{"agent_id":"watson","agent_name":"John B. Watson","slug":"the-little-albert-experiment","label":"The Little Albert experiment: are the emotions built by conditioning from a few unlearned reactions?","topic":"The Little Albert experiment","question":"Are the emotions built by conditioning from a few unlearned reactions?","position":"The adult's emotional life looks like a mystery until you see how it is built. I hold that the infant is born with three unlearned emotional reactions and their exciting stimuli: fear, called out by a sudden loud sound and by loss of support; rage, by hampering of the body's movements; love, by stroking and rocking of the skin. Everything else — the man's fear of the dark, of crowds, of God, of poverty; his loves and his hatreds — is conditioned onto new objects out of this slender unlearned base, by the same mechanism that attaches any response to any stimulus. To show it, Rayner and I took an infant, Albert, who feared the loud sound and did not fear a white rat, and by striking the bar behind his head as he reached for the rat, we made him fear the rat; and the fear spread of itself to the rabbit, the dog, the fur coat, the cotton-wool — a conditioned emotional reaction, transferred and generalized before our eyes. That is the demonstration: emotions are not inexplicable visitations but conditioned reflexes with a history, and a history that can be built can in principle be unbuilt.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"The adult's emotional life looks like a mystery until you see how it is built.","n":[]},{"t":"I hold that the infant is born with three unlearned emotional reactions and their exciting stimuli: fear, called out by a sudden loud sound and by loss of support; rage, by hampering of the body's movements; love, by stroking and rocking of the skin.","n":[1,2]},{"t":"Everything else — the man's fear of the dark, of crowds, of God, of poverty; his loves and his hatreds — is conditioned onto new objects out of this slender unlearned base, by the same mechanism that attaches any response to any stimulus.","n":[]}],[{"t":"To show it, Rayner and I took an infant, Albert, who feared the loud sound and did not fear a white rat, and by striking the bar behind his head as he reached for the rat, we made him fear the rat; and the fear spread of itself to the rabbit, the dog, the fur coat, the cotton-wool — a conditioned emotional reaction, transferred and generalized before our eyes.","n":[3,4]}],[{"t":"That is the demonstration: emotions are not inexplicable visitations but conditioned reflexes with a history, and a history that can be built can in principle be unbuilt.","n":[]}]],"texts":"Behaviorism (1925, the theory of the three unlearned emotional reactions — fear, rage, love — and their conditioning into the emotional life of the adult; the account of the Albert study and its interpretation); Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist (1919, the emotional theory and the method of studying emotion objectively). Reception: the enduring status of 'Little Albert' as a landmark and a scandal in the history of psychology; the methodological critique (single subject, no control, no reliable follow-up, the confounding of the design); the ethical critique of conditioning fear into an infant; the historical detective work on Albert's identity and fate (Ben Harris); the foundation the study nonetheless laid for behavior therapy and the treatment of phobias (Mary Cover Jones's deconditioning work).","works":["Behaviorism (1925, the theory of the three unlearned emotional reactions — fear, rage, love — and their conditioning into the emotional life of the adult","the account of the Albert study and its interpretation)","Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist (1919, the emotional theory and the method of studying emotion objectively)"],"reception":"the enduring status of 'Little Albert' as a landmark and a scandal in the history of psychology; the methodological critique (single subject, no control, no reliable follow-up, the confounding of the design); the ethical critique of conditioning fear into an infant; the historical detective work on Albert's identity and fate (Ben Harris); the foundation the study nonetheless laid for behavior therapy and the treatment of phobias (Mary Cover Jones's deconditioning work).","status":"One of the most cited and most criticized studies in the history of psychology. As a demonstration it was foundational — it made the conditioning of emotion concrete and pointed directly toward behavior therapy, and Mary Cover Jones's subsequent deconditioning of a child's fear was its constructive complement. As science it is now heavily faulted: a single subject, no proper control, an absence of the promised reconditioning, inconsistencies in Watson's own reports of Albert's responses, and the loss of the child to follow-up. As ethics it is a standard example of what research on a helpless subject must not do. Historians pursued Albert's identity and fate for decades (Ben Harris's \"Whatever Happened to Little Albert?\" the classic reassessment). The study endures as both a genuine landmark in the science of emotion and a permanent cautionary tale.","era":"1878-1958","discipline":"Psychology","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Behaviorism","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"Rage and love at first are not produced by the mere sight of an object. We know that later on in life the mere sight of persons may call out both of these primi- tive emotions. How do such \"attachments\" grow up? How can objects which at first do not call out emotions come later to call them out and thus greatly increase the richness as well as the dangers of our emotional life?","label":"Behaviorism"},{"n":2,"work":"The Ways of Behaviorism","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"Rage and love at first are not produced by the mere sight of an object. We know that later on in life the mere sight of persons may call out both of these primi- tive emotions. How do such \"attachments\" grow up? How can objects which at first do not call out emotions come later to call them out and thus greatly increase the richness as well as the dangers of our emotional life?","label":"The Ways of Behaviorism"},{"n":3,"work":"Behaviorism","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"They are certainly not the complicated kinds of emotional reactions we see later on in life but at least I believe they form the nucleus out of which ali future emotional reactions arise. So quickly do they become condi- tioned as we shall show later, that it gives a wrong impression to call them hereditary modes of response.","label":"Behaviorism"},{"n":4,"work":"The Ways of Behaviorism","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"They are certainly not the complicated kinds of emotional reactions we see later on in life but at least I believe they form the nucleus out of which all future emotional reactions arise. So quickly do they become condi- ' tioned as we shall show later, that it gives a wrong impression to call them hereditary modes of response.","label":"The Ways of Behaviorism"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"radical-behaviorism","label":"Radical behaviorism: should psychology throw out consciousness and study only behavior?"},{"slug":"radical-environmentalism","label":"Radical environmentalism: are talent and character built by conditioning rather than inherited?"},{"slug":"behaviorist-childrearing","label":"Behaviorist childrearing: should children be conditioned into good habits and spared affection?"},{"slug":"thinking-as-subvocal-behavior","label":"Thinking as subvocal behavior: is thought talking to oneself rather than a stream of inner images?"}]}