Abstract
Inaccuracies, especially concerning the stimulus generalization findings, in textbook descriptions of the Little Albert study have been well documented since the 1970s. However, there has not been a systematic examination of introductory psychology textbooks since the 1980s to determine whether such inaccuracies still persist. This study filled this gap by examining 23 current introductory texts for accuracy in their coverage of the Little Albert story. In addition, it checked for coverage of recent unsettled issues in the story—the claimed identification of Albert, discovery of his neurological impairment, and early death at 6 years of age. Inaccuracies, especially concerning generalization, are still present in some texts, and coverage of recent developments is rather limited. Resource information for remediation is provided.
Harris (1980, 2011) pointed out that when he titled his 1979 article, “Whatever Happened to Little Albert?” he did not intend for it to be interpreted literally at the biographical level as a question about Little Albert’s fate beyond the laboratory. 1 Rather, his intention was for the question to be interpreted metaphorically at the historiographical level as a question about the fate of Little Albert in the hands of psychologists acting as contemporary historians of science. Thus, the question could have been more aptly phrased, “Whatever happened to the story of Little Albert in the hands of psychologists?” In this study, I asked a similar question, “Whatever happened to the story of Little Albert in the hands of introductory psychology textbook authors?”
Since the late 1970s, inaccuracies of varying degrees in the telling of the Little Albert story in introductory and other undergraduate textbooks have been well documented (Cornwell & Hobbs, 1976; Harris, 1979, 2011; LeUnes, 1983; Paul & Blumenthal, 1989; Prytula, Oster, & Davis, 1977). 2 Harris (1979) classified these inaccuracies into less serious ones in which relatively minor details have been misrepresented (e.g., Albert’s age, the spelling of Rosalie Rayner’s name, and whether Albert was initially conditioned to fear a rat or a rabbit) and those of more significance that misrepresent the stimulus generalization results for Albert’s postconditioning fear and the postexperimental fate of Albert. 3 Some examples of spurious generalization findings are Albert showing fear to a cat, a fur pelt, Albert’s aunt who supposedly wore fur, and a teddy bear. An example of misrepresenting Albert’s fate is the addition of a happy ending in which Watson removed Albert’s fear, with the removal (or reconditioning) process sometimes discussed in detail. Prytula et al. (1977, p. 45) provided some interesting examples that they found in textbooks of how this fear removal process was achieved, such as “presentation of a rat was newly associated with a gift of a bowl of ice cream” (p. 45), and Cornwell and Hobbs (1976) reported that some authors wrote that Albert was reconditioned by having the rat presented while being fed “pieces of chocolate.” Interestingly, these two reconditioning examples are strikingly similar to the one that Watson and Rayner (1920, p. 12) described as a way that they might have tried had they have had the opportunity, “… to ‘recondition’ by feeding the subject candy or other food just as the animal is shown.”
According to Harris (1979, 2011), the largest number of textbook errors involve the nature of the objects and animals to which Albert’s fear generalized. He first pointed out that the rat Watson and Rayner used was white but most of the objects used to test for generalization were nonwhite—the rabbit, the dog, Rosalie Rayner’s sealskin coat [described by Watson and Rayner as “fur coat (seal)”], Watson’s hair and that of two observers (all three bent down so Little Albert could touch their hair if he so desired), and some toy blocks. The white objects used to test for generalization were a Santa Claus mask with a white beard and a package of cotton wool. Watson and Rayner (1920) reported that except for the toy blocks and the hair of the two observers (which Albert apparently played with), Albert showed fear to the other objects. He exhibited a strong negative response to the rabbit, the dog, and the sealskin coat (all nonwhite). He also showed a negative response to the Santa Claus mask and Watson’s hair and a somewhat milder negative reaction to the cotton wool. For some textbook authors, these details may comprise an inconvenience for the simpler story that they wanted to tell, so they changed both the objects that were used in the generalization trials and the generalization results. According to Harris, new stimuli, a furry white glove and a white piece of fur, for example, are said to be among those used to test for generalization, and the nonwhite color of some of the objects that were actually used is changed to white (e.g., the rabbit and the dog become white). Given such changes, Little Albert is reported inaccurately in some introductory textbooks to have generalized his fear to white, furry stimuli.
