Psychologists believe that humans aren't born with fear, they acquire it through various stages in life which means fear is learned. The fears and insecurites that you faced as a child may manifest themselves differently later on in life as a kind of fear that though you may deal with, is still alwys there. One such behavioral psychologist was John .B.Watson who in order to prove this theory in 1920 went on to conduct one of the most unethical experiments in the USA. It went on to become known as the Little Albert Experiment.
In the little Albert experiment, professor John Watson and graduate student Rosalie Rayner experimented with an 9 month old baby subjecting the infant to fear a white rat. In a series of generalized stimulus, the infant would end up displaying an equal fear to things like Watson’s hair, Santa Claus, a dog, a rabbit and a fur coat.
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No he wasn’t the Arthur Conan Doyle character and assistant to Sherlock Holmes. He was a doctorate professor of experimental psychology at John Hopkins University. His experiments were inspired by the famous experimental psychologist Ivan Pavlov and besides conditioning experiments on dogs, he wanted to see if the same experiments on humans to figure out if fear was an instinct or just a reflex that individuals responded differently to in life.
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Watson had no scruples whatsoever in using a 9-month-old infant named Albert for his experiment which was to be called “Classic conditioning”. As a baseline series of tests, the child was exposed to items like burning newspapers, a rat, Watson’s hair, a monkey, a mask, a rabbit and a white rat. The child showed no fear to any of these sometimes even reaching for them. The aim of the experiment was to create or condition a fear within the child of these very same items. Pavlov used the same method he had used with dogs.
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The second stage of the experiment involved Watson associating fear with the objects. Each time Albert was exposed to the white rat, Watson banged a hammer against a metal pipe making a loud disturbing sound. This made the child cry each time he heard the noise. After repeating this act several times, Little Albert soon began to cry immediately upon seeing the rat. One can well imagine why this could be considered unethical because if you imagine that little baby pouting and traumatised with such an incident then you will understand why I would consider Watson a deplorable man.
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The child would be exposed to even more such incidents to induce fear within him. One also wonders why would scientists conduct experiments on fear. Would it help them gain insight into treating abuse, panic disorders, trauma and depression in adults? It doesn’t take a scientist to know that childhood insecurity and abuse does give way to adult fears and panic disorders later on in life.
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As expected little Albert soon learnt to associate fear with a number of objects. He displayed fear and distress each time he saw a furry object. By the end of the experiment, Albert displayed identical responses to objects as harmless as cotton balls and a white rabbit. Even when he saw an image of Santa Claus, he associated the beard with fear of a white furry object. Albert’s responses proved to the scientists that fear was firmly entrenched into his mind and locked into his memory. Little Albert was seen several times crawling away or trying to hide even from the Santa Claus mask. Their experiment was successful.
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Watson recorded his observations and interpreted his experiments in his own way. Here is one of his observations describing how the child would react
"The instant the rat was shown, the baby began to cry. Almost instantly he turned sharply to the left, fell over on [his] left side, raised himself on all fours and began to crawl away so rapidly that he was caught with difficulty before reaching the edge of the table."
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The evil and unethical experiment was frowned upon by many in psychological circles. According to some reports, Albert’s mother also worked in Hopkins University and had no inkling of what was going on with her baby although there are reports disputing that fact. Original notes uncovered stated that the mother was a wet nurse at the hospital who may have been coerced into consenting to Watson’s experiments on her child.
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An investigation by psychologist and Professor Hall P.Beck uncovered several facts that proved initial reports about the aftermath of the experiments false, such as the outrage expressed by the mother. Beck concluded that Albert was actually a boy named Douglas, the illegitimate child of campus nurse Arvilla Merritte. Beck tracked down the family through records at the university and the help of FBI forensics who supplied a photograph that matched Douglas with little Albert.
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Watson and his aide Rosalie Rayner made no attempt to desensitize the child although he discussed what might be done to eradicate his fears. In fact, both left the university soon after.The experiment would go on to be regarded as a mystery and met with huge criticism simply because it only yielded Watson’s own interpretations of the experiment with no objective means to evaluate the child’s reactions. Many assumed that Albert would grow up with a fear of furry objects. The truth was even more tragic than that.
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Beck and his associate Alan J Friedlund discovered that Douglas had died tragically on May 10th 1925 when he was six due to Hydrocephalus which is a buildup of fluid in the brain. "Our search of seven years was longer than the little boy’s life," Beck wrote in an investigative research that he published along with Friedlund.
What was more sensational was the fact that the duo found that Douglas Merritte wasn’t the “healthy” and “Normal” child described in Watson’s experiment in 1920. They found that Douglas had suffered from the disease since birth and even provided convincing evidence that Watson was aware of the child’s condition. This cast a huge a shadow over the moral ethics of the notorious Little Albert Experiment.
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As for John Watson, he actually went on to deliver lectures about his experiments inspiring like-minded people like Mary Cover Jones who would go on to be known as the “Mother of Behavior Therapy” after her own study conducted on a three-year-old infant.
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