Just about any serious psychologist and psychologist in training can recall the story of John Watson and his experiment of classical conditioning on Little Albert. Though this experiment is excellent in demonstrating the fundamental terms of classical conditioning, further consideration on the possible lasting effects on the test subject have deemed the experiment unethical.
In the experiment, Little Albert is given time to play with a white lab rat. The white lab rat is shown to be a neutral stimulus because Little Albert does not present any anxiety towards the rat before the experiment. After some time, Watson creates a loud noise by striking metal with a hammer, causing the child to become frightened and cry. This demonstrates the use of an unconditioned stimulus, the loud noise, provoking the unconditioned response of frightening Little Albert. Watson repeats the process of introducing the neutral stimulus, creating the unconditioned stimulus, and causing the unconditioned response, several times in order for Little Albert to associate the unconditioned stimulus with the neutral stimulus.
After several repeats of the procedure, Watson was able to evoke fear and crying in Little Albert by simply showing him the white lab rat. By this time, the lab rat has transformed from the neutral stimulus to the conditioned stimulus. The conditioned stimulus provokes the conditioned response of fear and crying.
The class text leaves it a mystery as to how Little Albert was affected, and some online research provides some unsatisfying and unfortunate results. An article by author T. DeAngelis (2010) on the APA website describes that Little Albert was identified as Douglas Merritte (DeAngelis, 10). It seems that no psychologist will ever know the lasting effects of Watson’s experiment because he passed away of encephalitis at age 6 (DeAngelis, 10). This definitely does not justify the lasting effects that could have possibly haunted Little Albert, because Watson never deconditioned Albert to stop fearing lab rats. The fear of lab rats may not be identified as such a bad fear, but if Little Albert underwent stimulus generalization, his fear of lab rats may have generalized towards a variety of small or white/furry objects. The potential for this experiment to have caused lasting harm to the participant makes deems this experiment unethical.
One reasonably irrational fear that I had growing up was of needles. Perhaps I had bad nurses who painfully gave me shots when I was younger, but growing up, I was very anxious every time I had to go to the doctor. Initially, needles may have been a neutral stimuli, but because of the pain that is associated with some injections, I was conditioned to feel anxiety towards getting immunizations. This generalized towards getting blood drawn (almost the same thing, but with a bigger needle). Since then, I have counter-conditioned myself over time, not so much to associated positive feelings with immunizations, but the realization that they don’t really hurt that much has allowed me to not really fear them anymore.
Source:
Doyle-Portillo, S. & Pastorino, E. (2011). What is Psychology?: 3E. Belmont: Wadsworth.
Re:
You post was very comprehensive and with a very good discussion regarding the ethical considerations surrounding the case study of Little Albert. Can you tell me the particular ethical guideline that was not followed in this case?
Your APA resource that you include is very good and adds to both the material given in the book and the videos provided for this week. You did not specifically refer to the video shown on Little Albert? Did you use any of the information from this video in your response?
Re:
I actually can't remember if I had watched the Little Albert video at that point or not, but I remember concentrating on information that I had previously read from the class text in order to create the post.
As for the ethics, I did some research and found this website that described the "APA Ethical Guidelines for Research with Human Subjects" (Website below). The 7th point states that "research procedures likely to cause serious or lasting harm to a participant are not used unless" and lists a few reasons and conditions in which lasting harm in research is considered acceptable. Some conditions include voluntary and informed consent and avoidance of even worse possible consequences. For the most part, though, any experiments that involve the possibility of lasting harm to a subject is not recommended and should be avoided.
Source:
http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~raulin/apaethic.html