Classical Conditioning: Little Albert

Explain how Watson and Rayner could have altered their experiment with Little Albert to make it more likely to meet today's ethical standards.

Although it is now one of the classical examples of psychological experiments involving classical conditioning, Watson and Rayner's 1920 experiment upon Little Albert, a young boy who was taught to become afraid of his a gentle white rat, would raises troubling ethical issues if it were replicated today. "This infant was reared almost from birth in a hospital environment; his mother was a wet nurse in the Harriet Lane Home for Invalid Children" (Watson & .Rayner, 1920). Albert had little contact with rats. When Albert was playing with the tame rat, the psychologists taught Albert to become afraid of the harmless animal making a loud noise behind the boy whenever he went near the rat.

Whenever he heard the noise, Albert began to cry. Soon, because he associated the rat with the unpleasant noise or stimulus, Albert avoided the rat and would cry at the sight of the animal. "In Pavlovian terms, a bond had been established between the sight of the rat (CS) and the arousal of Albert's autonomic nervous system (CR)" (Beck, 2001). But if "Pavlovian techniques can be used to induce fear, then it is likely that they can be used to remove fears," which would have been a more ethical version of the experiment, than essentially dooming the boy to a lifetime of phobias, and perhaps even teaching a young child his first taste of fear. Instead, Watson and Rayner could have found a child who was afraid of a harmless animal, like a dog, and deconditioned the child of that fear by giving the child a piece of forbidden candy, whenever the animal was in the room.

Works Cited

Beck, HP. (2001) "Watson, Rayner and Little Albert." General Psychology. Retrieved 19 Feb 2007 at http://www1.appstate.edu/~beckhp/littlealbert.htm

Watson, John B. & Rosalie Rayner (1920). "Conditioned Emotional Reactions."

First published in Journal of Experimental Psychology, 3(1), 1-14.

Classics in the History of Psychology. An internet resource developed by Christopher D. Green. Retrieved 19 Feb 2007 at http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Watson/emotion.htm