Classical Behaviorism and Little Albert

Classical Behaviorism and Little Albert

By the beginning of the XXth century many psychologists had concluded that the human mind could not be adequately studied through introspective methods, and were advocating a switch to the study of the mind through the evidence of behavior in controlled laboratory experiments.

John Watson was not the first advocate of this throughgoing behaviorist approach, but he was certainly the most conspicuous. In a career cut short by his marital infidelity, he became one of the most influential and controversial psychologists of the XXth century. Through his work on the stimulus-response learning theory that had been pioneered by Thorndike, he became regarded as the founding father of behaviorism, and he did much to popularize the use of the term. His 1913 lecture, Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It, put forward the revolutionary idea that “a truly scientific psychology would abandon talk of mental states... and instead focus on prediction and control of behavior.” This lecture became known to later psychologists as the “behaviorist manifesto.”

Before Watson's research at Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, Maryland, the majority of experiments on behavior, with the results extrapolated to human behavior. Watson himself studied rats and monkeys for his doctorate but (perhaps influenced by his experience working with the military during World War I) was keen to conduct experiments using human subjects. He wanted to study the stimulus-response model of classical conditioning and how it applied to the prediction and control of human behavior. He believed that people have three fundamental emotions – fear, rage and love – and he wanted to find out whether a person could be conditioned into feeling these in response to a stimulus.

Anyone, regardless of their nature, can be trained to be anything. Photo by Elena.

Little Albert

With his research assistant, Rosalie Rayner, Watson began a series of experiments involving  “Albert B.”, a nine-month-old baby chosen from a local children's hospital. The tests were designed to see whether it is possible to teach an infant to fear an animal by repeatedly presenting it at the same time as a loud, frightening noise. Watson also wanted to find out, whether such a fear would transfer to other animals or objects; and how long this fear would persist. Today, his methods would be considered unethical and even cruel, but at the time they were seen as a logical and natural progression from previous animal studies.

In the now famous “Little Albert experiment,” Watson placed the healthy but “on the whole stolid and unemotional” baby Albert on a mattress and then observed his reactions when introduced to a dog, a white rat, a rabbit, a monkey, and some inanimate objects, including human masks and burning paper. Albert showed no fear of any of these animals or objects and even reached out to touch them. In this way, Watson established a baseline from which he could measure any change in the child's behavior toward the objects.

On a separate occasion, while Albert was sitting o the mattress, Watso struck a metal bar with a hammer to make a sudden loud noise; unsurprisingly, Albert became frightened ad distressed, bursting into tears. Watson now had an unconditioned stimulus (the loud noise) that he knew elicited a response of fear in the child. By parting this with the sight of the rat, he hypothesized that he would be able to condition little Albert to become afraid of the animal.

When Albert was just over 11 months old, Watson carried out the experiment. The white rat was placed on the mattress with Albert, then Watson hit the hammer on the steel bar when the child touched the rat. The child burst into tears. This procedure was repeated seven times over two sessions, one week apart, after which Albert became distressed as soon as the rat was brought into the room, even when it was not accompanied by the noise.

By repeatedly pairing the rat with the loud noise, Watson was applying the same kind of classical conditioning as Pavlov had in his experiments with dogs. The child's natural response to the noise – fear and distress – had now become associated with the rat. The child had become conditioned to respond to the rat with fear. In terms of classical conditioning, the rat was initially a neutral stimulus eliciting no particular response; the loud noise was an “unconditioned stimulus” (US) that elicited an “unconditioned response” (UR) of fear. After conditioning, the rat had become a “conditioned stimulus” (CS), eliciting the “conditioned response” (CR) of fear.

However, this conditioning seemed to go deeper than simply a fear of the white rat, and appeared to be far from temporary. In order to test whether Albert's fear had “generalized,” or spread to other, similar objects, he was reintroduced to white furry things – including a rabbit, a dog, and a sheepskin coat – five days after the conditioning. Albert showed the same distressed and fearful response to these as to the rat.

In these experiments, Watson demonstrated that human emotions are susceptible to classical conditioning. This was a new finding, because previous stimulus-response experiments had focused on testing the learning of physical behaviors. Watson had discovered that not only can human behavior be predicted, - given certain stimuli and conditions – it can also be controlled and modified. A further check of Albert's reactions to the rat, rabbit, and dog one month later suggested that the effects of this conditioning were long-lasting, but this could not be proven as Albert was soon after removed from the hospital by his mother. It has been suggested that this was a sign of the mother's distress, but according to Watson and Rayner's own account, it occurred on a prearranged date.

(Excerpt The Little Book of Psychology).

Grown-up Little Albert. Illustration by Elena.