THE ROUGH GUIDE TO PSYCHOLOGYof our own infancy. Despite these obstacles, we do have some inkling.
Because the lenses of babies’ eyes are undimmed by age and their
brains haven’t yet learned to filter out unwanted sounds, the world
will seem both blindingly bright and very noisy. There’s also evidence
The truth about Little Albert
Little Albert is probably the most famous case study in child psychology.
Aged eleven months, he was the subject of a series of experiments
initially reported by the pioneering behaviourist John Watson (see
p.14) and his wife Rosalie Rayner in 1920. The pair conditioned Albert
to fear a white rat by repeatedly showing him the rat and simultane-
ously banging a steel bar and claw hammer together behind his head.
Needless to say, this kind of experiment would never receive ethical
approval today! Albert had previously been unafraid of the rat, but
after Watson and Rayner’s intervention, he cried whenever the rat was
placed near to him. Watson and Rayner also tested Albert’s reaction to
other animals and objects to see how much his fear would generalize
to things resembling a white rat. Their findings are often misreported- for example, some accounts have stated that Albert subsequently
feared all furry animals. The historical record isn’t helped by the fact
that Watson and Rayner wrote several different versions of their experi-
ments and never published the research in a peer-reviewed academic
journal. What’s clear from their writings is that the results were
rather messy. For example, in a later stage of their experiments, the
researchers used the metal bar to condition Albert to fear not only the
rat, but also a rabbit and a dog. Yet later that same day Albert barely
reacted when presented with these animals in another room. Another
myth that often finds its way into reports of these experiments is the
claim that Albert’s mother took him away from Watson and Rayner
before they could employ “desensitization” procedures to remove his
recently acquired fears. In fact, the 1920 report of this work makes it
clear that the psychologists were told well in advance when Albert
would no longer be available.
There’s a sad coda to this story. In 2009, the psychologist Hall Beck
of Appalachian University reported the results of his efforts to find out
what happened to poor Little Albert in the years after he was experi-
mented on. Beck trawled Watson’s personal and professional writings,
as well as census data and other official archives, and even recruited
the help of an FBI forensics expert. In the end Beck concluded that
Little Albert was most likely a boy called Douglas Merritte, the son of
Arvilla Merritte, a campus wet-nurse, who it is believed disposed of
her maiden name, Irons, to hide the fact that her baby was illegitimate.
According to Arvilla Iron’s descendents, Douglas died aged just six,
after developing fluid on the brain.