The "Little Albert" experiment was a famous psychology experiment conducted by behaviorist John B. Watson and graduate student Rosalie Raynor. Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov had previously conducted experiments demonstrating the conditioning process in dogs. Watson was interested in taking Pavlov's research further to show that emotional reactions could be classically conditioned in people.
The participant in the experiment was a child that Watson and Raynor called "Albert B.", but is known popularly today as Little Albert. Around the age of nine months, Watson and Raynor exposed the child to a series of stimuli including a white rat, a rabbit, a monkey, masks and burning newspapers and observed the boy's reactions. Initially the boy was unafraid of these objects. After repeatedly pairing a white rat with a loud clanging noise, he began to cry in response to the rat. Learn more about the experiment and discover what happened to the child in the study in this overview of the Little Albert experiment.
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