Watson’s Little Albert experiment demonstrated that human fear could be conditioned

Evidence

Watson believed that humans, like other animals, could be conditioned to respond in predictable ways, and his most famous experiments were conducted on human infants. In the one on “Little Albert,” a human version of Pavlov’s experiments on dogs, Watson induced a phobia of rats in an eleven-month-old. He did so by striking a metal bar with a hammer behind the baby’s head every time a white rat was shown to him. After seven weeks of conditioning, the child, initially friendly to the rodent, began to fear it, bursting into tears at the sight of it. The child, in fact, began to fear anything white and furry—Watson bragged that “now he fears even Santa Claus.” — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 199

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Fear conditioning generalizes broadly rather than isolating the punished behavior — , The Rod and the Child: A Global History…, 6123

Broader Connections

• Fear conditioning generalizes broadly rather than isolating the punished behavior #expands (0.82) — , The Rod and the Child, 6123