A Cup of Psych Tea

Imagine being conditioned into fearing white fluffy things by associating a white rat with loud clanging noises, and having that phobic reaction get generalized to anything from a white rabbit to cotton wool, and even to Santa.

If you study psychology, it’s very likely that you’ve come across the Little Albert study by John Watson and Rosalie Rayner in 1920 when learning about operant conditioning. Most would be familiar with how they unethically involved a toddler in researching the behavioural approach of acquiring phobias. 

At 11 months old, Little Albert was exposed to a white rat (the neutral stimulus) and a loud noise (an unconditioned stimulus) would occur when he came into contact with it, leading to him crying (an unconditioned response). After multiple acquisition trials, the white rat or anything similar becomes associated with the terrifying loud noise, making it a conditioned stimulus that elicits a conditioned response – crying. The researchers were not able to decondition the phobia due to unforeseen circumstances, leaving Little Albert to live with such a phobia till his death at six-years-old. After putting the toddler through emotional damaging conditions, they came to the conclusion that phobias can in fact be a consequence of conditioning, but at what cost? 

What your lecturers may not have let you know is a little piece of drama that followed the study’s publication. At the start of 1920 when the study was published, John Hopkins University gave Watson a wage raise to retain his talents, all was well for him, but by the end of the year it was also John Hopkins that dismissed Watson. Prior to Little Albert, Watson was married to Mary Ickes since 1901. At the ripe age of 42, Watson cheated on Mary with the 22-year-old Rayner. Their affair created so much uproar that their love letters were on the pages of the news, and Watson and Ickes’ divorce was on the front page of the newspapers, leading to John Hopkins firing Watson for public indiscretion, the same celebrity they paid so much to make stay. It was so bad that Watson could not find a job in academia again and switched to advertising in New York. Rayner also left the university and they got married by the end of 1920. 

A question on many people’s mind is ‘was a mere divorce really the cause of Watson’s demise in academia’? Well…there have been rumours that there was another reason why John Hopkins was so desperate to get rid of Watson (spoiler: this rumour has been debunked and I’m just including this because it’s spicy 🌶️). The rumour was that Watson and Rayner were also working on a different study – physiological sex research. It was publicized by James McConnell that the two were conducting research by measuring their own physiological responses during sex, saying ‘Watson wanted to know what kinds of biological changes occurred in humans during the stress of intercourse, and he (Watson) tackled the issue directly, by connecting his own body (and that of his female partner) to various scientific instruments while they made love’. But again, the theory was definitively debunked later in 2007. 

So I suppose the famous Little Albert study was entirely unethical in more ways than one.