Facts about Little Albert Conditioning
- 10
Fears conditioned in Little Albert generalized to Albert's hair and his own hand, suggesting the conditioning affected not only external stimuli but also his perception of himself.
- 09
Albert's fear response to the rat persisted for at least one month after the initial conditioning without any additional stimulus pairings, demonstrating spontaneous recovery of the conditioned fear.
- 08
Watson and Rayner's study is widely cited as a foundational example of how classical conditioning principles can produce phobic responses in humans.
- 07
Eleven months after the conditioning experiment ended, Watson attempted to decondition Albert's fear response using gradualized exposure to the rabbit, achieving only partial success before the child left the hospital.
- 06
Watson's original case notes on Little Albert were lost for decades until psychologist John Burnham located them in 1992, revealing previously undocumented details about the experiment's procedures.
- 05
The Little Albert experiment has never been successfully replicated by researchers, raising questions about the robustness of Watson and Rayner's original 1920 conditioning results.
- 04
Rosalie Rayner, Watson's graduate assistant and co-experimenter, later expressed regret about the Little Albert study and advocated for ethical guidelines protecting child research subjects.
- 03
Douglas Merritte, the real identity of Little Albert, suffered lifelong developmental disabilities and died at age 6 in 1925, just five years after the conditioning experiment.
- 02
Albert's conditioned fear response generalized to other white furry objects including a rabbit, dog, and cotton wool, demonstrating stimulus generalization in classical conditioning.
- 01
In 1920, John B. Watson and Rosalie Rayner conditioned 9-month-old Albert B. to fear white rats by pairing them with loud 114-decibel clanging sounds.