Harris (1979) discussed several reasons for these errors made by textbook authors, such as authors’ overreliance on secondary sources, their desires to make experimental findings consistent with textbook theories of behavior (e.g., conditioning should generalize along simple stimulus dimensions, such as color), and authors’ confusion due to Watson’s own altering and deleting important aspects of the Little Albert story in his subsequent descriptions of it (e.g., Watson, 1928; Watson & Watson, 1921). Samelson (1980) also discussed the discrepancies in Watson’s subsequent accounts of the Little Albert study and pointed out that anyone who read the original article and Watson’s later accounts of it with a skeptical eye would have deemed the Little Albert study with a sample of one at best an unconfirmed, interesting pilot study. 4 The generalization data were ambiguous, and Watson and Rayner’s description of them was both imprecise and subjective. In fact, as Samelson pointed out, Watson and Watson (1921, see footnote on p. 493) described their work as “in such an incomplete state that verified conclusions are not possible; hence this summary, like so many other bits of psychological work, must be looked upon merely as a preliminary exposition of possibilities rather than as a catalogue of concrete usable results.” Thus, given this ambiguous state of the Watson and Rayner findings, it would seem that textbook authors who wanted to include coverage of the Little Albert study would have to streamline it to make it a “good” story.
One of the explanations that Gilovich (1991) proposed for textbook errors relates to this streamlining approach to errors in the Little Albert story. He explained that sharpening and leveling processes are used by textbook authors to tell a good story to facilitate reader understanding. Sharpening is emphasizing what the author takes the gist or main point of the story to be, and leveling is de-emphasizing details thought to be less essential, so the story is not encumbered by inconsistencies and ambiguous details. For example, the evidence in the Little Albert study for both the extent of Albert’s fear was rather inconsistent and the amount of generalization to various stimuli was difficult to interpret. Because these inconsistencies interfere with the point of the story about the generalization of classically conditioned fear, some text authors just remove them from the story. Thus, the story becomes simpler and not encumbered by ambiguous details. Gilovich also pointed out that some of the authors have likely never read the original Watson and Rayner article. What we take to be secondhand information in a textbook could in fact be third-, fourth-, or fifth-hand, and the more links there are in a communication chain, the more likely distortions are to be introduced along the way. In addition, Gilovich explained that authors’ desire to be informative may lead them to stretch the facts (distort the story) to ensure that the reader gets the point the author wants to make. In the Little Albert story, for example, the generalization results become more clear-cut and not as they really were, ambiguous and difficult to interpret. Paul and Blumenthal (1989) concluded that it may not matter to some textbook authors whether the story is exactly accurate, as long as it illustrates a point that they consider fundamentally correct, thereby serving a pedagogical purpose. All of these reasons likely played roles in producing the inaccuracies introduced by textbook authors into the Little Albert story, leading readers of the flawed stories to a state of knowledge that “just ain’t so.”
