Transcript: The Little Albert Experiment: Two Teams Found Two Different Boys
Every line of episode 2 as narrated, with the time it starts. Back to the episode page.
Little Albert may have died at six.
Or lived until 2007.
He's the baby from psych class, the one taught to fear a white rat.
Two scientists wrote him up in 1920, as Albert B.
Their paper ends the day he left the hospital.
For almost ninety years, not a single fact about him was verified.
Then two teams went looking for him.
Each team found a boy. They found different boys.
And the paper says the fear they gave him had weakened within ten days.
So let's start with the paper, in the authors' own words.
He was raised almost from birth inside a hospital.
His mother was a wet nurse at the Harriet Lane Home, part of Johns Hopkins.
Her job is the clue both search teams would later trace.
The paper has two authors, John B.
Watson and his graduate student, Rosalie Rayner.
They called the baby healthy, and on the whole, stolid and unemotional.
That calm was the point. They wrote that they could do him relatively little harm.
They admit to considerable hesitation at first.
Then they went ahead, telling themselves such fears would arise anyway, once he left the nursery.
No ethics code stopped them.
The American Psychological Association didn't have one until 1953.
First they tested what scared him.
They showed him a white rat, a rabbit, a dog and a monkey.
He was curious, not afraid.
The paper says that at no time did this infant ever show fear.
Then they found one thing that did.
Someone struck a hammer on a steel bar, four feet long.
It was the first time anything in the lab had made him cry.
He was eight months old. And that noise became their tool.
They waited until he was eleven months old.
That was the winter of 1919 into 1920.
The paper never gives a date.
A white rat was taken from a basket and held out to him.
He reached for it.
Just as his hand touched it, the bar was struck behind his head.
He jumped and fell forward into the mattress.
He did not cry.
The second time, he began to whimper.
Then they stopped for a week, the paper says, so as not to disturb the child too seriously.
After that, five more times. The rat, then the bar.
At the end they showed him the rat alone.
He cried at once and crawled away.
They caught him just before the edge of the table.
They called it as convincing a case of a completely conditioned fear response as could have been theoretically pictured.
Seven pairings, over two sessions.
That's the famous result.
The next pages test whether the fear spread.
Some textbooks have said everything it spread to was white and fluffy.
Five days later, they brought him back.
The rat still made him pull away.
But between tests, he played with his blocks as usual.
So the fear hadn't spread to the room or the toys.
The paper says so itself.
A rabbit made him cry. A dog, less.
A sealskin coat made him cry and try to crawl away.
Cotton wool, less so.
Then a Santa Claus mask. The paper calls his reaction pronouncedly negative.
Watson even put his own head down, to see if the baby would play with his hair.
Albert would not. Two other observers did the same, and he played with their hair right away.
Ten days after the pairings, his reaction to the rat was much less marked.
So they struck the bar again, to freshen up the reaction.
They also struck the bar while showing him the rabbit and the dog.
It was the first time those two had been paired with the noise.
They moved him to a bigger lecture room.
There, his fear of the rat was slight at first, so they paired it with the noise again.
But the dog, which had been quiet, barked three times, about six inches from his face.
He fell over and wailed until the dog was taken out.
The paper adds, with an exclamation mark, that the adults in the room were frightened too.
Its conclusion: emotional transfers do take place.
Then came a month with no emotional tests.
When they came back, he still reacted to the mask, the coat, the rat, the rabbit and the dog.
But with what the authors call a certain loss in the intensity.
When the rat crawled toward him, he sat very still and watched it.
It touched his hand. He pulled the hand back.
He did not cry.
And he kept sucking his thumb.
Watson was also making a film of the baby studies.
While the film was being made, they had to take the thumb out of his mouth again and again before the fear would show.
Still, the authors wrote that fears like his persist and modify personality throughout life.
Later in the same paper, they call that view possibly not very well grounded.
They never got to test it.
Albert was taken from the hospital the day of those last tests.
He was 12 months and 21 days old.
So they never tried to remove the fear.
That chance, the paper says, was denied us.
Then the paper ends with a joke.
Twenty years from now, they wrote, some Freudian would analyze Albert's fear of a sealskin coat.
Assuming, they added, that he comes to analysis at that age.
Twenty years from then was about 1940.
Hold on to that date.
Watson's affair with Rayner led to a public divorce trial and his dismissal from Hopkins.
Little Albert was the last published research of his academic career.
In 1922, two years after the paper, a newspaper carried Watson's claim that conditioning like Albert's leads to lifelong problems.
The historian Ben Harris reproduced that page.
He knows how the story grows, because as a new lecturer in the late 1970s, he told it wrong himself.
His class textbook had Albert conditioned to a white rabbit, with the fear spreading to a rat.
I had spent the previous semester fibbing to scores of first-year undergraduates.
Then he read the original paper.
To my surprise, the article described how unsuccessful its authors had been in inducing fear in Little Albert.
