The baby that John Watson experimented on in the 1920s.
Is there any documentation of what happened to him later in life?
I thought once that Watson was unable to find Albert after he was later adopted.
I’ve never heard of this – what was the experiment?
Ahh, I guess that means he had a name change as well? Does this mean that NOBODY bothered to track the poor soul that was practically tortured in the name of science*?
*That’s not to put down science but this was a pretty unethical experiment IMHO.
AFAIK, Albert has never been tracked down. Thomas Pynchon used that concept in Gravity’s Rainbow – “Baby Tyrone” in the book was part of a similar experiment and his grown-up identity was never known (though, of course, the novel reveals it).
Ahh yes…the exemplar of undergraduate psych program’s experiment gone bad…Actually, Dr. Watson’s experiment’s were chock full of holes, and they were usually used as examples of what not to do, than anything else. Especially, when the APA changed it’s protocols for experimenting on Human subjects.
But for a good read and dissection of what ever happened to Little Albert, see here .
He went on to invent an item of body-piercing jewelry.
I think it’s safe to assume he’s not working at Petsmart.
God. So this poor baby was probaby given lifelong phobias and who knows what other psychological problems, in the name of scientific curiosity? That’s seriously messed up.
Was Albert B. an American? If so, with Albert’s date of birth (probably contained in Watson and Raynor’s original papers), it would not be hard for a genealogist to narrow him down to a handful of possible people.
I appologize, I linked to an article but gave no indication of where he actually landed, essentially because we do not know for certain. However, the article is one of the most widely accepted theories on Watson’s whole battery of testing on little Albert. It has been postulated that his parents changed his name, as he needed to be institutionalized for quite some time, but in the end, the experiments had little lasting developmental effect on the child. Then again we truly do not know. But that is what I tell my students.
You really think so? I doubt any of his child hood fears transfered to anything past animals. He probably ended up disliking animals, and understood them better when he became a teen. I really don’t think what he experienced was all that bad, children have gone through much, much worse. The experiments were of a short duration. Sometimes you gotta take of for the team.
Or do you think maybe he was this guy? :eek: :rolleyes:
Huh?? Did you read the whole link? These experiments obviously caused the child extreme distress. How do you tell a baby in fear that it’s “not that bad?”
“Take one for the team”? What team? These experiments weren’t done to research anything important - it was idle curiosity on the part of the scientists.
Put yourself or your own child in that situation and try to imagine what you’d/they’d be feeling.
There’s a real ethical problem with purposely scaring a one-year old child, over and over again. It’s not enough to say that some children endure worse in daily life. After all, children fall and break their bones fairly often, but that wouldn’t justify giving a kid several minor sprains for the sake of experiment.
And there are other problems with this. They taught him to fear harmless things he could easily encounter at home and shouldn’t be afraid of, such as pets, fur coats, and even people’s hair. That’s a pretty serious social maladjustment, and there was no reason it had to be that way; they could just as easily have taught him to fear guns or pill bottles. And they made no attempt to “deprogram” him afterward. Their excuse that he had to leave the hospital before they got the chance is dodging responsibility—they planned the experiment in the first place and should have made sure there would be enough time to finish it.
Was it? From the Harris article: