The Boy Who Feared The Colour White
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The Little Albert experiment was one of the most unethical but revealing experiments in 1920s child psychology.
Psychologists John B Watson and Rosalie Raynor set out to discover whether emotional responses could be conditioned in humans, building on Russian scientist Ivan Pavlov‘s similar experiment with dogs in which he discovered that dogs could be trained to develop somewhat irrational fears.
The two psychologists took 9-month-old baby “Albert” and subjected him to a series of tests and training to see if they could get him to fear stimuli such as a white rat, a rabbit, a monkey, some masks, and burning newspapers.
They showed the boy all of these items and observed that he didn’t react at all to anything- meaning he had no fear or preference of any of the stimuli.
The next time they showed Albert the white rat, Watson hit a pipe with a hammer to create a loud and unpleasant noise which of course, made the child cry and attempt to crawl away. After a few repetitions of the rat=noise test, Albert began to panic and cry from seeing the rat even if the loud noise did not come. After several sessions of conditioning, Albert began to fear not only the white rat but also other white objects including a white beard and a white coat.
The conclusions of this awful experiment showed that a negative association with any object can lead to a fear or dislike of the object. In Albert’s case, it was the association of white objects with a loud and uncomfortable sound that lead him to develop his phobia.
Similar observations have shown that children often suffer from the same fears as one of their parents because of an object/situation being associated with their parents negative or fearful responses.