“Unveiling the Dark Truth: What Happened When Scientists Manipulated a Nine-Month-Old Baby in an Unthinkable Experiment?”

When you think about the wild, sometimes ethically questionable world of early psychological research, it’s hard not to raise an eyebrow—or maybe even a full-on alarmed eyebrow! One of the most infamous experiments, involving a nine-month-old baby known as Little Albert, still sends shivers down spines a century later. Conducted between 1919 and 1920 by John B. Watson and Rosalie Rayner, this controversial study bent the boundaries of ethical research, raising questions that still echo today. Can you imagine deliberately instilling fear in such a tiny human? If that doesn’t make you shake your head, perhaps the fact that some experiments back then could never see the light of day today will! So, how did this shocking experiment unfold, and what were its lasting impacts—both on psychology and the unfortunate subject? Buckle up; it’s about to get interesting! LEARN MORE.

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.

In that experiment, dogs were conditioned to salivate at the sound of a bell.

Baby Albert was the subject of a conditioning experiment (YouTube)

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.

By the end, the mere sight of the white rodent caused the baby to break down into tears (YouTube)

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.