Shocking outcome of one of the 'most unethical psychological experiments ever' involving nine-month-old baby
One of the most controversial psychological experiments ever unsurprisingly had an equally controversial outcome.
Whether you studied psychology in school or not, you're probably aware of the loose rules and regulations around ethics in the early days of science and psychology.
Most of these tests simply wouldn't fly today.
Animals would often be subjected to cruel tests in the name of research, though some experiments, such as Pavlov's dog, have gone down in the history books.
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In that experiment, dogs were conditioned to salivate at the sound of a bell.
This worked as Russian psychologist Ivan Pavlov would ring a bell before feeding his canines, and after some time, the dogs would expect food whenever a bell was rang.
It was a successful example of how conditioning can be used, but things may have gone a step too far when psychologists decided to apply this same logic to a baby.
Conducted in 1919-1920, a nine-month-old baby was subject to a conditioning experiment to make him fear certain animals.
Carried out by psychologist John B. Watson and his grad student Rosalie Rayner, the pair exposed a baby, known as Albert B., to a number of different things.
The archive footage has since been uploaded to YouTube, shocking viewers more than 100 years later.
Baby Albert was put in front of a rabbit, monkey, a white rat and even burning newspapers, to see how he would react.
The nine-month-old hadn't seen any of these before, so he didn't show any fear when they were placed in front of him.
But Watson wanted to change that.
The next time a rat was placed in front of the baby, the psychologist would bang a metal pipe with a hammer, startling the boy and making him cry.
This was repeated until the rat's appearance on its own was enough to cause Albert to break into tears.
It is now known as the ‘Little Albert experiment’, as Watson sought out to create the feeling of fear from simply seeing the rodent.
But what happened to the poor baby that was subjected to psychological scarring?
Well according to researcher Hall Beck from Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, Albert B's real name was Douglas Merritte, the son of Johns Hopkins University Hospital employee Arvilla, and he died age six of hydrocephalus, or water on the brain.
This condition would have led the child to blindness at points in his life, prior to his death.
However, other psychologists weren't convinced.
Russ Powell, along with his colleagues at MacEwan University in Alberta, Canada, claimed that Beck missed on another candidate, as a woman named Pearl Barger also had a baby at the same hospital, on the same day, who was named William Albert Barger.
They had found more consistencies between William and baby Albert, believing that this was the true subject.
A lot of people hoped so too, as William lived a long and happy life before his death in 2007, his niece explained.
If it was him, he claimed that he knew nothing about the experiment, though he did have a fear of animals throughout his life.
Let's all hope that the latter was correct.
Joshua Nair