Textbook inaccuracies and fictitious embellishments in the Little Albert story such as those I have described have been observed in introductory textbooks up through the 1980s (Paul & Blumenthal, 1989). Harris (2011) reported that he informally examined some more recent texts from the 1990s to 2000s and still found examples of inaccuracies in the texts’ accounts of Little Albert (e.g., in one textbook, the white laboratory rat was changed to be a “pet albino rat,” possibly to allay students’ possible prejudices about rats as fearful objects). There has not, however, been a systematic analysis of coverage of the Little Albert study in current introductory textbooks to determine whether inaccuracies still exist and, if so, their prevalence and nature. Given the number of critical articles that have been published on this inaccuracy problem, it would seem that these articles would have by now guided authors to more accurate textbook descriptions of the Little Albert story. Paul and Blumenthal (1989), however, found that although some textbook authors cite these critical articles, their presentations of the Little Albert story remain pretty much the same, so textbook inaccuracies had persisted. Harris (2011) echoed these sentiments in commenting about how difficult it is to improve textbook accounts of the Little Albert story. He does, however, report that he thinks that his 1979 article may have helped to eliminate the false detail that Watson removed Albert’s fear through some sort of reconditioning by drawing attention to the fact that Watson and Rayner knew a month in advance when Albert would no longer be available and made no attempt to use this last month with Albert to remove his fears. Paul and Blumenthal (1989) confirmed Harris’s thoughts with their finding that texts in the 1980s had indeed jettisoned stories about Watson and Rayner’s extinction of Albert’s fear. Harris also pointed out that he thought the removal of these extinction stories led some authors to provide a new ending by inserting an account of how a former student of Watson’s, Mary Cover Jones, deconditioned a young boy’s fear of rabbits (Jones, 1974).
Recent research has added another layer to the Little Albert story that may lead to new inaccuracies in how the story is told in introductory psychology textbooks. After 7 years of detective work on an almost 90-year-old cold case, Beck, Levinson, and Irons (2009, 2010; see also Beck & Irons, 2011) claimed that they had uncovered Little Albert’s true identity (Douglas Merritte, the son of Arvilla Merritte, a wet nurse at the hospital where the Little Albert study was conducted) and that he died at just 6 years of age in 1925. 5 However, this issue is far from settled, as there are other researchers who believe that Beck et al. identified the wrong mother and child and that Douglas Merritte was not Little Albert (e.g., Harris, 2011; Powell, 2010, 2011; Powell, Digdon, Harris, & Smithson, 2014; Reese, 2010). 6 As Powell (2010) concluded, “… psychology’s lost boy is still missing” (p. 300). If the identity of Little Albert is eventually settled, it will end all of the facetious answers about Albert’s fate, such as “Albert is probably a successful furrier” (Murray, 1973, p. 5) and “Albert has been a functionary at the National Institutes of Health, turning down requests for research grants in psychology” (Resnick, 1974, p. 112).
But this is not the end of the story; the saga continues. Additional detective work together with new detailed clinical analysis of video footage of Little Albert and the subsequent examination of some newly discovered medical records of Douglas Merritte have led Fridlund, Beck, Goldie, and Irons (2012a) to claim that Little Albert was neurologically impaired (primarily due to hydrocephalus—brain swelling associated with an excess of cerebral spinal fluid) at the time he was tested by Watson and Rayner. This too is an unsettled issue (e.g., see Ben Harris’s criticism in “Another twist in the Little Albert tale,” 2012, but also see Fridlund, Beck, Goldie, & Irons’s, 2012b, reply to Harris). If Douglas was indeed Little Albert, this new claim not only contradicts Watson and Rayner’s assertion that Little Albert was “normal” and “healthy” but also leads to the conclusion that Watson and Rayner would have almost certainly had to know about Little Albert’s medical condition, raising even more serious ethical questions about the already ethically questionable Little Albert study (but see Note 6; Digdon, Powell, & Harris, in press; Digdon, Powell, & Smithson, 2014).
Given the well-documented history of inaccuracies in introductory psychology textbook coverage of the Little Albert story, the purpose of this study was to discover how accurately the Little Albert story is described in current introductory psychology textbooks. In his classic book on teaching, McKeachie (2002) pointed out that “research on teaching suggests that the major influence on what students learn is not the teaching method but the textbook” (p. 14). Hence, because textbooks play a central role in our students’ education and because introductory psychology is the most popular course in psychology with an estimated annual enrollment of 1.2 to 1.6 million students in the United States (Steuer & Ham, 2008) and may be the only psychology course taken by most of these students, psychology teachers want introductory textbooks to be as accurate as possible. The obvious downside of inaccuracies in the introductory textbook coverage of the Little Albert story is that students will be misled into accepting the story as fact, and sadly, it seems that students seldom question the textbook stories that they are told (Burton, 2011).
