John Watson: Behaviorism

John Broadus Watson (January 9, 1878 – September 25, 1958) was an American psychologist who established the psychological school of behaviorism, after doing research on animal behavior. He also conducted the controversial "Little Albert" experiment.
He was the first student to receive a doctorate in psychology from the University of Chicago in 1903. His dissertation was on learning in rats. His dissertation "Animal Education: An Experimental Study on the Psychical Development of the White Rat, Correlated with the Growth of its Nervous System. "Animal Education" described the relationship between brain myelinization and learning ability in rats at different ages. Watson showed that the degree of myelinization was largely unrelated to learning ability. Watson stayed at the University of Chicago for several years doing research on the relationship between sensory input and learning and bird behavior.
In 1913, Watson published the article "Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It" — sometimes called "The Behaviorist Manifesto". In this article, Watson outlined the major features of his new philosophy of psychology, called "behaviorism". The first paragraph of the article concisely described Watson's behaviorist position:
Psychology as the behaviorist views it is a purely objective experimental branch of natural science. Its theoretical goal is the prediction and control of behavior. Introspection forms no essential part of its methods, nor is the scientific value of its data dependent upon the readiness with which they lend themselves to interpretation in terms of consciousness. The behaviorist, in his efforts to get a unitary scheme of animal response, recognizes no dividing line between man and brute. The behavior of man, with all of its refinement and complexity, forms only a part of the behaviorist's total scheme of investigation.

LITTLE ALBERT EXPERIMENT
The Little Albert experiment was an experiment showing empirical evidence of classical conditioning in humans. This study was also an example of stimulus generalization. It was conducted in 1920 by John B. Watson along with his assistant Rosalie Rayner. The study was done at Johns Hopkins University.
John B. Watson, after observing children in the field, was interested in finding support for his notion that the reaction of children, whenever they heard loud noises, was prompted by fear. Furthermore, he reasoned that this fear was innate or due to an unconditioned response. He felt that following the principles of classical conditioning, he could condition a child to fear another distinctive stimulus which normally would not be feared by a child.
John B. Watson and his partner, Rayner, chose Albert from a hospital for this study at the age of almost nine months. Albert's mother was a wet nurse at the Harriet Lane Home for Invalid Children. "Albert was the son of an employee of the Phipps Clinic at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where Watson and Rayner were conducting their experiments." Before the commencement of the experiment, Little Albert was given a battery of baseline emotional tests; the infant was exposed, briefly and for the first time, to a white rat, a rabbit, a dog, a monkey, masks with and without hair, cotton wool, burning newspapers, etc. During the baseline, Little Albert showed no fear toward any of these items.
EXPERIMENT:
Watson and his colleague did not begin to condition Little Albert until approximately two months later, when he was just over 11 months old. The experiment began by placing Albert on a mattress on a table in the middle of a room. A white laboratory rat was placed near Albert and he was allowed to play with it. At this point, the child showed no fear of the rat. He began to reach out to the rat as it roamed around him. In later trials, Watson and Rayner made a loud sound behind Albert's back by striking a suspended steel bar with a hammer when the baby touched the rat. Not surprisingly in these occasions, Little Albert cried and showed fear as he heard the noise. After several such pairings of the two stimuli, Albert was again presented with only the rat. Now, however, he became very distressed as the rat appeared in the room. He cried, turned away from the rat, and tried to move away. Apparently, the baby boy had associated the white rat (original neutral stimulus, now conditioned stimulus) with the loud noise (unconditioned stimulus) and was producing the fearful or emotional response of crying (originally the unconditioned response to the noise, now the conditioned response to the rat).
This experiment led to the following progression of results:
• Introduction of a loud sound (unconditioned stimulus) resulted in fear (unconditioned response), a natural response.
• Introduction of a rat (neutral stimulus) paired with the loud sound (unconditioned stimulus) resulted in fear (unconditioned response).
• Successive introductions of a rat (conditioned stimulus) resulted in fear (conditioned response). Here, learning occurs.
What was problematic about this experiment was that Little Albert seemed to generalise his response so that when Watson sent a (non-white) rabbit into the room seventeen days after the original experiment, Albert also became distressed. He showed similar reactions when presented with a furry dog, a seal-skin coat, and even when Watson appeared in front of him wearing a Santa Claus mask with white cotton balls as his beard, although Albert did not fear everything with hair.
Post experiment
Shortly after the series of experiments were performed, Albert was taken from the hospital; therefore, all testing was discontinued for a period of 31 days. Watson wanted to desensitize him to see if a conditioned stimulus could be removed, but knew from the beginning of the study that there would not be time. However, Albert left the hospital on the day these last tests were made, and no desensitizing ever took place, hence the opportunity of developing an experimental technique for removing the Conditioned Emotional Response was denied. Nothing was known of Albert's later life until Beck, Levinson & Irons (2009) reported on the results of their intensive investigation. Watson later stated that he knew the boy would depart one month before the trial ended. Had the opportunity existed, they would have tried several other methods, including:
• Constantly confronting the child with those stimuli which produced the responses, in the hope that habituation would occur.
• Try to "recondition" by feeding him candy or other food just as the animal is shown.
• Buildup "constructive" activities around the object by imitation and putting the hand through the motions of manipulation.
A study on reconditioning a child was conducted several years later by Mary Cover Jones (1924). It was one of the first studies on behavioral therapy. The child was selected to take part in the study because s/he had personality characteristics similar to those of Albert B. As author notes:
Peter was 2 years and 10 months old when we began to study him. He was afraid of a white rat, and this fear extended to a rabbit, a fur coat, a feather, cotton wool, etc., but not to wooden blocks and similar toys.
Finding Little Albert
After 90 years, the identity of "Little Albert B." appears to have been uncovered with reasonable certainty by Dr. Hall P. Beck of Appalachian State University and his colleagues. After intensive review of Watson's correspondence and publications as well as extensive research in public documents, Beck et al. (2009) propose that "Little Albert B." was a pseudonym for Douglas Merritte, the son of Arvilla Merritte, then an unmarried woman who appears to have been a wet nurse at the Harriet Lane Home. She gave birth to Douglas on March 9, 1919 at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. She was employed at the Harriet Lane Home and a resident of the Johns Hopkins campus at the time of Watson's experiment. Beck et al. (2009) determined that Watson obtained his baseline assessment of Little Albert on or around December 5, 1919 when Douglas Merritte was 8 months 26 days old, the same age reported in Watson's article (Watson & Raynor, 1920). No descriptive data beyond a probable photograph were uncovered for Douglas and, hence, there is nothing known about the enduring effects of Watson's experiment on the child. The young boy died on May 10, 1925 of hydrocephalus which he developed in 1922. He is buried in the cemetery of the Locust Grove Church of the Brethern in Mt. Airy, Maryland.