# Transcript: The Little Albert Experiment: Two Teams Found Two Different Boys

Source page: https://underthebehavior.com/episodes/little-albert-experiment/transcript

The full transcript of episode 2 of Under the Behavior, little albert, with the time each line starts and a link back to the episode.

Every line of episode 2 as narrated, with the time it starts. [Back to the episode page](https://underthebehavior.com/episodes/little-albert-experiment).

0:00 Little Albert may have died at six.

0:02 Or lived until 2007.

0:05 He's the baby from psych class, the one taught to fear a white rat.

0:09 Two scientists wrote him up in 1920, as Albert B.

0:13 Their paper ends the day he left the hospital.

0:16 For almost ninety years, not a single fact about him was verified.

0:20 Then two teams went looking for him.

0:22 Each team found a boy. They found different boys.

0:27 And the paper says the fear they gave him had weakened within ten days.

0:32 So let's start with the paper, in the authors' own words.

0:36 He was raised almost from birth inside a hospital.

0:39 His mother was a wet nurse at the Harriet Lane Home, part of Johns Hopkins.

0:43 Her job is the clue both search teams would later trace.

0:47 The paper has two authors, John B.

0:49 Watson and his graduate student, Rosalie Rayner.

0:52 They called the baby healthy, and on the whole, stolid and unemotional.

0:58 That calm was the point. They wrote that they could do him relatively little harm.

1:03 They admit to considerable hesitation at first.

1:06 Then they went ahead, telling themselves such fears would arise anyway, once he left the nursery.

1:12 No ethics code stopped them.

1:14 The American Psychological Association didn't have one until 1953.

1:19 First they tested what scared him.

1:21 They showed him a white rat, a rabbit, a dog and a monkey.

1:26 He was curious, not afraid.

1:28 The paper says that at no time did this infant ever show fear.

1:32 Then they found one thing that did.

1:35 Someone struck a hammer on a steel bar, four feet long.

1:39 It was the first time anything in the lab had made him cry.

1:42 He was eight months old. And that noise became their tool.

1:47 They waited until he was eleven months old.

1:50 That was the winter of 1919 into 1920.

1:53 The paper never gives a date.

1:55 A white rat was taken from a basket and held out to him.

1:59 He reached for it.

2:00 Just as his hand touched it, the bar was struck behind his head.

2:04 He jumped and fell forward into the mattress.

2:06 He did not cry.

2:08 The second time, he began to whimper.

2:10 Then they stopped for a week, the paper says, so as not to disturb the child too seriously.

2:16 After that, five more times. The rat, then the bar.

2:21 At the end they showed him the rat alone.

2:23 He cried at once and crawled away.

2:25 They caught him just before the edge of the table.

2:28 They called it as convincing a case of a completely conditioned fear response as could have been theoretically pictured.

2:35 Seven pairings, over two sessions.

2:37 That's the famous result.

2:39 The next pages test whether the fear spread.

2:41 Some textbooks have said everything it spread to was white and fluffy.

2:47 Five days later, they brought him back.

2:49 The rat still made him pull away.

2:51 But between tests, he played with his blocks as usual.

2:55 So the fear hadn't spread to the room or the toys.

2:58 The paper says so itself.

3:00 A rabbit made him cry. A dog, less.

3:03 A sealskin coat made him cry and try to crawl away.

3:07 Cotton wool, less so.

3:09 Then a Santa Claus mask. The paper calls his reaction pronouncedly negative.

3:14 Watson even put his own head down, to see if the baby would play with his hair.

3:19 Albert would not. Two other observers did the same, and he played with their hair right away.

3:25 Ten days after the pairings, his reaction to the rat was much less marked.

3:30 So they struck the bar again, to freshen up the reaction.

3:33 They also struck the bar while showing him the rabbit and the dog.

3:37 It was the first time those two had been paired with the noise.

3:40 They moved him to a bigger lecture room.

3:42 There, his fear of the rat was slight at first, so they paired it with the noise again.

3:47 But the dog, which had been quiet, barked three times, about six inches from his face.

