Little Albert Experiment (Watson & Rayner)
Watson and Rayner (1920) conducted the Little Albert Experiment to answer 3 questions:
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Can an infant be conditioned to fear an animal that appears simultaneously with a loud, fear-arousing sound?
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Would such fear transfer to other animals or inanimate objects?
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How long would such fears persist?
Little Albert Experiment
Ivan Pavlov showed that classical conditioning applied to animals. Did it also apply to humans? In a famous (though ethically dubious) experiment, John Watson and Rosalie Rayner showed it did.
Conducted at Johns Hopkins University between 1919 and 1920, the Little Albert experiment aimed to provide experimental evidence for classical conditioning of emotional responses in infants
At the study’s outset, Watson and Rayner encountered a nine-month-old boy named “Little Albert” (his real name was Albert Barger) – a remarkably fearless child, scared only by loud noises.
After gaining permission from Albert’s mother, the researchers decided to test the process of classical conditioning on a human subject – by inducing a further phobia in the child.
The baseline session occurred when Albert was approximately nine months old to test his reactions to neutral stimuli.
Albert was reportedly unafraid of any of the stimuli he was shown, which consisted of “a white rat, a rabbit, a dog, a monkey, with [sic] masks with and without hair, cotton wool, burning newspapers, etc.” (Watson & Rayner, 1920, p. 2).
Approximately two months after the baseline session, Albert was subjected during two conditioning sessions spaced one week apart to a total of seven pairings of a white rat followed by the startling sound of a steel bar being struck with a hammer.
After seven pairings of the rat and noise (in two sessions, one week apart), Albert reacted with crying and avoidance when the rat was presented without the loud noise.
By the end of the second conditioning session, when Albert was shown the rat, he reportedly cried and “began to crawl away so rapidly that he was caught with difficulty before reaching the edge of the table” (p. 5). Watson and Rayner interpreted these reactions as evidence of fear conditioning.
By now, little Albert only had to see the rat and immediately showed every sign of fear. He would cry (whether or not the hammer was hit against the steel bar), and he would attempt to crawl away.
The two conditioning sessions were followed by three transfer sessions. During the first transfer session, Albert was shown the rat to assess maintained fear, as well as other furry objects to test generalization.
Complicating the experiment, however, the second transfer session also included two additional conditioning trials with the rat to “freshen up the reaction” (Watson & Rayner, 1920, p. 9), as well as conditioning trials in which a dog and a rabbit were, for the first time, also paired with the loud noise.
This fear began to fade as time went on, however, the association could be renewed by repeating the original procedure a few times.
Unlike prior weekly sessions, the final transfer session occurred after a month to test maintained fear. Immediately following the session, Albert and his mother left the hospital, preventing Watson and Rayner from carrying out their original intention of deconditioning the fear they have classically conditioned.
