Little Albert Experiment Analysis

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Summary In 1920, a famous psychology experiment was conducted by founder of behaviorism John B. Watson and his graduate student Rosalie Raynor. They called it, “Little Albert”. The study was performed at Johns Hopkins University based previously off of Ivan Pavlov’s experiment demonstrating the conditioning process in dogs. The main reason why Watson directed this test was to prove that emotional reactions could be classically conditioned in people. Design This experiment was designed around a little boy named Albert B, but is however known popularly today as Little Albert. When Albert was around nine months, Watson and Rayner exposed this child to certain objects known as neutral stimuli. These include a white rat, a rabbit, a monkey, masks and burning newspapers. When albert’s reactions were initially observed, he showed didn’t show any fear to the objects that were shown and playfully reacted to some. When Albert was exposed to the rat a second time, Watson associated a large bang with a hammer (which scared kids). The boy was a little startled at first but didn’t react that severely. The next few times, the baby quickly grasped that the white rabbit caused a loud bang which automatically made it scary because loud sounds are frightening to babies. So naturally, the child began to cry, and after many such trials he began to cry just at the sight of the rat. Conclusions Watson and Raynor wrote, “The instant the rat was shown, the baby began to cry. Almost instantly he turned sharply to the left, fell over on [his] left side, raised himself on all fours and began to crawl away so rapidly that he was caught with difficulty before reaching the edge of the table.” They observed that the neutral stimulus was the white rat because the baby was normal to it at first, the unconditioned stimulus as the loud noise because the baby didn’t expect this coming, the
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