3:53 He fell over and wailed until the dog was taken out.

3:57 The paper adds, with an exclamation mark, that the adults in the room were frightened too.

4:02 Its conclusion: emotional transfers do take place.

4:06 Then came a month with no emotional tests.

4:08 When they came back, he still reacted to the mask, the coat, the rat, the rabbit and the dog.

4:15 But with what the authors call a certain loss in the intensity.

4:19 When the rat crawled toward him, he sat very still and watched it.

4:23 It touched his hand. He pulled the hand back.

4:26 He did not cry.

4:27 And he kept sucking his thumb.

4:29 Watson was also making a film of the baby studies.

4:32 While the film was being made, they had to take the thumb out of his mouth again and again before the fear would show.

4:38 Still, the authors wrote that fears like his persist and modify personality throughout life.

4:45 Later in the same paper, they call that view possibly not very well grounded.

4:50 They never got to test it.

4:51 Albert was taken from the hospital the day of those last tests.

4:55 He was 12 months and 21 days old.

4:58 So they never tried to remove the fear.

5:01 That chance, the paper says, was denied us.

5:04 Then the paper ends with a joke.

5:06 Twenty years from now, they wrote, some Freudian would analyze Albert's fear of a sealskin coat.

5:13 Assuming, they added, that he comes to analysis at that age.

5:17 Twenty years from then was about 1940.

5:20 Hold on to that date.

5:22 Watson's affair with Rayner led to a public divorce trial and his dismissal from Hopkins.

5:27 Little Albert was the last published research of his academic career.

5:32 In 1922, two years after the paper, a newspaper carried Watson's claim that conditioning like Albert's leads to lifelong problems.

5:41 The historian Ben Harris reproduced that page.

5:44 He knows how the story grows, because as a new lecturer in the late 1970s, he told it wrong himself.

5:51 His class textbook had Albert conditioned to a white rabbit, with the fear spreading to a rat.

5:57 I had spent the previous semester fibbing to scores of first-year undergraduates.

6:02 Then he read the original paper.

6:05 To my surprise, the article described how unsuccessful its authors had been in inducing fear in Little Albert.

6:13 In 1979, Harris published a paper about it.

6:16 A 2014 paper by Russell Powell and colleagues says Harris's paper called the study social science folklore.

6:24 Other retellings had gone further, years before.

6:27 Back in 1965, Harris reports, a psychologist named Eysenck made Albert a motherless orphan who was quite fond of white rats.

6:36 The real baby's mother worked in the same hospital.

6:39 Some textbooks made the coat white, or made everything white and fluffy.

6:44 Harris, going by the film, says the rabbit was brown or gray, and the coat was black.

6:50 Some textbooks, he found, said Watson cured the fear.

6:53 Others said Albert's mother stopped the study.

6:56 Neither is in the paper.

6:58 In 2014, a researcher named Griggs checked 23 current textbooks.

7:03 Some still got the spread of the fear wrong.

7:05 And their coverage of who Albert was, Griggs wrote, was rather limited.

7:10 By then, there were two answers to that question.

7:14 The first came in 2009, from Hall Beck, a psychologist at Appalachian State.

7:20 When we began our investigation, not a single fact had been verified about Albert after he left Johns Hopkins.

7:28 Beck and his team searched for seven years.

7:31 They went through Watson's letters and the public records.

7:34 One record mattered most.

7:36 A census of the staff living at Johns Hopkins Hospital on January 2, 1920.

7:42 It listed three women working as foster mothers.

7:45 One of them was Arvilla Merritte.

7:47 On March 9, 1919, at Johns Hopkins, she gave birth to a boy.

7:52 She named him Douglas.

7:54 Beck's team came to believe that Douglas was Albert.

7:58 Then they found his grave, in a small cemetery beside the Locust Grove Church.

8:04 The stone reads, Douglas, son of Arvilla Merritte, March 9, 1919 to May 10, 1925.

8:13 He was six years old.

8:15 His death certificate says he developed hydrocephalus in 1922.