According to Morawski (1992), textbooks are the key transmitters of psychological knowledge both to potential new members of the discipline and to those outside of the discipline (giving psychology away), and therefore it is essential that textbook information be accurate. Thus, it is important to the psychological teaching community to identify inaccuracies in our textbooks so that they can be corrected and we as textbook authors and teachers do not continue to “give away” false information about our discipline. This study takes a step in this direction by examining current coverage of the Little Albert story in introductory psychology textbooks. It is also possible that inclusion of the identity and impairment claims will lead to new inaccuracies in the Little Albert story and this study will also address this possibility.
I developed three hypotheses for this study. First, per Harris (2011), there should be only a small number of misrepresentations of minor details in the story (e.g., reporting that a rabbit rather than a rat was used in the initial fear conditioning of Albert). Second, there should be relatively few more serious inaccuracies concerning misrepresentations of the generalization findings and the deconditioning of Albert’s fear given the many previous articles criticizing such inaccuracies in textbook accounts of the Little Albert story. In addition, contemporary textbook authors have the benefit of easier access to primary sources via the Internet, leading to less use of secondary sources and hence a higher probability of accuracy in textbook coverage of primary sources. Third, based on textbook authors’ penchant for telling “good” stories, if the claim that Little Albert’s identity is now known (i.e., Douglas Merritte) is discussed, then articles that disagree with this claim will not be cited in most of these discussions in order to maintain the good story line.
Method
The textbook sample was a large convenience sample that included the current editions of 23 introductory psychology textbooks. The most recent copyright date of 21 of these texts was 2012–2014, the current 3-year revision cycle for introductory textbooks at the time of this study. I included two texts with a 2015 copyright date because they were already published and available in early 2014, when this study was conducted. If two versions of a text (regular and brief) were available, I included the version with the latest copyright date in the sample to increase the probability that recent developments in the story might be covered. Complete reference information for all 23 texts is given in the References section. The textbook sample is a good mix of contemporary (initially published after 2000) and older (initially published before 2000) introductory psychology textbooks. The mean edition number for the sampled texts is 4.8. The sample included the most recent introductory text (Grison, Heatherton, & Gazzaniga, 2015) and the oldest, Psychology and Life (Gerrig, 2013), first published in 1937 and now in its 20th edition.
To determine where the coverage of the Little Albert story was located within each text, the subject index and the name index were checked for “Little Albert study” or variants such as “Little Albert experiment” and “J. B. Watson,” respectively. For two textbooks not in my possession, this search process was not used. Instead, the authors of these texts sent me the relevant pages from their texts in PDF files. The accuracy of the coverage in each text was then checked, and any inaccuracies noted. The nature of the inaccuracies was also noted. I first checked for inaccuracies in accordance with Harris’s (1979) two error categories: (a) less serious ones in which a minor detail has been misrepresented, such as an incorrect conditioned stimulus (e.g., a rabbit instead of a rat) or an incorrect age for Albert and (b) those of more significance that misrepresent the generalization stimuli and results (e.g., the rabbit and dog were white) and the postexperimental fate of Little Albert (e.g., the inclusion of a fictitious deconditioning of Albert). Harris (2011) reported that he sometimes found that coverage of Mary Cover Jones’s deconditioning of a child’s fear of rabbits (Jones, 1974) was now often provided at the end of the Little Albert story. Thus, I checked to see whether this was the case with current introductory textbooks. Harris (2011) also reported that only a few textbooks mention Little Albert’s playing with the hair of the two female research assistants while reacting negatively to Watson’s hair. So I checked each text for inclusion of this anomalous generalization finding.
