Classical Conditioning, ethics and Little Albert
It is a sad fact of human experience that our ingenuity often outruns our wisdom.
Introduction:
Classical conditioning remains one of psychology’s most outstanding discoveries. And yet buried within the history of classical conditioning, is the evidence of the axiom provided above.
Ethics finds its etymology like so many words, within the Greek language and wrapped within the classical Greek tradition.
The word ethics comes from the Greek word: ‘Ethos’, we can take this to mean the character or moral character of an individual (etymonline, 2022).
Every structured field of inquiry may be said to have had to evolve its own system of ethics as it developed over time. From medicine to psychology, costs have had to be weighed up as to how much is progress worth in terms of human suffering and good conscience.
Considering these arguments, one may bring to mind the immortal words of the Hippocratic standard ‘Do no Harm’. But ‘to do no harm’ whilst an admirable mantra, leaves little room for practicality in the flawed and imperfect world in which we live. Harm, itself is not an absolute term and to avoid harm is to avoid something subjective, a term which will differ in meaning from individual to individual.
The current status in many fields is ‘to do as little harm as possible’. Which allows for progress, but not at the undue suffering of either the individual homosapien and increasingly to animals we recognise with the right to be content and unharmed. With the evolution of ethics we can at least start to live up to our self-awarded title ‘homosapien’ and live the meaning of the word homosapien- ‘wise man’.
As an example of the sort of experiments that were carried out pre-ethics, we turn to classical conditioning and the work of John Watson and his graduate student Rosalie Raynor. The focus of the work was in studying fear and to do this they used an eleven-month old baby — Albert B or as he came to be known in psychology literature ‘Little Albert’.
We’ll start by outlining the experiment and then, I’d like to discuss some comments made by Watson which appear to explain his own rationale about the reluctance he felt about conducting this experiment.
The Experiment:
Before any conditioning could take place, Watson and Raynor first had to gauge Little Albert’s fear responses. To this they employed surprise by presenting Albert with a range of items in a sudden manner (Watson and Raynor, 1920).
As Watson recalled, Albert was presented — :
“…successively with a white rat, a rabbit, a dog, a monkey, with masks with and without hair, cotton wool, burning newspapers, etc.”
The most frequent reaction from Albert was one of manipulation. There appeared to be no rage or fear associated with any of these items nor in the sudden way in which he was shown them.
In a sequential manner, Watson and Raynor either showed the toy rat by itself which at first elicited no response than to play with it. Or they showed the rat with the sound of banging a bar out of view behind Albert but close enough for him to exhibit a scared response.
Both Watson and Raynor were also interested in whether the fear response that had been generated by the presentation of rat and the loud bang, was transferable to any other items within the room, however this was proven false. They tested this by offering playing blocks to Albert who seemed only intent on manipulating and playing with the blocks.
However, there appeared to be transfer in items that were similar in either tactile or physical attributes. Little Albert showed a severe aversion to a rabbit and other soft toys when they were presented. The playing blocks often served as a counterbalance and a condition that always elicited playing-like responses from Albert.
What Watson and Raynor discovered was that these negative reactions seemed to persist, with a slight lessening in reaction although this was still extreme. In fact, Watson argued that these changes may persist through life.
Both Watson and Raynor had intended to ‘cure’ Albert of these conditioned responses before he left the hospital in which his mother worked — ‘The Harriet Lane Home for Invalid Children’.
Ethics:
What’s really surprising in the original paper is the ways in which Watson seems to rationalise the behaviour of inducing fear within a child.
To illustrate, I’ll use some direct quotations from the paper:
“His stability was one of the principal reasons for using him as a subject in this test. We felt that we could do him relatively little harm by carrying out such experiments as those outlined below.”
This is absoutely fascinating, in a sense Watson is arguing that Albert has more resources to bounce back from the effects of this experiment. In some way, the individual who is emotionally stable makes for a good research subject, true? Maybe but this in no way justifies the methodology. The term ‘relatively little harm’ scares me for some reason. Who decides what level of harm is justifiable? Surely not the person who stands to benefit from publishing, in a way this emphasises why psychology researchers now need approval from an association like the APA or BPS. And each suggested experiment has to pass a strict ethics test before it can be carried out.
“We decided finally to make the attempt, comforting ourselves by the reflection that such attachments would arise anyway as soon as the child left the sheltered environment of the nursery for the rough and tumble of the home.”
Another tenuous logic belies this claim that Albert may have developed conditioned responses anyhow, and so what harm can the experiment really do?
Conclusions:
The development of a specific set of guidelines for adhering to an ethical framework originated in the Aftermath of the Second World War and the Nuremberg Trials. The central question that underpins much of the ethical conundrums is what price do we put on knowledge? What price is too high?
Certainly Watson’s and Raynor’s experiment would not be carried out today. The standard of ethics is high enough that we recognise that there are some prices that are far too high to pay in terms of ethics and conscience.
My own feeling about Watson is that we are not talking about a psychopath or sadist. To me, Watson is a man very much of his time, a pioneer who desperately wanted answers to deep psychological questions.
However, Watson is naive, shockingly so, about the ramifications of his work and the rationalisations he provides to explain the legitimacy of studying fear in this manner.
If Watson had been entirely bereft of conscience, there would have been no plan to counter the introduced conditioning. Perhaps, Watson too was a creature of conditioning, had he been conditioned by the ethos of the day that all knowledge was to be acquired by any means necessary.
The question for modern-day philosophers of mind, is whether we’re wise enough to explore and answer deep psychological questions without the need to go against conscience and our growing knowledge of ethics?
References:
‘Ethics’ etmology — Accessible from: https://www.etymonline.com/word/ethics
Waton, J. Raynor, R. ‘CONDITIONED EMOTIONAL REACTIONS’ in Journal of Experimental Psychology Volume III No 1 (1920) Available at — https://pure.mpg.de/rest/items/item_2404117_3/component/file_2404116/content (Date Accessed: 11/05/2022)
For more info including a criticism of the methodology and it’s ecological validity see:
