John B Watson & Rosalie Rayner 1920

AIMS: Watson, the founding father of Behaviourism, 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 would not be feared by a child.

Watson and his graduate student assistant, Rayner, aimed to find out:-

• whether they could condition fear of an animal by simultaneously presenting the animal and banging a steel bar so that the unexpected loud noise would frighten the child
• whether the fear would be transferred to other animals and objects
• the effect of time on the conditioned response

PROCEDURE (METHOD): The experimenters chose ‘Albert B’ aged 9 months as their participant. Effectively Albert had been reared from birth in a hospital environment - his mother being a wet nurse at the Harriet Lane Home for Invalid Children. The infant was healthy, well-developed, stolid and unemotional, so Watson & Rayner thought they could do him “relatively little harm”. They reasoned he would have frightening experiences at nursery, anyway. The study took place at John Hopkins University.

Before the commencement of the experiment, Albert was given a battery of baseline 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. During the baseline, Little Albert showed no fear toward any of these items. Albert’s mother and some of the hospital staff witnessed some of these events - which Watson had filmed.

The experimenters also banged a hammer against a suspended steel bar to make a loud noise. Albert reacted fearfully - his lips puckered and trembled and he suddenly began crying.

Watson & Rayner did not begin to condition 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. He began to reach out to the rat and groan as it roamed around him. In later trials, Watson & Rayner had the suspended steel bar with a hammer behind Albert's back by striking the 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 seven such pairings of the two stimuli, Albert was again presented with only the rat. 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.

Albert was allowed to play with blocks in between the trials; he appeared to have no problem playing happily with the blocks.

5 days after the first exposure to the rat and loud noise together, Watson & Rayner concluded that the conditioned response was weakening and, therefore, renewed it. They did the same again on the 20th day.

17 days after the original pairing of the stimuli, Watson took a (non-white) rabbit into the room: Albert 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. (However, Albert did not fear everything with hair.)

In the very last stages, the experiment was transferred to a lecture room and conducted in the presence of 4 people. This was to study the effects of different surroundings.

After 31 days of the experiment, Albert was taken from the hospital by his mother. Watson & Rayner appeared baffled by her rash action. A number of commentators have suggested that the mother was never allowed fully-informed consent; once she discovered what was taking place, she became angry and removed her son.

Watson & Rayner claimed they had planned to attempt to desensitise Albert and eliminate his fearful reactions (pair the white rat with warm milk which babies love) - but the infant’s abrupt removal by his mother destroyed the opportunity.  However, Watson later stated that he knew the boy would depart one month before the trial ended. Had the opportunity existed, they would have tried several other methods, including:

• Constantly confronting the child with those stimuli which produced the responses, in the hope that habituation would occur
• Try to ‘recondition’ by showing objects producing fear responses (visual) while simultaneously stimulating the erogenous zones (tactile), first the lips, then the nipples and, as a last resort, the sexual organs
• Try to ‘recondition’ by feeding him candy or other food just as the animal is shown

FINDINGS (RESULTS): This experiment lead to the following progression of results:

1. Introduction of a loud sound (unconditioned stimulus) resulted in fear (unconditioned response), a natural response.
2. Introduction of a rat (neutral stimulus) paired with the loud sound (unconditioned stimulus) resulted in fear (unconditioned response).
3. Successive introductions of a rat (conditioned stimulus) resulted in fear (conditioned response).

Albert also seemed to have generalised his response to several other stimuli (animals and objects) which bore some kind of similarity to the white rat.

After 31 days the conditioned response was still present if a little weaker than it had been

CONCLUSIONS: Watson & Rayner concluded that they had succeeded in conditioning in an infant fear of an animal the child would not ordinarily be frightened of. Stimulus generalisation also was claimed in that Albert transferred the fear to other similar stimuli.

From the fact that the conditioned response was still present after 31 days, Watson & Rayner concluded it might last a lifetime.

CRITICISMS (EVALUATION):-

• The study was carefully documented; witnesses helped to record the data and there were strict controls. Only one variable was changed at a time. The extensive documentation meant the study could have been replicated and, therefore, tested for reliability.
• Ivan Pavlov had shown that Classical Conditioning occurs in dogs but Watson & Rayner were the first to demonstrate it occurred in humans too
• There are huge ethical issues in respect of this study - viz...

An extract from a documentary featuring commentary on Watson’s theory and footage from the Little Albert experiment

• Albert’s mother appears not to have given fully-informed consent - though there clearly was some degree of consent and an understanding of when he would be taken back by his mother
• The researchers deliberately exposed Albert to psychological harm - causing him distress. They allowed him to rest in between exposures to frightening stimuli but continued even when it was clear he was distressed.
• Not only did Watson & Rayner fail to extinguish Albert’s fears but they made light of this failure in their account of the experiment - describing a phobic adult Albert presenting himself for treatment by ‘Freudians’ and being told in analysis that his problem was due to his receiving a violent scolding for trying to play with his mother's pubic hair!  However, if the conditioned response was weakening by the end of the experiment, then it is possible that it might have become extinct over time, anyway, with the unconditioned and conditioned stimuli no longer being paired. In fact, whether or not Albert would have suffered long-term effects from Watson & Rayner’s conditioning will never be known as, in 2009, Hall P Beck, Sharman Levinson & Gary Irons revealed that the boy died in 1925 at the age of 6 from hydrocephalus and convulsions. (Albert’s identity had been a mystery for many years - shortly before his death in 1958 Watson burned all his documents...and, with them, he seemed to have thought, any chance of learning Albert’s full identity. However, Beck et al, through an arduous process of detective work and elimination, eventually concluded ‘Albert’ was Douglas Merritte while his mother was wet nurse Arvilla Merritte.)

• The experiment was conducted in a laboratory settings, with tight controls, and is, therefore, potentially subject to all the usual criticisms about lack of mundane realism and low ecological validity.
• A detailed review by Benjamin Harris (1979) of the original study and its subsequent misinterpretations, found that:-

• “Critical reading of Watson & 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.”
  In other words, it’s possible there might not have been a phobia to extinguish. Harris’ review found that after Albert supposedly acquired his intense phobia of the white rat, there were random intervals during testing when Albert seemed completely fine with the rodent. Watson & Rayner would sometimes find the boy petting the rat without any apparent fear. If the phobia was as intense as the researchers claimed, Albert would have consistently drawn back from the rodent. Add that inconsistency to grand claims made on the basis of one study, with one participant with no successful replications since, and it’s questionable that Albert’s fear was even created in the first place.
• Watson would change aspects of the experiment to improve the appearance of the experiment

• “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”

• “A study on reconditioning a child was conducted a few years later by Mary Cover Jones (1924), another one of Watson’s students. The child was selected to take part in the study because he had personality characteristics similar to those of Albert B. As  the author notes:
  “Peter was 2 years and 10 months old when we began to study him. He was afraid of a white rat, and this fear extended to a rabbit, a fur coat, a feather, cotton wool, etc, but not to wooden blocks and similar toys.
  Jones’ study became the inspiration from which Joseph Volpe developed Systematic Desensitisation.