In 1979, Harris published a paper about it.
A 2014 paper by Russell Powell and colleagues says Harris's paper called the study social science folklore.
Other retellings had gone further, years before.
Back in 1965, Harris reports, a psychologist named Eysenck made Albert a motherless orphan who was quite fond of white rats.
The real baby's mother worked in the same hospital.
Some textbooks made the coat white, or made everything white and fluffy.
Harris, going by the film, says the rabbit was brown or gray, and the coat was black.
Some textbooks, he found, said Watson cured the fear.
Others said Albert's mother stopped the study.
Neither is in the paper.
In 2014, a researcher named Griggs checked 23 current textbooks.
Some still got the spread of the fear wrong.
And their coverage of who Albert was, Griggs wrote, was rather limited.
By then, there were two answers to that question.
The first came in 2009, from Hall Beck, a psychologist at Appalachian State.
When we began our investigation, not a single fact had been verified about Albert after he left Johns Hopkins.
Beck and his team searched for seven years.
They went through Watson's letters and the public records.
One record mattered most.
A census of the staff living at Johns Hopkins Hospital on January 2, 1920.
It listed three women working as foster mothers.
One of them was Arvilla Merritte.
On March 9, 1919, at Johns Hopkins, she gave birth to a boy.
She named him Douglas.
Beck's team came to believe that Douglas was Albert.
Then they found his grave, in a small cemetery beside the Locust Grove Church.
The stone reads, Douglas, son of Arvilla Merritte, March 9, 1919 to May 10, 1925.
He was six years old.
His death certificate says he developed hydrocephalus in 1922.
Beck's team wrote that none of the folk tales about Albert had a factual basis.
He wasn't adopted by a family north of Baltimore.
Nor was he ever an old man.
No family stories, they wrote, suggest he was afraid of furry things or loud noises.
After 89 years, psychology's lost boy has come home.
In 2012, Beck and a researcher named Fridlund, with two others, published a paper titled Little Albert, A Neurologically Impaired Child.
They argued his condition was there from birth, and that Watson would have been aware of it.
In 2014, Digdon, Powell and Harris answered.
They read the same film, and the record, as showing a normal infant.
And they had a different boy.
Go back to that census. Three foster mothers.
Another one was Pearl Barger. She was 16.
Beck's team hadn't found a baby for her.
In 2014, Russell Powell and Nancy Digdon, with Harris and a genealogist, did.
Her son's hospital file names him Albert.
It's written Albert, W, Barger.
So his name fits Albert B., with nothing changed.
Beck's side had argued that Watson may have used a made up first name.
Pearl Barger worked as a wet nurse at the Harriet Lane Home from May 1919 to the end of March 1920.
The paper's Albert weighed 21 pounds at nine months.
In the medical files Powell's team read, Albert Barger weighed almost 22 pounds at about that age.
Douglas, in the same files, weighed just under 15.
Counting from the birth date in his medical file, Barger left the hospital at exactly 12 months and 21 days.
That's the age the paper gives for Albert's last day.
Douglas, by their count, left at 12 months and 15 days.
Powell's team said Albert Barger matches the paper better than Douglas Merritte does.
They also wrote that their own case was not conclusive.
Watson later wrote that Albert was adopted by an out-of-town family.
That fits neither boy. Both appear to have grown up with their mothers.
In 2020, Fridlund and colleagues replied that Douglas Merritte remains the closest fit.
The same year, Digdon wrote of confirmation bias.
Harris wrote of questionable logic.
Harris and Digdon, who argued against the Merritte case in print, are authors of the Barger paper.
Beck is an author of the Merritte papers.
So is Irons, a grandson of Arvilla Merritte.
In the latest papers we found, from 2020, both cases are still argued in print.
This video picks neither.
But Powell's team did find one more thing, and it surprised them.
Later in life, Albert Barger's full name was William Albert Martin.
His niece remembered an easygoing man who worked for years as a salesman for a major airline.
She told them he disliked dogs, and animals in general.
When he visited, the family dogs were kept in another room.
He disliked barking. Sometimes he put his hands over his ears.
The researchers didn't call it proof.
It sounded more like a dislike than a phobia, they wrote.
And he had his own story. As a boy, he told his niece, he saw his pet dog killed in an accident.
Powell's team wrote that they can neither confirm nor deny a link to the experiment.
He died in 2007.
His niece says he died before finding out he may have been Little Albert.
Beck's team wrote much the same about Douglas.
We will probably never know if Douglas experienced any long-term effects.
The paper still tells what happened in those weeks.
Its authors joked about the analyst he would meet twenty years later.
If he was Douglas, he'd been buried for fifteen years by then.
If he was Albert Barger, he lived until 2007, and never knew.
Our next story starts in 1944, at the University of Minnesota.
There, 36 men who refused to fight in the war volunteered to be starved on purpose.
It was meant to show how to feed civilians starved by the war.