"Little Albert." - Comments

I've been studying this recently in Psych too actually. And it was horrible. But they did a lot of horrible things during that time period. That's not an excuse for what they did to that poor baby, but it did happen. Let's not forget about the other guy (can't remember his name) who wanted to prove that he could create personalities of every walk of life just by conditioning children. And how he wanted to collect a bunch of kids just so he could prove that he could turn them into artists, doctors, and on the flip side, thieves and murderers. Luckily, people didn't let him enact his experiment. I can't imagine what those kids would have had to go through in order for him to "prove" that he could create personalities.

We learned this just last week in my Psych lecture, it was under the whole Classical Conditioning unit. It was to test if they could induce a fear in someone, and just how far that fear would go. It first started with the white rat, then soon moved on to a white rabbit, then a normal rabbit was fearsome after having reminded the child of the white rabbit. That whole process is called Generalization I believe, fearing the color items as well as things that resemble them.

What's upsetting is the fact that his own mother had no idea what was going on. When she found out, she was furious. From what I read, she was only paid a dollar for her son's contribution (for lack of a better word.) Also yes, he had a heart defect at birth, so those experimentations likely didn't help with that.

These men were very clever, but yes what they did and how they went about it was absolutely unethical. It makes me wonder if these men knew about his condition before beginning experimentation. Even if the did, would they have continued anyway? Hmn. It's a highly controversial experiment. Amazing in my opinion, yet wrong.

We actually learned about that in Psychology not too long ago. He never told us what happened to the boy, though. :/