In this video, we're going to be going over one of the most famous experiments in all of psychology, the Little Albert experiment. So this was done by John Watson and his student Rosalie Rayner, and they essentially wanted to know if classical conditioning could explain behavior in humans. Up until this point, all research on classical conditioning had been done in animal samples. In 1920, they conducted the Little Albert experiment which had one participant, a 10-year-old boy named Albert, and they were specifically trying to see if fear could be classically conditioned. So, we're going to go through this experiment in the same way that we did with Pavlov's.
So we'll talk about the before conditioning phase, the acquisition phase, and then the after conditioning phase. Before conditioning, we had our unconditioned stimulus, which was essentially just a loud noise. They would strike a piece of steel using a hammer and it would make a very loud noise, and that stimulus would elicit the unconditioned response of fear in Albert. So whenever he heard that noise, he would get startled and he would cry. Young babies get startled by loud noises very easily, and they find them very unpleasant.
And their neutral stimulus was a white rat, to which Albert essentially had no response at this time. He was not afraid of it. So during the acquisition trials, they would pair their unconditioned stimulus with their neutral stimulus. They would present the rat and then immediately make this very loud noise, and we would see that unconditioned response in Albert. At this stage, he's still crying in response to the noise, so this fear response is still in response to the hammer striking the steel until, you know, we have enough learning trials.
In our after conditioning phase, our rat, our previously neutral stimulus, has become a conditioned stimulus, and the rat by itself could scare Albert and make him cry. So he is now showing a conditioned response. Right? Because remember, the neutral stimulus becomes the conditioned stimulus and the unconditioned response becomes the conditioned response. So that was the procedure of the experiment.
Now using this experimental design, they examined a few more things. First, they wanted to know, could this fear be transferred or generalized? And what they found was yes. The fear actually did generalize. So Albert showed a fear response when presented with a fluffy white bunny, a white fur coat, and even the beard of a Santa costume.
The fear did generalize. It was not specific to the white rat. Researchers also wanted to know, would the conditioned fear change over time? And it seemed like yes. They observed that Albert's fear actually began decreasing in the days and weeks between trials.
It is worth noting that this is obviously a very artificially induced fear and that may be why we saw this decreasing response. If this had happened more organically where, for example, a rat attacked Albert, he might have only needed that one instance to have a pretty strongly sustained fear response. So this could be happening due to the artificial nature of the experiment. But regardless, the reason that we're still talking about this experiment a hundred years later is because it really was the first experiment to show that classical conditioning can explain emotions and complex behavior in humans, and modern research has, of course, verified this. We know that classical conditioning does work on people.
Before we conclude, I do want to address one thing, and that is the ethical considerations of this study. This study could not be done today. Of course, all studies go through the Institutional Review Board (IRB) nowadays, and the IRB is very concerned with the safety, both physical safety and emotional safety, of participants. So we would not conduct an experiment like this today. But, obviously, in 1920, John Watson did not have to go through the IRB.
But we can take comfort in knowing that Albert was probably okay. As we discussed, his fear was already beginning to dissipate just in the days and weeks between trials. And so, odds are, weeks and months after the experiment had ended, he was probably perfectly fine. Like we said, this was a very artificially induced situation and he would have no continued reason to be afraid of adorable white rats or fluffy bunnies.
Alright, guys. So that is the Little Albert experiment, and I will see you in the next one. Bye bye.
