The Little Albert Experiment is one of the most famous cases in psychology. Like the Milgram experiment and the Stanford prison experiment, it received waves of scrutiny and criticism. Additionally, some experts believe it was flawed from the start, making it inadmissible as a modern resource. The trial followed a nine-month-old named Albert, who was conditioned to fear rats and similar objects. Psychologists today want to know what happened after he grew up. Did his fear of rats continue into adulthood?
What was the Little Albert Experiment?
Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov is famous for his studies in which he conditioned dogs. He discovered that if he rang a bell while feeding a dog, it began salivating every time it heard the ring. His research into “conditioned reflexes” won him the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1904. It also inspired American psychologist John Watson to begin his own study to determine if humans could be conditioned the same way.
So Watson and his research assistant, Rosalie Rayner, began their trial at Johns Hopkins University in 1919. Their test subject was a nine-month old son of a wet nurse, and the trial continued until he was over a year old. They gave him the name “Albert” or “Little Albert”. They began the trial by presenting him with a neutral stimulus: furry animals like a white rat and a rabbit. At first, he reacted with mild curiosity and a bit of playfulness.
Then Watson and Rayner began their Pavlovian conditioning by adding a negative stimulus. They presented the animal again while hitting a hammer into a metal pipe. Albert reacted to the loud noise and withdrew from the rat or rabbit. After several rounds of this, Albert began withdrawing from the animals automatically, even when they stopped slamming the pipe. They had successfully conditioned Albert to fear the animals he once responded positively to.
The researchers found his fear extended to furry animal-like objects, like a wool coat and a Santa Claus mask with a fluffy beard. “Watson presented [the Albert study] as a proof for his theory that all our emotional responses in adulthood are offshoots of three primordial responses — fear, rage and love,” says Alan Fridlund, PhD, a social and clinical psychologist at UC Santa Barbara, to How Stuff Works.
Unethical and Questionable
Imbuing a baby with a fear of furry objects would grossly violate current ethical standards. Albert was incapable of consenting to the trial, and his mother wasn’t informed of the extent of the tests. When she found out halfway through the experiment, she withdrew him. Watson and Rayner had promised to decondition Albert but never did because the study ended early. Still, the Little Albert experiment was published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology. It made the case that fears come from conditioned emotional reactions, and it became widespread in psychology textbooks.
However, some critics have deemed the trial worthless. For one, it followed only one subject, which can’t represent the overall population. Additionally, the study was designed poorly, which makes the results questionable. And a 2021 review in the journal History of Psychology does question it. The authors call the conditioning “largely ineffective” and chalk up Albert’s “weak signs of distress” in the experiment’s film to other potential factors. To make matters worse, Watson has changed details over his various recounts of the experiment. And obviously, there were no follow-up studies.
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Who was Little Albert?
Watson hadn’t documented Albert’s real name, but that didn’t stop people from wondering what happened to him after the experiment. A team of psychologists tried to solve the mystery in a 2009 study. Using public data and facial recognition experts, they concluded Albert was actually Douglas Merritte, son of a wet nurse at the Harriet Lane Home.
They reached out to a relative of Merritte who found his John Hopkins medical records. Tragically, Merritte had died in childhood from hydrocephalus, a condition where fluid builds up in the brain. It tends to appear at or soon after childbirth or after an injury, according to the NIH. Symptons can include an unusually large head, sleepiness, irritability, seizures, and slow or regressive development.
Watson had described Albert as healthy, but Fridlund found indications of the contrary in the film of the experiment. “He has a very large head, and he’s quite pudgy and short, but the head is still big for a pudgy, short infant,” Dr. Fridlund says. “The second thing was how abnormal he was in his behavior. During that entire film—on which Albert appears for roughly four minutes—you see not one social smile from Albert. Not one.” Typically, babies begin smiling by six months and seek more social connection by nine months.
Fridlund also noted Albert’s strangely mild reactions during the trial. “Not once in the film, despite being brought an Airdale that’s scampering all over, being shown burning paper, being shown a monkey cavorting on a leash—and he has a steel bar struck with a hammer 14 times behind his back—not once does Albert turn to either Watson or Rayner to seek support. If infants perceive that the stimulus is threatening, they typically run toward a caretaker.” Muted responses may be indicative of hydrocephalus.
The Impact of the Little Albert Experiment
As if the results of the experiment weren’t questionable enough, they may have been conducted on a neurologically impaired baby, according to Fridlund and his colleagues. But although the trial itself was flawed and perhaps inadmissible as scientific research, its impact is unmistakable. “All told, the Albert study was a terribly flawed ‘proof of concept’ that nonetheless fueled research on how fears develop,” says Dr. Fridlund, “and it influenced how mental disorders such as phobias, generalized anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder are understood and treated today.”
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