Little Albert’s experiment

To John B. Watson He is known as one of the fathers of behaviorism. His main intellectual reference was Pavlov, the Russian physiologist who made the first discoveries about instrumental conditioning. Watson, for his part, carried out a famous study, known as the Little Albert experiment.

Let’s go by parts. Ivan Pavlov carried out a very famous experiment with dogs. It could be said that it was one of the most important paragraphs in the introductory chapter of what would later become psychology as a science. He discovered the basic aspects of how the stimulus works -answer and established the principles of what was called “classical conditioning.”

What Pavlov did with dogs, Watson tried to replicate it in Little Albert’s experiment. In other words, she experimented on human beings. In this case, with a baby whom he manipulated to prove his thesis.

Pavlov’s experiments

Ivan Pavlov was a great researcher of nature. After studying various disciplines, he became interested by physiology. And it was precisely a physiological element that allowed him to discover conditioning from the stimulus-response scheme.

Pavlov noticed that dogs They salivated before they were given food.. In other words, he discovered that these animals “prepared” to eat when the time came. They reacted to the stimulus. That observation gave him the opportunity to start experimenting. This is how he introduced different stimuli before serving them the food, in the form of an advertisement.

Pavlov’s great discovery was the ability of a bell to predict the presence of food. Although it may seem simple, no one had taken note of this fact. But what is the scientific explanation? The bell in itself has no predictive value, so in psychological terms, in this case, it is considered a neutral stimulus. Food triggers an innate salivation response in the dog. Food is considered an unconditioned stimulus (it causes a natural response) and salivation is an unconditioned response..

When food (unconditioned stimulus) is presented along with the sound of the bell (neutral stimulus), the dog associates the sound of the bell with the presence of food. So that, When the dog salivates at the sound of the bell, this sound is considered to have become a conditioned stimulus., that is, a conditioning has occurred. The dog’s salivation response to the bell is a conditioned response.

The background of the little Albert experiment

John B. Watson was a radical positivist. He thought that human behavior should be studied exclusively based on learned behaviors. For him it made no sense to talk about genetic elements, the unconscious or instincts. Theirs was to study only observable behavior.

Watson was a researcher at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore (United States). It started from the idea that in human beings all, or most of our behavior, can be explained by our learning history. based on conditioning. Thus, it seemed to him that it was a good idea to try to demonstrate that the conclusions that Pavlov had reached could also be applied to human beings.

This is how, together with his assistant, Rosalie Rayner, he went to an orphanage and chose a baby who was only 8 months old.. He was the son of one of the orphanage’s wet nurses. He lived basically ignored, in an environment where coldness prevailed. He seemed excessively calm. It was said that he had hardly cried in his short life. Thus was born Little Albert’s experiment.

A controversial experiment

In the first phase of little Albert’s experiment, he was presented with different stimuli. The objective was to observe which of them made him afraid. It was found that he only expressed fear when he heard loud noises. It was something common to all the little ones. Otherwise, she showed no signs of fear of animals or fire.

The test continued to induce fear conditioning. The baby was presented with a white rat and he wanted to play with it. However, when trying to do so, a very loud noise was made. that scared him. After repeating the same cycle several times, the baby ended up feeling afraid of the rat. Later, other animals such as rabbits, dogs and even fur coats were introduced. In all cases, the little one ended up conditioned. He felt afraid when he saw those elements.

The baby was subjected to tests for a long time. Little Albert’s experiment lasted almost a year. In the end, the baby had gone from being very calm to being practically in a state of continuous anxiety. She became afraid of a Santa Claus mask. They forced him to touch it and the child cried uncontrollably. Finally, the university expelled Watson due to the controversy of his experiment. Also for having started an affair with his assistant.

The second part of the experiment was to reverse the conditioning; that is, in “deconditioning” previously conditioned fears. However, this was never realized. It is not known what happened to the baby after Little Albert’s famous experiment. However, one publication claimed that the boy, whose real name was Douglas Merrite, died at age 6 from congenital hydrocephalus, although other sources claim it was as a result of meningitis.

If so, the results of such a macabre experiment could be questioned. In any case, Little Albert’s experiment is one of the most famous in the history of psychology. For the height of its claims, for its conclusions and for violating many of the rules that any researcher who wants to carry out an experiment today has to respect.

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