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A Closer Look
The participant in the experiment was a child that Watson and Rayner called "Albert
B." but is known popularly today as Little Albert. Around the age of 9 months, Watson
and Rayner exposed the child to a series of stimuli including a white rat, a rabbit, a
monkey, masks, and burning newspapers and observed the boy's reactions. The boy
initially showed no fear of any of the objects he was shown.
The next time Albert was exposed to the rat, Watson made a loud noise by hitting a
metal pipe with a hammer. Naturally, the child began to cry after hearing the loud
noise. After repeatedly pairing the white rat with the loud noise, Albert began to cry
simply after seeing the rat.
"The instant the rat was shown, the baby began to cry. Almost instantly he turned
sharply to the left, fell over on [his] left side, raised himself on all fours and began to
crawl away so rapidly that he was caught with di culty before reaching the edge of the
table."
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The Little Albert experiment presents and example of how classical conditioning can be
used to condition an emotional response.
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Recently, however, the true identity and fate of the boy known as Little Albert was
discovered. As reported in American Psychologist, a seven-year search led by
psychologist Hall P. Beck led to the discovery. After tracking down and locating the
original experiments and the real identity of the boy's mother, it was suggested that
Little Albert was actually a boy named Douglas Merritte.
The story does not have a happy ending, however. Douglas died at the age of six on
May 10, 1925 of hydrocephalus, a build-up of uid in his brain. "Our search of seven
years was longer than the little boy’s life," Beck wrote of the discovery.
In 2012, Beck and Alan J. Fridlund published their discovery that Douglas Merritte was
not the "healthy" and "normal" child that Watson described in his 1920 experiment.
Instead, they found that Merritte had su ered from hydrocephalus since birth and
presented convincing evidence that Watson knew about the boy's condition and
intentionally misrepresented the state of the child's health. These ndings not only
cast a shadow over Watson's legacy, they also deepen the ethical and moral issues of
this well-known experiment.
In 2014, doubt was cast over Beck and Fridlund's ndings when researchers presented
evidence that a boy by the name of William Barger was the real Little Albert. Barger
was born on the same day as Merritte to a wet-nurse who worked at the same hospital
as Merritte's mother. While his rst name was William, he was known his entire life by
his middle name, Albert.
While experts continue to debate the true identity of the boy at the center of Watson's
experiment, there is little doubt that Little Albert left a lasting impression on the eld
of psychology.
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