The Little Albert Experiment

1. The Little Albert Experiment - 1920

The Little Albert Experiment was conducted and published in 1920. This experiment happened at Johns Hopkins University by John B. Watson and Rosalie Rayner. The study was conducted to prove that there was evidence of classical conditioning in humans making them fear things, such as white mice, by the unconditioned fear of loud noises. Watson felt that fear was learned and that children were not born with it, and he wanted to find support for that. He believed that fear was innate and caused by unconditioned responses, and that if he used that classic conditioning, he could cause a child to fear some other thing that most children aren’t typically afraid of. In this experiment, Watson and Rayner were
It is also known as reverse sexual imprinting, which is basically just the occurrence that happens to people who have grown up with each other starting from when they were very young, making them desensitized to sexual attraction towards each other. One of the reasons why he created this theory was as an explanation to the incest taboo, and the evidence that he uses to justify this theory comes from many different places, cultures, and biologically related
In those collective farms, the children were not put in groups by whom they were related to, but rather groups with other peers of the same age. From the children in this study later in life, there were almost 3,000 marriages, but a very miniscule amount of those (14) actually happened between the kids who grew up together in the same age group, which helps to justify the Westermarck theory. Of those 14 out of nearly 3,000 marriages, none of the children had grown up with each other until at least the age of 6. With those results, Westermarck came to the conclusion that his hypothesis takes place in children up to the age of 6, and that past that age, they are more capable of developing those sexual attractions towards each other when they grow up. He found also that, according to the theory of genetic sexual attraction, a pair of siblings who had not grown up with each other or met each other until they had gotten older could feel the same kind of sexual attraction towards each other as if they had not been related. The Westermarck theory was pretty much accepted in groups and places where it was much more common considering that inbreeding, or having children with someone that you are closely related to, causes the children to develop deformities or mental defects, making incest seem to be an unnatural