Little Albert: Classical Conditioning

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) Little Albert was an experiment that took place in 1920 at John Hopkins University by John B. Watson and Rosalie Raynar. John Watson had observed children in the field of behaviorism and was curious to find out whether the reaction that children had from loud noises was due to fear. He believed that by using classical conditioning it would enable a child to react fearfully by another stimulus, which wouldn’t commonly be the prompt of fear. To follow the principles of classical conditioning meant to use a kind of learning that occurred when a specific functional reaction was evoked paired with an unconditioned reaction. Watson and his assistant Raynar aimed to find this out by presenting certain animals or objects to the child and making…show more content…
He was placed in a room with a white rat and showed no fear. In a trial later, Watson and Rayner made the loud noise using the hammer and steel bar every time Albert attempted to touch the rat. This noise made Albert scared and emotional. When the next trial took place they placed Albert in the room with only the rat and no sounds yet Albert responded to this with fear and always tried to move away in tears. 20 days later the same experiment took place with a rabbit, which purposely was not white like the rat yet he still had the same reactions towards it as he did with the white rat. This continued with many other random objects with fur and no fur. After all these tests, Watson and Rayner were prepared to present the notion that it was possible to train a child to fear something he/she wouldn’t usually fear. In this case the rat began by being the neutral stimulus and over time became the conditioned stimulus. Since the conditioned fear lasted after 31 days they claimed it might last for Albert’s whole life. B) From the information gathered about this experiment, it is clearly unethical. Firstly, in the psychological code of ethics it is stated that participants must voluntarily agree to be in the study without being persuaded. This was already an issue as the participant was an infant who obviously couldn’t have an opinion or give consent. A study is also considered unethical if it causes any mental or physical harm to the participants. In this particular case a lot of mental harm was caused. To condition fear to an infant is traumatizing and as Watson had admitted himself, could last a

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