Dr. Watson & Little (Slothrop) Albert

[David Morris]

http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=970

In the early decades of the twentieth century the discipline of
psychology was still in its infancy, but beginning to make significant
headway. Pioneering researchers were enthusiastically unraveling the
human mind, and some were willing to go to alarming lengths to satisfy
their curiosity.

One such trailblazer was a behaviorist named John B. Watson. In 1919,
his curiosity was aroused after observing a child who showed an
irrational fear of dogs. Watson supposed that a shiny new human would
not possess an inborn fear of domesticated animals, but if "one animal
succeeds in arousing fear, any moving furry animal thereafter may
arouse it." In order to satiate his scientific appetite, he undertook
a series of experiments at Johns Hopkins University to determine
whether an infant could indeed be conditioned to fear cute-and-cuddly
animals by associating them with scary stimuli. A couple decades
earlier Pavlov's notorious dogs had been conditioned to salivate at
the sound of a bell; Watson hoped to expand upon the concept.

In 1920 Watson secured access to a "healthy, stolid, and unemotional"
nine-month-old infant named Albert B., the son of a wet nurse who
worked in the hospital. He was assisted by Rosalie Rayner, a graduate
student at the university. The researchers' first order of business
was to establish a psychological baseline. They tried exposing the
infant to a white rat, a rabbit, a dog, and a monkey, and Albert
reached for each animal with cheerful curiosity. The researchers
brought him items such as masks and clumps of cotton, and he
manipulated the objects with interest. They placed a long steel rod
behind Albert's head and struck the metal sharply with a claw hammer,
and he flinched with evident distress.