The Little Albert Experiment
● Conducted by behaviourist John B Watson and graduate
student Rosalie Rayner.
● Previously Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov had conducted
experiments demonstrating the conditioning process in dogs.
● Watson was interested in taking Pavlov’s research further to
show that emotional reactions could be classically conditioned
in people.
● Watson was a radical positivist, he thought that human
behaviour should be studied exclusively based on the
behaviours that were already learned. Genetic unconscious or
instinct developments made no sense to him.
● Watson was a researcher at John Hopkins University in
Baltimore.
● He began with the idea that most if not all human behaviour
could be explained by the person’s learning history based on
conditioning. Due to this, he thought it was a good idea to
prove that Pavlov’s conclusions could be applied to human
beings as well.
● He went into an orphanage along with Rosalie Rayner, they
then picked an eight month old baby, the son of one of the
nurses from the orphanage. He was very neglected and lived in
a very cold environment.
● The baby seemed excessively calm though the people said the
baby barely cried ever since he was born.
● This was the beginning of the Little Albert Experiment.
● In the first phase of the experiment, they showed Albert
different stimuli. The goal was to observe which one of them
scared him.
● They noticed he would feel frightened only when hearing loud
sounds which is common in babies.
● Conducted by behaviourist John B Watson and graduate
student Rosalie Rayner.
● Previously Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov had conducted
experiments demonstrating the conditioning process in dogs.
● Watson was interested in taking Pavlov’s research further to
show that emotional reactions could be classically conditioned
in people.
● Watson was a radical positivist, he thought that human
behaviour should be studied exclusively based on the
behaviours that were already learned. Genetic unconscious or
instinct developments made no sense to him.
● Watson was a researcher at John Hopkins University in
Baltimore.
● He began with the idea that most if not all human behaviour
could be explained by the person’s learning history based on
conditioning. Due to this, he thought it was a good idea to
prove that Pavlov’s conclusions could be applied to human
beings as well.
● He went into an orphanage along with Rosalie Rayner, they
then picked an eight month old baby, the son of one of the
nurses from the orphanage. He was very neglected and lived in
a very cold environment.
● The baby seemed excessively calm though the people said the
baby barely cried ever since he was born.
● This was the beginning of the Little Albert Experiment.
● In the first phase of the experiment, they showed Albert
different stimuli. The goal was to observe which one of them
scared him.
● They noticed he would feel frightened only when hearing loud
sounds which is common in babies.
