Little Albert was the baby at the heart of one of psychology’s most controversial experiments – now considered “medical misogyny.” For decades nobody knew the identity of the infant, who died only six years after the study that conditioned him to fear everything furry.
In the 1890s, Russian neurologist Ivan Pavlov discovered that dogs responded to the sound of a bell, salivating as they connected the noise with food, demonstrating conditioned learning, or conditioned reflex.
The Nobel Prize winner’s discovery was so groundbreaking that it influenced the development of behaviorism, a theory that suggests “all behaviors are acquired through conditioning processes,” Verywell Mind explains.
In simple terms, “It all comes down to the patterns of learning we’ve acquired through associations, rewards, and punishments. This approach argues that it’s our environment that shapes our actions more than our thoughts and feelings.”
Baby experiment
Influenced by Pavlov’s work, John B. Watson – widely regarded as the founder of the school of behaviorism – decided that in 1920, he would test conditioned reflexes – fear reactions –on a 9-month-old human baby.
“He was healthy from birth and one of the best developed youngsters ever brought to the hospital, weighing twenty-one pounds at nine months of age,” Watson and his study partner, Rosalie Rayner, wrote of Little Albert, whose mother was a wet nurse. “He was on the whole stolid and unemotional. His stability was one of the principal reasons for using him as a subject in this test. We felt that we could do him relatively little harm by carrying out such experiments.”
Feared Santa
The pair was setting the stage for a horror show disguised as science.
At first, Albert reacted with playful curiosity to soft animals like a rabbit and the white rat.
“At no time did this infant ever show fear in any situation,” writes Watson, who was 80 when he died in 1958.“ No one had ever seen him in a state of fear and rage. The infant practically never cried.”
Then came the twist: every time Albert reached for the rat, a deafening clang – a hammer smashing against a steel pipe – screeched through the room. The baby flinched, cried, recoiled.
Over several trials, that playful reaction transformed into pure fear and the child withdrew, avoiding anything that resembled the furry creatures: a rabbit, a dog, a wool coat, even Santa Claus’s fluffy white beard.
This was Pavlovian conditioning in action – except instead of drooling dogs, the doctors had a terrified baby.
“Watson presented [the Albert study] as a proof for his theory that all our emotional responses in adulthood are offshoots of three primordial responses – fear, rage and love,” said Dr. Alan Fridlund, a social and clinical psychologist at UC Santa Barbara.
But, behind the scenes a storm was brewing.
Study gets muddy
Little Albert never gave consent – he couldn’t. He was a baby.
And Watson never told the infant’s mother how deeply distressing the tests would become. When she eventually discovered the truth, she yanked Albert out of the study and though Watson and Rayner promised to reverse the damage – to “decondition” him – they never did.
Baby’s identity revealed
For decades, no one knew the real identity of Little Albert – a name that was never recorded by Watson.
But in 2009, a determined team of psychologists set out to uncover the truth. Using facial recognition and medical archives, they concluded that Little Albert was likely Douglas Merritte, the son of a hospital wet nurse at Johns Hopkins.
What they found was heartbreaking: Douglas had died just six years after the experiment from hydrocephalus – a condition where fluid builds up in the brain.
Baby Douglas had suffered from meningitis and showed signs of developmental issues long before Watson ever plopped him in front of that white rat.
“He has a very large head, and he’s quite pudgy and short, but the head is still big for a pudgy, short infant,” Fridlund told How Stuff Works of the obvious health issues the baby was having.
Next, speaking of moments from the film that documents the experiment, the doctor continued, “The second thing was how abnormal he was in his behavior. During that entire film – on which Albert appears for roughly four minutes – you see not one social smile from Albert. Not one.”
Furthermore, he adds “Not once in the film, despite being brought an Airdale that’s scampering all over, being shown burning paper, being shown a monkey cavorting on a leash – and he has a steel bar struck with a hammer 14 times behind his back – not once does Albert turn to either Watson or Rayner to seek support. If infants perceive that the stimulus is threatening, they typically run toward a caretaker.”
Flawed foundation
Even though the science was shaky and the ethics horrifying, the Little Albert experiment left a permanent mark.
Watson’s recounting of the experiment changed over time and though details got muddier, he went on to build a career off bold claims about human behavior.
Now, however many see the Little Albert study as a flawed foundation – possibly even built on the suffering of a neurologically impaired child.
“Because Watson and Rayner tried to condition fear in an infant and made no effort to follow him after discharge and insure his well-being, the Little Albert study has always led us to consider basic issues of experimental ethics,” Dr. Fridlund said in an article published in the American Psychological Association. “But now it forces us to confront deeper, more disturbing issues like the medical misogyny, the protection of the disabled and the likelihood of scientific fraud. It’s a story all psychologists can learn from.”
Little Albert – or Douglas Merritte – wasn’t just a subject in a lab. He was a real child, one whose short life has become a painful reminder of how the pursuit of knowledge must never trump compassion.
