"Little Albert."

Alright. Let's talk about "Little Albert." Shall we?

I'm not very good at describing things. But let me do my best to summarize the experiment. First of all, there was a man named Pavlov who discovered that, if he rang a bell before serving meat to dogs, eventually the dogs would associate the sound of the bell with being fed. And they would start to drool at just the sound of the bell. A scientist by the name of John B. Watson wanted to test this theory on humans. Watson and his graduate student, Rosalie Raynor, used a little boy for their study on human conditioning in 1920.

They wanted to see if they could make this little boy, who they called "Albert B.," afraid of white rats. At first they put the white rats and other animals like rabbits, dogs, a monkey, and other items in front of the little boy. And the child had no problem with them, he showed no fear. Then Watson started to make a loud noise whenever the little boy started to reach for the rat. And the noise startled the little boy. After this was repeated enough, the little boy associated the noise with the rat and became really scared of the rats. And of other animals that resembled them, including the white rabbits and a Santa Claus mask. They absolutely traumatized this little child.

The little boy and the mom moved away shortly after this. And there were a lot of stories spreading around about what happened to "Little Albert." One story says that he became addicted to drugs and that he grew up to still be scared of animals. But the main story is that they found out that the boy's name was Douglas and that he had died at six. And that he had actually been very sick since birth.

+ An article about the experiment.

This whole story honestly makes me cry and it makes me really upset. The fact that they would think it is okay to put a small child through all of that. The fact that they would put anybody through that. It makes me feel sick. I'm glad that they have laws to protect something like this from happening again, but I wish somebody had been there to protect this little boy from the trauma.

And I wanted to hear what you guys have to say. What do you think about the "Little Albert" experiment?