The “Little Albert” Experiment was conducted by John B. Watson and Rosalie Raynor. Watson was interested in showing that emotional reactions could be classically conditioned or learned in people. He based his research off of Pavlov’s research with dogs. The participant in the experiment was “Albert B”, as Watson called him, but became known as Little Albert. Around 8 months, Little Albert was placed in a room and an experimenter stood behind him and made a loud noise by striking a hammer on a steel bar. He began to cry after hearing the sound a few times. At the age of 9 months, Watson and his counterpart, Rosalie Raynor, exposed Albert to a series of stimuli including a white rat, a rabbit, a monkey, masks, and burning newspapers and observed the boy’s reactions. He initially showed no fear of any of the objects.
The next time Albert was exposed to the rat, Watson made a loud noise by striking the hammer on the steel bar. Naturally the child began to cry after hearing the loud noise. After repeatedly pairing the rat with the loud noise Albert began to cry by just simply seeing the rat. They also observed that stimulus generalization had occurred. Albert feared not just the white rat, but also a wide variety of similar white objects and furry objects. In this experiment the neutral stimulus was the white rat, the unconditioned stimulus was the loud noise, the unconditioned response was fear, the conditioned stimulus was the white rat, and the conditioned response was fear. This experiment presents an example of how classical conditioning can be used to condition emotional responses in humans. Little Albert was not originally scared of the white rat, but when it was paired with something that did scare him such as the loud noise, he associated the loud noise with the rat and feared the rat. He was conditioned to fear the rat. This experiment had several