most cited psychologists of the 20th century . Meanwhile, Ben Harris, who in 1979 conducted a thorough analysis of the scientific items describing the case of Little Albert, found a reliable description of the study ... in four textbooks.