The Little Albert Experiment By John B. Watson

Anybody that has children of their own knows how difficult it can be raise children. Trying to figure out what babies are crying for is almost impossible but parents always figure out a way to take care of their child. If children could just tell us what they are thinking, what they want, and why they are crying life would be great. Luckily for us there have been psychologists in the past who have performed controlled experiments to understand how children behave and how to control their behavior. One famous psychologist was John B. Watson who performed an experiment known as “The Little Albert Experiment.”

The experiment was performed sometime prior to 1920, the results from the experiment were published in February 1920 in the Journal of Experimental Psychology. The experiment was to expand on Pavlov’s classical conditioning experiments that were performed on dogs to see how it would work on humans. The experiment’s subject was a nine-month-old baby only known as “Albert B”. Albert was exposed to a series of stimuli and various
The stimuli including things like a white rat, rabbit, a monkey, different types of masks, and burning newspapers. The first one was the white rat by itself and Albert was not affected at all by the white rat. Next time Albert saw the rat Watson added a sound effect at the same time, using a hammer to hit a metal pipe. As expected, when Albert heard the loud banging he cried. During the next seven weeks Albert cried when exposed to the white rat and the loud banging sound. What happened after that is what is considered stimulus generalization because Albert would now cry every time he saw the white rat even without the loud banging sound. Even after the experiment was completed Albert still had phobias of objects which shared characteristics with the rat; including the family dog, a fur coat, some cotton wool and a Father Christmas