The "Little Albert" Experiment - Engineering Phobias #Historyofpsychology #unethical #study #baby

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[00:00:00]In 1920, Watson and his graduate student Rosalie Rener conducted the little Albert experiment to demonstrate this model. They successfully induced severe distressing fear in an 11-month-old infant. However, the child was removed from the hospital before any attempt at deconditioning could occur. Watson left the child with an artificially induced trauma, a breach of ethics that today would be prohibited by institutional review boards. Watson proved that emotional responses could be manufactured in a lab, but he failed to show how they could be safely reversed.

[00:00:33]This left a critical question. If fear could be conditioned into a subject, could those same principles be used to remove it?