PSYC 1100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 17: Rosalie Rayner, Little Albert Experiment, Operant Conditioning
22 Oct 2018
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Little albert experiment: john watson and rosalie rayner. Experiment: trying to find out if you could teach fear. When the baby was 9 months old, played normally. At 11 months old, watson could make albert afraid of normal things (stuffed animals) by pairing them with uncomfortable stimulus. Next phase: paired loud sound with presence of neutral stimuli (toy or animal), baby would cry at sound of noise. Now the baby was scared of the animals that was shown originally that didn"t bother him. Eventually the baby generalized his fear to all furry items. Watson stated that he could train any baby to become anything (lawyer, doctor or beggar), we aren"t born one way, everything is learned. Very egalitarian b/c everyone can become anything. Generalization: conditioned response is observed even if stimulus is slightly different than item they were trained on. Albert was taught to be scared of the rat and the dog but eventually became afraid of all fuzzy things.
