Little Albert Experiment - Psychology's Black Eye

An eight-month-old baby with rosy cheeks sits in front of a camera. A man appears in the frame and places a live rabbit near the baby. Then the man brings over a small, squirming spider monkey on a leash. Then a dog. The baby, who would become known as Little Albert, seems to have a healthy curiosity about the animals.

But what happens next made the experiment a staple of psychology textbooks and brought it into the pantheon of unethical scientific research.

Dr. John Watson was a psychologist and considered the father of behaviorism. Building off of Pavlov’s work proving that you could “hardwire” certain behaviors into dogs, Watson suspected that the same would apply to humans. In the “nature vs. nurture” debate, Watson was at the extreme end of the nurture spectrum. “Give me a dozen healthy infants,” he wrote, “well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select — doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and yes, even a beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors.”

Watson was positioning himself as a kind of demi-god, molding or mangling the unformed clay of a human life. And the “specified world” he imagined bringing children into was harsh. He believed that giving them affection was a “mawkish sentimental” act and should be avoided—otherwise the child would develop an “emotional disturbance.”

He decided to test his theory about conditioning by manufacturing a phobia in an infant. More specifically, he would instill a phobia of furry animals in Little Albert.

First, he and his graduate assistant, Rosalie Rayner, had to determine that Little Albert was not already afraid of them. Since Little Albert had watched the animals with interest and in some cases tried to touch them, he clearly wasn’t. Next, Dr. Watson brought the rat back. When Albert reached for it, he heard a disturbing noise: a hammer clanging against a metal bar. Little Albert jerked away from the rat, visibly startled. When Albert tried to reach for the rat again, the researchers made the sound again. Then they sent Albert home for a week. When he came back, they started over again, startling Little Albert as they brought out the animals. As they expected, Little Albert’s fear transferred to other furry objects, even a fur coat. As he saw the animals and heard the clanging sound, he trembled and cried or tried to crawl away.

The experiment never would have passed muster today. Scientific experiments must now be overseen by institutional and ethical review boards to ensure they are treated safely and fairly. But in 1920, when this experiment took place, there was very little oversight on human testing. In 1947, the Nuremberg medical code was developed in response to Nazi scientists, who had run a slew of horrifying experiments on gypsies, Jews, and other prisoners, deliberately infecting them with diseases, forcing them to drink sea water, and experimenting with bone grafting. For the most part, these experiments didn’t produce useful information. But according to Slate, the data from one experiment that involved submerging naked victims in ice water for hours is still used in hypothermia research. Today, though there are protocols for dealing with human subjects, there is little consensus about what to do with the data from previous unethical experiments, like Little Albert’s.

Naturally, outrage over the treatment of Little Albert caused people to wonder who he was and what had happened to him. But tracking him down proved nearly impossible, as Watson had burned his papers before he died, likely out of a sense of shame surrounding the criticism of his ethics. Albert’s real name was unknown. For the sake of privacy, Watson had referred to the baby as “Albert B.” Because researchers knew his approximate birth date and that Little Albert’s mother was a nurse at Johns Hopkins, they were able to whittle the potential Little Alberts down to two.

At first, the prevailing theory was that Little Albert was Douglas Merritte, a developmentally delayed child born with hydrocephalus, or water on his brain. Douglas died when he was six years old. It was an incredibly disturbing prospect that Watson had introduced an additional stress factor into what was already a life marred by suffering — and because using a neurologically impaired child would have invalidated the findings. If Douglas was Albert, it meant that Watson had deliberately concealed his ailment.

A few years later, in 2014, a more plausible possibility was presented by researchers at MacEwan University in Canada. The other baby fitting the criteria was William Albert Barger — the “Albert B.” suddenly making sense. This “Albert” was also dead, but when Tom Bartlett tracked down Barger’s niece for a piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education, she reported that Barger despised dogs. It was impossible to know if this was the real Little Albert, but the details were uncanny. As Barlett would write, “The honest answer is: No one knows.” But if William Albert Barger was Little Albert, it was one data point suggesting that there was something to Watson’s theory.

Watson’s career ended in scandal, but not over the ethics of creating phobias in children. He was in the process of developing an institution to carry out his draconian parenting philosophies, when ironically, love did him in. Watson was married and having an affair with the graduate student, Rosalie Rayner, who helped him with the Little Albert experiment. Forced out of the profession, Watson became an advertising executive and, with Rayner, penned a wildly popular child-rearing book. “Let your behavior always be objective and kindly firm,” they counseled American parents. “Never hug and kiss them, never let them sit in your lap.”


I think I may know a few people who's parents purchased this book. What about you? What do you think about the ethical issues regarding the Little Albert experiment? Unethical, yes, but I will say this about some of the unethical psychological experiments: We now know immensely important information on how humans operate because of these experiments. Obviously, I'm not saying we should torture more children, but let's not forget the knowledge gained from one man that went a little too far in the name of scientific discovery.


See you all tomorrow.

Buh-bye.