Little Albert Experiment

In 1920, a controversial experiment shocked the world by showing how fear can be learned. This experiment, now famously known as the Little Albert experiment, helped shape what we know about phobias today.

Meet little Albert:

Albert was a 9-month-old infant who unknowingly became part of a groundbreaking experiment at Johns Hopkins University. This experiment was conducted by John B. Watson and Rosalie Rayner to demonstrate that emotional responses could be conditioned in humans.

Setup

At first, Albert was introduced to a variety of objects such as a white rat, a rabbit, a monkey. He was curious but showed no signs of fear. The white rat in particular fascinated him. However, he did react fearfully when a hammer was struck against a steel bar, producing a loud, frightening sound behind his head.

Later, the researchers paired the white rat (which Albert initially liked) with the same loud sound. Every time Albert reached out to touch the rat, the steel bar was struck behind his head. The sudden noise startled him and made him cry. This pairing was repeated several times.

What happened?

Eventually, just seeing the rat—without the noise—was enough to make Albert cry, tremble, and try to crawl away. He had learned to fear the once-innocent white rat.

How did this happen?

Classical conditioning is a type of learning in which a neutral stimulus becomes associated with a meaningful stimulus and begins to trigger a similar response.

Over time, Albert began reacting fearfully to similar objects: a white rabbit and a fur coat. 

This is called fear generalization.

Fear generalization occurs when a person (or animal) begins to feel fear not only toward the original feared stimulus but also toward things that are similar to it, even if those things were never directly associated with any threat. It's a natural extension of classical conditioning, where the conditioned response (like fear) spreads to other stimuli that resemble the original trigger.

The Little Albert experiment was one of the first to show that fear can be learned through classical conditioning. It laid the foundation for understanding:

• How irrational fears and phobias can develop
• Why avoidance maintains fear
• That we may not be born afraid of things, we often learn to fear them

But it raised ethical concerns regarding the treatment of subjects in psychological research because:

• Albert’s fear was never unlearned
• He was too young to consent, and his mother was likely unaware of the long-term impact

Today, this experiment would not be allowed under modern ethical guidelines in psychology.

Fear is a survival tool but sometimes, it’s also a lesson we didn’t mean to learn. The Little Albert experiment reminds us that even the strongest fears might have started small, and that with understanding, we can start to unlearn them too.