8:19 Beck's team wrote that none of the folk tales about Albert had a factual basis.

8:23 He wasn't adopted by a family north of Baltimore.

8:27 Nor was he ever an old man.

8:29 No family stories, they wrote, suggest he was afraid of furry things or loud noises.

8:36 After 89 years, psychology's lost boy has come home.

8:40 In 2012, Beck and a researcher named Fridlund, with two others, published a paper titled Little Albert, A Neurologically Impaired Child.

8:50 They argued his condition was there from birth, and that Watson would have been aware of it.

8:55 In 2014, Digdon, Powell and Harris answered.

8:59 They read the same film, and the record, as showing a normal infant.

9:03 And they had a different boy.

9:07 Go back to that census. Three foster mothers.

9:10 Another one was Pearl Barger. She was 16.

9:14 Beck's team hadn't found a baby for her.

9:16 In 2014, Russell Powell and Nancy Digdon, with Harris and a genealogist, did.

9:22 Her son's hospital file names him Albert.

9:25 It's written Albert, W, Barger.

9:28 So his name fits Albert B., with nothing changed.

9:32 Beck's side had argued that Watson may have used a made up first name.

9:35 Pearl Barger worked as a wet nurse at the Harriet Lane Home from May 1919 to the end of March 1920.

9:43 The paper's Albert weighed 21 pounds at nine months.

9:46 In the medical files Powell's team read, Albert Barger weighed almost 22 pounds at about that age.

9:53 Douglas, in the same files, weighed just under 15.

9:57 Counting from the birth date in his medical file, Barger left the hospital at exactly 12 months and 21 days.

10:03 That's the age the paper gives for Albert's last day.

10:07 Douglas, by their count, left at 12 months and 15 days.

10:11 Powell's team said Albert Barger matches the paper better than Douglas Merritte does.

10:16 They also wrote that their own case was not conclusive.

10:20 Watson later wrote that Albert was adopted by an out-of-town family.

10:23 That fits neither boy. Both appear to have grown up with their mothers.

10:27 In 2020, Fridlund and colleagues replied that Douglas Merritte remains the closest fit.

10:33 The same year, Digdon wrote of confirmation bias.

10:36 Harris wrote of questionable logic.

10:39 Harris and Digdon, who argued against the Merritte case in print, are authors of the Barger paper.

10:44 Beck is an author of the Merritte papers.

10:47 So is Irons, a grandson of Arvilla Merritte.

10:50 In the latest papers we found, from 2020, both cases are still argued in print.

10:55 This video picks neither.

10:58 But Powell's team did find one more thing, and it surprised them.

11:03 Later in life, Albert Barger's full name was William Albert Martin.

11:07 His niece remembered an easygoing man who worked for years as a salesman for a major airline.

11:13 She told them he disliked dogs, and animals in general.

11:17 When he visited, the family dogs were kept in another room.

11:20 He disliked barking. Sometimes he put his hands over his ears.

11:25 The researchers didn't call it proof.

11:27 It sounded more like a dislike than a phobia, they wrote.

11:31 And he had his own story. As a boy, he told his niece, he saw his pet dog killed in an accident.

11:38 Powell's team wrote that they can neither confirm nor deny a link to the experiment.

11:43 He died in 2007.

11:45 His niece says he died before finding out he may have been Little Albert.

11:50 Beck's team wrote much the same about Douglas.

11:52 We will probably never know if Douglas experienced any long-term effects.

11:58 The paper still tells what happened in those weeks.

12:01 Its authors joked about the analyst he would meet twenty years later.

12:05 If he was Douglas, he'd been buried for fifteen years by then.

12:10 If he was Albert Barger, he lived until 2007, and never knew.

12:16 Our next story starts in 1944, at the University of Minnesota.

12:21 There, 36 men who refused to fight in the war volunteered to be starved on purpose.

12:27 It was meant to show how to feed civilians starved by the war.

The Little Albert Experiment Two Teams Found Two Different Boys

12:28 · Episode 2 · YouTube [Watch the episode](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_t9kij_hqo)