Foundations of sand?

Christian Jarrett

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Conditioning babies

You’d be forgiven at this point for thinking that it is exclusively social psychology that suffers from the lure of academic myths. Not so. One of the most consistently misreported studies in psychology is the tale of Little Albert and his conditioning by John Watson and Rosalie Rayner in 1920. For decades the case has been heralded as the classic example of how humans, like animals, can be easily led to fear innocuous stimuli using classical conditioning, and how this fear generalises to other similar stimuli according to the rules of behaviourism.
Unfortunately, Watson and Rayner’s study was conducted in a haphazard fashion (see box on p.759) – a fact neglected by most textbooks. To give one example: It is often reported that Albert’s conditioned fear of white rats generalised to, among other things, a fear of dogs. The reality is that Albert was initially unmoved when, after his conditioning, a dog was first brought into the laboratory. After that, the dog, previously silent, barked three times loudly just six inches from Albert’s face. In the words of the original 1920 report, not only was Albert upset, but ‘The sudden barking of the hitherto quiet dog produced a marked fear response in the adult observers!’ This was hardly an appropriately controlled test of Albert’s conditioned fears.
Authors have also invented stimuli that Albert was never tested on, including a cat, a man’s beard, a white furry glove, his aunt, a teddy bear, as well as the oft-cited claim that he became fearful of all ‘furry animals’. Another curious error is that textbook authors have tended to claim that Albert’s mother withdrew him from Watson and Rayner’s care before they had a chance to extinguish his fears using desensitisation. The truth, apparent from the original 1920 report, is that Watson and Rayner knew a month in advance when Albert would no longer be available.
‘These inaccuracies definitely do still exist,’ says Professor Benjamin Harris at the University of New Hampshire, author of a landmark critique of the Little Albert story published in 1979 entitled ‘Whatever happened to Little Albert?’ ‘There are still people out there who want to give an easy explanation for things like stimulus generalisation in classical conditioning,’ says Harris ‘and it is just too inviting an idea that something like white objects or furry objects are going to be fear arousing because of the process of stimulus generalisation.’
Could the misreporting of the Little Albert story have damaged progress in psychology in the same way that Manning and Rafferty believe academic myths have inhibited certain lines of research in the social domain? According to Harris, this depends on the extent to which you believe behaviourism continues to exert an unjustified influence on contemporary psychological thought. ‘You could argue that it makes people complacent, leading them to think simplistically about PTSD or other forms of adult psychopathology,’ he says.
Beyond his 1979 paper, Harris has devoted great energies to correcting the mis-telling of the Little Albert story, unfortunately with little success. For example, Harris worked to ensure the tale was told accurately by Philip Zimbardo in the 1990s Discovering Psychology TV series broadcast on American Television. Harris sold the show producers the rights to footage of the Watson and Rayner study, which he had serendipitously discovered under a stairwell at the University of Michigan. But instead of this serving to improve the veracity of the programme, the producers edited the clip in such a way to make it appear that Watson had in fact conditioned two children, not just one, a misleading impression reinforced by Zimbardo’s narration!

The ‘whatever’ effect

A true sign that a study or studies have acquired mythical status is when they lend their name to an ‘effect’. So it is with the ‘Hawthorne effect’, a name derived from a series of experiments on productivity conducted at the Hawthorne Works of the Western Electric Company in Chicago, in the late 1920s, early 1930s. But according to Mecca Chiesa at the University of Kent and Sandy Hobbs at the University of West of Scotland, the fame of these studies is not matched by their quality (see opposite). The pair published a critique this year in which they lamented the thriving, widespread use of the term in light of its hopelessly vague meaning and given that the original Hawthorne studies were woefully poor.