Question

after watching John B. Watson, Little Albert experiment write me a 300 word report on your findings. Explain what happened, how, and the results. Is it ethical?

Answer 1

Watson believed that, along with structure and the basic reflexes, humans inherit the emotions of fear, rage, and love. In infants, fear is elicited by loud noises and loss of support (such as falling), rage by restricting the infant’s freedom of movement, and love by stroking or patting the infant. Through learning, these emotions come to be elicited by stimuli other than those that originally elicited them. Furthermore, all adult emotions such as hate, pride, jealousy, and shame are derived from fear, rage, and love. To demonstrate how emotions could be displaced to stimuli other than those that had originally elicited the emotions, Watson and Rosalie Rayner performed an experiment in 1920 on an 11-month-old infant named Albert. They showed Albert a white rat, and he expressed no fear of it. In fact, he reached out and tried to touch it. Subsequently, as Albert reached for the rat, from behind the boy Watson struck a steel bar with a hammer. The loud, unexpected noise caused Albert to jump and fall forward. Again Albert was offered the rat, and just as he touched it, the steel bar behind him was again struck. Again Albert jumped, and this time he began to cry. A week later, when the rat was again presented to Albert, Albert was less enthusiastic and attempted to keep his distance from it. Five more times Watson and Rayner placed the rat near Albert and struck the steel bar; and Albert, who had at first been attracted to the rat, was now frightened of it. Five days later, Watson and Rayner found that Albert’s fear of the rat was just as strong as it had been at the end of testing and that the fear had generalized to other furry objects such as a rabbit, a dog, a fur coat, and a Santa Claus mask. Watson and Rayner had clearly demonstrated how experience rearranged the stimuli that caused emotional responses. They believed that all adult emotional reactions develop by the same mechanism that had operated in the experiment with Albert—that is, contiguity.

The experiment was not ethical. This is because not only a fear was created in an infant, no efforts to de condition the fear were made. Little Albert's fear was not eliminated which goes against the principles of beneficence and debriefing.