Your opinions on this ethical issue

S

shira

Shinigami
"The Little Albert Experiment" by Watson & Rayner (1920)

OK so this one is quite famous as psychology experiments go; but this one did go a bit too far in some respects. So basically, I was wondering if you guys feel that the information gained from the experiment was worth it or not.

For those who don't want to read wiki's explaination, i'll give a breif summary from a textbook I use;

"In one of the most celebrated if unethical studies in psychology, Wantson & Rayner (1920) clasically conditioned an 11 month-old child, since known as Little Albert, to fear fluffy animals. They did this by pairing presentation of a tame white ray with a sudden loud noise. The noise caused fear. Eventually Albert was conditioned to associate the rat with fear. Little Albert also becam afraid of other fluffy objects similar to the white rat such as a rabbit and white dog; this is known as stimulus generalisation

Ethical issues - Besides the serious ethical issue of scaring a young child and causing psychological harm, Watson & Raynor did not decondition Little Albert as his mother, with Watson & Rayner's knowledge, removed him from the research programme"

So, if the mother hadn't withdrawn Little Albert, he would have been fine in the end, and deconditioned, but, she withdrew him. Now, Watson & Raynor knew that this meant Little Albert would never be deconditioned, but they still let him go.

What're you thoughts on this? The information gained on human conditioning is indeed valuable but, to do such a thing to an 11 month-old child?

I'd be interested to know.
 
stuart-says-yes said:
I suppose it is unethical because the child couldn't give his consent to being experimented on but at the same time a child of that age doesn't understand the stimulus but only how to react to said stimulus.

Apparently the child died some 5 years later because of illness, so we never knew what happened to him because of the lack of reconditioning.
I feel the experiment was ideal because they planned to teach the child to not fear the furry animals with practical techniques so he wouldn't be in fear of these animals for the rest of his life.
Though his mother even with this knowledge withdrew him from the experiment before it was concluded, so its her fault if the experiment happened to have a negative effect on the child.

Really, I feel it was okay to experiment on the child, because they planned to teach the child to not fear the furry things at the end of the experiment.
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Yes, the planned too. However, in Psychology it's not definate that it would be a success. After learning to fear the things, to be put through more psychological distress to learn to not fear them is hardly fair.

Do remember, you're scaring an 11 month-old child for the sake of science, just to see if we can give him a stupid phobia. It was a success but... the consequences were hardly ideal.

I feel that the conclusions of the experiment did succeed in teaching us a lot about the human mind, but, it still does over shadow that this was an innocent 11 month-old boy being experimented on.
 
stuart-says-yes said:
Surely it is easier to teach 11 month old to fear things instead of a 33 year old because a 33 year old will understand the reason for the noise and won't automatically associate it with the rat.
The infant would meaning surely the experiment would have be done on something that is yet to be able to reason with it self, to show whether it was possible to teach a child to fear things
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Yes but the purpose of the experiment to see if human conditioning was realistically possible. There is no real need to pick an 11 month-old. Also, I am not debating whether it's easier to condition a child in comparison to an adult, what i'm asking is whether it was actually worth it. Is it 'right' to scare an innocent child, just for scientific progression. Let us bear in mind that this is not realistically helping us cure anything (like when medical tests are conducted) since there are already examples of conditioning done on animals. [Pavlov (1927) on dogs].
 
Frightening children in the name of psychology is rather distasteful in itself; letting the woman go with her child without having undone said scare tactics is surely borderline criminal! But as to whether it was worth it... That's certainly debatable.

As you said Godot, it's not actually that helpful in terms of curing anything. But a lot of research is not necessarily philanthropic, and its importance was in terms of furthering what we know about the human mind and how it can work. Its true value however, and the reason it is so well known- may be in providing a rather stellar example of "When Psychology Attacks"; something that we should bear in mind when pursuing psychological experiments.
 
Reading it made me think of the guy who taught his son Klingon as his first language for the first few years of his life. It, of course, failed or something since. He's a teenager now and obviously doesn't speak it - I imagine some more information is out there.

As for this thing? It's odd but I don't have any strong feelings towards it. It's easy to say that it was a different time (and children were seen and not heard - mother probably needed money) but I'd be curious at what the results were. I'd be lying it I wasn't. It's improbable, but I've always wanted to see someone who's been mentally trained to laugh when something is sad and cry at laughter. And the only way for such a thing to happen is doing it from a young age, which won't ever come about but...
 
Jayme said:
As for this thing? It's odd but I don't have any strong feelings towards it. It's easy to say that it was a different time (and children were seen and not heard - mother probably needed money) but I'd be curious at what the results were. I'd be lying it I wasn't.
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The aim was to see if they could clasically condition him to fear something he shouldn't. The results were a success as he was scared of the rat, and various other white fluffy things.

I don't feel strong on this either. But when you think quite hard about it, and realise that boys age, it does seem distasteful.
 
I agree with this experiment but also don't.

I don't because he wasn't rehabilitated. I see that as the most useful and most important part of the experiment and without it my reasons for agree with the experiment are invalid.

I would have agreed because there are people who have great problems with irrational fears. I read not to long ago about a lady who was afraid to leave her house and hadn't left it for over 20 years though with help she had started briefly leaving it, in the article. This experiment could have provided further insight into rehabilitation which possibly could have helped large numbers of people with various different fears.

Without the rehabilitation then in real life terms the experiment may help in the prevention of fear in a child but we already know not to show fear around a child because they pick up on it. Lol my friend tries to not show fear of spiders in front of her sisters little daughter because she would pick up on it. A natural response to learn to be wary of dangers.

Kids are far far far more susceptible to things than adults. I guess there is a risk that a permanent effect could be created.
 
Godot said:
The results were a success as he was scared of the rat, and various other white fluffy things.
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Oh, no, I didn't mean it like that. All I was saying is that if I were in that position I'd also be very curious as to what the results would be. The matter of distaste probably wouldn't even occur to me. If anything, I'd blame the parent that puts the child into the situation in the first place. And it's not like other tests don't happen on a regular basis to babies.

...I might have suggested using a chimp instead.
 
Asdrubael said:
I would have agreed because there are people who have great problems with irrational fears. I read not to long ago about a lady who was afraid to leave her house and hadn't left it for over 20 years though with help she had started briefly leaving it, in the article. This experiment could have provided further insight into rehabilitation which possibly could have helped large numbers of people with various different fears.
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My only counter argument to this is that there are dozens of people out there with irrational fears as it is. Why not try rehabilitating them?

The thing to bear in mind is that this experiment was only about seeing whether they could make the child scared of a tame, white, 'fluffy' rat. The rehabilitation side of things are covered in various other experiments. (Obviously you wouldn't know, but thats part of the next chapter of the textbook I quoted from).

On the basis of the experiments aims, I don't feel I can agree with it. But heck, that's the 1920's for ya'.
 
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