I have saved the best for last my friends. This experiment is my all time favorite experiment of all the ones that I have been taught throughout the years. Much similar to the experiment involving Pavlov’s dogs, John B Watson performed an experiment in 1913 in which classical conditioning was put to the test.
The experiment involved a 9- month old infant orphan boy, named Albert, and several items used as stimuli. The test started off by presenting Albert with a white rat and observing his response to the creature. Albert was surprisingly comfortable with the rat and approached it with open arms to play with. After this presentation of the rat, Watson showed Albert the same rat but at the same time created a loud noise just behind Albert’s head. This loud noise scared Albert and made him start to cry. After repetition of this process, Albert was then presented the rat just by itself, with no loud noise. Albert was terrified, he started screaming, crying, and tried to crawl away. Albert had shown that because of the added stimuli of the loud noise, he now associated the creature with such horror as well.
After this process had been tested. Watson wanted to test the theory of generalization. This is where Albert would associate items that looked much similar or even had a few similarities with the same horror he associated the rat with. This was tested by presenting Albert with a white family dog, a fur coat, even a Santa Claus mask. Albert showed the same fear that he did originally towards the rat to these objects.
This may seem very horrific and you may be questioning why I favor this experiment so much, but if you were to look at the psychological gains that were received through this experiment…you would understand. This experiment proved that emotions such as fear can be taught to individuals such as Albert. Watson once said: “Give me a dozen healthy infants, 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 beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations and the race of his ancestors” (Watson, 1924, p. 104). And it’s true! Through the use of classical conditioning, emotions, talents, even traits can be learned!
Now this experiment could never be done in present day due to ethical reasoning but for your own piece of mind I’ll have you know that Little Albert was shortly adopted after this experiment and his parents did reveal that he eventually came over his fears with time.
Watson, J. B. (1924). Behaviorism. New York: People’s Institute Publishing Company.
This is also one of my favorite experiments. It makes me wonder if all of our fears are conditioned somehow and if they are, can we prevent that from happening and eliminate all fears. If we are not taught that spiders are scary as infants, would anyone be scared of spiders?