Why the Little Albert Experiment Could Never Happen Today

Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov discovered that if he rang a bell each time he fed a dog, the pup would eventually start salivating at the mere sound of a bell. Thus, classical conditioning was born. His work on "conditioned reflexes" earned him the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1904.

Curious about whether humans could also be conditioned, Watson and his research assistant, Rosalie Rayner, launched their own study at Johns Hopkins University in 1919. They recruited a 9-month-old infant, the son of a wet nurse, as their test subject.

Watson and Rayner used successive rounds of Pavlovian conditioning to invoke a fear response in a boy whom they gave the alias "Albert," who writers would call Little Albert. They initially tested his natural response to furry animals like a white laboratory rat and a rabbit. Initially, Albert was curious about the animals, and even playful.

Pairing a Neutral Stimulus With a Negative Stimulus

Next, Watson and Rayner began showing Albert a rat or rabbit while slamming a hammer into a metal pipe to create a loud sound. This caused Albert to withdraw from the animal.

After repeating this process several times, the researchers reported that Albert began withdrawing from the animal, even without the loud noise. They had conditioned Albert to fear the furry animals he had once played with.

Watson and Rayner then presented Albert with other furry objects similar to the animals, like a wool coat and Santa Clause mask with a fluffy cotton beard. They found that Albert's fear generalized to those objects.

"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.

In recent decades, the Albert research has been criticized as cruel and ethically dubious. Instilling a previously unafraid baby with fears of bunny rabbits and Santa Claus would certainly violate our current ethical standards.

Today, human test subjects are told about the risks of any research they participate in. Albert was too young to consent, and his mother wasn't granted informed consent.

Midway through the research, in fact, Albert's mother pulled him out of the psychological research. (Watson and Rayner had promised to decondition Albert to reverse his fears, but since the study ended, that never happened.)

Today, ethical considerations are paramount. The American Psychological Association has a code of conduct and other safeguards are in place. Federally funded facilities, for example, have institutional review boards that help ensure ethical practices.

The Little Albert experiment, which made the case that fears and phobias are conditioned emotional reactions, was published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology. It would become one of the most cited studies in the field of psychology and popped up in many psychology textbooks.

The study had a profound influence on developmental psychology. "Watson published a book on childcare in the 1928 ["Psychological Care of Infant and Child"], and people took to it like crazy," Dr. Fridlund says. "They followed his prescriptions for how to rear kids — raise them on a schedule, give them minimal affection, don't pick them up and hug them gratuitously, only if they've done something that justifies it."

Watson hoped to raise a new kind of human being who was free of emotional fetters, due to his fears about the disruptions in family life that accompanied industrialization and other rapid social changes he was witnessing around him.

Watson's study also influenced the development of behavior therapy. Dr. Fridlund explains:

Beyond ethical concerns, some critics say the Little Albert study has little value. A research study conducted on just one human subject is hardly representative. And its findings haven't stood up well to scientific scrutiny.

The study was poorly designed, and some question the results. A review published in the journal History of Psychology in 2021, for example, deemed Watson and Rayner's conditioning procedure "largely ineffective."

The authors weren't persuaded by the film of Albert, saying his "weak signs of distress" could be chalked up to other influences.

To complicate matters, as Watson gave various accounts of his research, he sometimes changed the details. And there has been no subsequent research of the same kind, for obvious reasons.

Watson never divulged his young test subject's real name, leaving many psychologists (and others) curious about his identity and what happened to Little Albert.

In 2009, psychologists Hall P. Beck, PhD, and Sharman Levinson, PhD, pored over public data and consulted facial recognition experts, hoping to solve the mystery of "psychology's lost boy." They believe that Little Albert was Douglas Merritte, the son of a wet nurse at the Harriet Lane Home.

They worked with Gary Irons, a relative of Douglas Merritte, who obtained Douglas's medical records from Johns Hopkins. Unfortunately, Douglas died as a young child from hydrocephalus, a build-up of fluid in the brain.

Little Albert Looks Unwell on Film

While Watson claimed that Little Albert was a healthy baby, Fridlund observed signs of illness when viewing footage of the study.

"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."

By six months, healthy babies engage in social smiling and seek even more social contact by nine months.

Dr. Fridlund also noticed Albert's muted responses to stimuli:

Dr. Fridlund says his muted responses may very well indicate hydrocephalus, which is nearly always present at birth. Watson and Rayner themselves called Albert "extremely phlegmatic," Fridlund says, and this was the reason they picked him for fear conditioning.

So Fridlund, Beck, Iron, and pediatric neurologist William Goldie (at Johns Hopkins) published their collective findings. A neurologically impaired child, of course, might not have the same responses to stimuli.

Another Albert

Meanwhile, a group of Canadian researchers — Russ Powell, PhD, Nancy Digdon, PhD and Ben Harris — discovered an infant named William Albert Barger whose mother was also a wet nurse at the Harriet Lane Home.

William, whose middle name was Albert, was born on the same day as Little Albert. Notes on his weight also match the weight of Little Albert. In 2014, they published their own research on Albert Barger. Unlike Merritte, Barger lived into his late eighties.

More than a century after the Albert study, it continues to generate discussion. It doesn't comport with today's ethical sensibilities, and Watson and Rayner used haphazard procedures that wouldn't pass muster today, with some undermining the effects of others.

"There were inadequate controls and there was no long-term follow-up," Dr. Fridlund says. "To be fair, many of the experimental procedures required to demonstrate authentic Pavlovian fear conditioning were not refined until the 1980's, but Watson and Rayner's conclusions went well past their findings."

Yet its influence lives on. As Dr. Fridlund says, "All told, the Albert study was a terribly flawed 'proof of concept' that nonetheless fueled research on how fears develop, and it influenced how mental disorders such as phobias, generalized anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder are understood and treated today."