Was the treatment of little albert justified in J. Watsons 1920s experiment?
This is an unanswerable question: you can justify either answer The issues with this is right to withdraw (Albert was scared which signifies a wish to withdraw) was not given, and Albert was harmed (suffered distress, possible lasting harm/phobia). Consent was also not fully sought, although this was in part an artefact of the time, when guidelines were more lax and consent less frequently required. However, Albert’s fears were not intense (textbooks exagerate them to magnify the importance of the study. In reality, the original results with Albert were inconclusive.) The evidence that Albert developed a phobia at all is uncertain. It is also a fact Watson intended to “cure” Little Albert, but he was withdrawn from the experiment – so follow up treatment was offered (as required by ethical guidelines). The importance of the study at the time was immense – we take behavoirism for granted now, but at the time it was very controversial that conditioning could occur in “rational” humans. I
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. 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 and his colleagues had planned to attempt to desensitize Albert and eliminate these fearful reactions (pair the white rat with warm milk which babies love). 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
