The Little Albert Experiment
John B. Watson: (behaviorism)
John B. Watson was an American psychologist (1878 - 1958) who established the scientific theory of behaviorism as a psychological school. He was also the J. Hopkins laboratory director. He considered only love, fear and anger to be unconditional and unlearned. According to him, current behavior should be studied and not only pondered over.
Concept of personality:
He conceives a person as a mechanism whose activity is determined by the content of the environment in which he lives. Two levels can be distinguished in humans:
congenital - physiological properties of the organism, unconditional reflexes associated with basic emotions - fear, anger, sex
obtained - new units of behavior - instincts (arising through learning), habits (arising on the basis of contact with the environment)
The Little Albert Experiment:
Watson and his wife Rosalie Rayner (also a psychologist) conducted The Little Albert Experiment to answer these three questions: Can an infant be conditioned to fear an animal that appears simultaneously with a loud, fear-arousing sound? Would such fear transfer to other animals/inanimate objects? How long would such fear persist?
They brought a 9-month infant called Albert, who was tested on his reactions to various neutral stimuli. He was shown a white rat, a rabbit, a monkey and some masks. Albert acted calm around all of them with no fear of any of these stimuli. Then they took out a hammer and struck it against a steel bar behind his head. That made Albert feel frightened and he burst into tears.
When Albert reached 11 months, he was shown a white rat again, but at the same time a hammer was struck against the steel bar behind his head. Albert reacted the same as the last time - frightened and crying. After seven pairings of the rat and the hammer noise, Albert reacted with crying and fear anytime just the rat was presented (without the noise).
Five days later, Watson found out that Albert developed phobias of anything reminding him of a rat - a family dog, a fur coat or a Father Christmas mask (this process is called generalization).
This built fear of rats began to fade as time went on (extinction), but can be renewed by following the same procedure. It was evident that 1 month after the experiment, Albert was no longer frightened of rats, but the associations could still be easily renewed. Albert's mother withdrew him from the experiment the day the last tests were made, so Watson and Rayner couldn't conduct further experiments to reverse the condition response. The Little Albert Experiment was conducted before ethical guidelines were implemented in psychology, and this study can only be judged retrospectively.