Off The Record
The Heartbreaking Fate Of ‘Little Albert’: Child Subject Of Historic Study Died At Just Six
The infant at the center of one of psychology’s most contentious experiments—now referred to as “medical misogyny”—was little Albert. The baby, who passed away just six years after the study that made him fear everything hairy, was unknown for decades.
Ivan Pavlov, a Russian neurologist, found in the 1890s that dogs exhibited conditioned learning, also known as conditioned reflex, when they responded to the ring of a bell by drooling as they associated the sound with food.
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
John B. Watson, who is considered the creator of behaviorism, was influenced by Pavlov’s work and made the decision to test conditioned reflexes, or fear reactions, on a 9-month-old human infant in 1920.
“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 two were preparing for a science-disguised horror performance.
Initially, Albert responded to soft animals like the white rat and a rabbit with playful interest.
“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.”
The twist was that every time Albert reached for the rat, the room was filled with the sound of a hammer crashing on a steel pipe. The infant recoiled, wailed, and flinched.
After a few trials, the child’s lighthearted response turned into sheer terror, and he or she retreated from anything that looked like the furry animals, including Santa Claus’ fluffy white beard, a dog, a rabbit, or a wool coat.
This was an example of Pavlovian conditioning, but the doctors had a scared newborn instead of drooling dogs.
“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.
Behind the scenes, however, a tempest was building.
Study gets muddy
Little Albert was unable to give his consent. He was a newborn.
Furthermore, Watson kept the mother of the baby in the dark about how upsetting the testing would be. She snatched Albert out of the study when she finally realized the truth, and despite Watson and Rayner’s vows to undo the harm and “decondition” him, they never did.
Baby’s identity revealed
Little Albert’s true identity was unknown for decades since Watson never wrote down his name.
However, a resolute group of psychologists set out to find the truth in 2009. They came to the conclusion that Little Albert was most likely Douglas Merritte, the son of a Johns Hopkins hospital wet nurse, using facial recognition and medical records.
They discovered the tragic news that Douglas had passed away from hydrocephalus, a disorder in which fluid accumulates in the brain, six years after the experiment.
Long before Watson had placed him in front of the white rat, baby Douglas had been afflicted with meningitis and had symptoms of developmental problems.
“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
The Little Albert experiment made a lasting impression despite the dubious science and appalling ethics.
As time went on, Watson’s description of the experiment became less clear, but he continued to base his career on his audacious assertions about human nature.
However, a lot of people now believe that the Little Albert research was based on a faulty foundation, perhaps even on the suffering of a child with a neurological impairment.
“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.”
Douglas Merritte, often known as Little Albert, was more than a scientific experiment. He was a genuine child, and his brief life has served as a heartbreaking reminder that compassion must always come before knowledge.
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