Although no previous systematic analysis of the Little Albert photos in introductory textbooks seems to have been conducted, Harris (2011) reported that he found some errors in which the photo caption did not match the photo. Therefore, I analyzed the Little Albert photos that were included in the present text sample with respect to (a) their content and (b) the accuracy of their captions. Finally, I checked for coverage of the recent developments in the Little Albert story (i.e., the supposed identity, medical condition, and early death of Little Albert). If included, I checked the accuracy of the coverage, especially with respect to whether the debatable status of these developments was made clear and the citation of critical articles included.
Results and Discussion
Minor Inaccuracies
The hypothesis that there should be few minor errors was supported. With respect to misspelling Rosalie Rayner's last name, it was spelled correctly in all of the textbooks. 7 A new misspelling, however, has crept into the textbooks. In the six texts that mentioned Douglas Merritte (the infant claimed to be Little Albert by Beck et al., 2009) by name, two (33%) misspelled his last name as Merritt. Hopefully reporting this error will lead authors of future discussions of Douglas Merritte to use the correct spelling. There were also a few inaccuracies concerning other minor details of the story. For example, one text described Little Albert as an orphan since birth, but obviously he was not because he lived with his mother at the hospital where the study was conducted and where she was a wet nurse. Another text reported that Albert’s mother withdrew him from the study a month after it began, but this is impossible because the study began when Albert was 9 months old and finished when he was 1 year, 21 days old.
All of the texts correctly reported that Little Albert was initially conditioned to fear a rat and not a rabbit (or any other animal). There was, however, some variance in describing the rat. Fourteen texts referred to a “white rat,” four to a “white laboratory rat,” and one each to a “live white rat,” a “laboratory rat,” a “live laboratory rat,” a “tame, white rat,” and a “tame white laboratory rat.” These last two descriptions of a “tame” rat are similar to the “pet albino rat” description reported by Harris (2011). Both seem to be authors’ attempts to ward off student prejudices toward viewing a rat as a fearful object. Actually, Watson and Rayner (1920) only referred to the rat as “a white rat,” so some of the additions of “laboratory” in the description of the rat (though accurate) may possibly have also been made to defuse student’s beliefs about rats as inherently fear arousing.
It is important to note that Albert was approximately 9 months old when the study began and Watson and Rayner assessed his reactions to several stimuli. There was, however, a 2-month delay between this baseline assessment and the beginning of the fear-conditioning trials. Albert was 11 months and 3 days old when the conditioning trials began. Thus, this 2-month gap between these two phases of the study may have created problems for text authors. Eleven texts gave his age as 11 months (the age at which the fear-conditioning trials began), five gave it as 9 months (Albert’s age at the beginning of the study), one gave both 9 months and 11 months and correctly identified what happened at both ages, and the other six texts avoided any possible age problems by describing Albert only as a baby or infant. There were some misrepresentations of the timing of the first two phases of the study, especially when Albert’s age was given as 9 months. Some of the text descriptions led to the perception that the conditioning trials began soon after the initial fear assessment, but I do not see this as a serious misrepresentation of the study. The 2-month interval between the two phases of the study is very unusual, and the reason for this delay before beginning the fear-conditioning trials has still not been decisively determined. Various explanations have been proposed. For example, according to Hunt (1993), Watson and Rayner allowed 2 months to pass so that the initial testing experiences would fade from Albert’s memory. Fridlund et al. (2012a), however, proposed that this 2-month hiatus was possibly due to some health problems suffered by Douglas Merritte (their supposed Little Albert) and the closing of Johns Hopkins University during a 2-week Christmas vacation period.
Serious Inaccuracies
According to Harris (2011), the serious inaccuracies about Watson and Rayner deconditioning Little Albert have largely disappeared and to some extent have been replaced with coverage of Jones (1974) and her desensitizing a young boy of his fear of rabbits. Harris was correct about the fictitious deconditioning descriptions. Not one text claimed that Watson and Rayner deconditioned Little Albert of his fear. Thus, this inaccuracy seems to have disappeared from introductory textbooks. In addition, only 7 of the 23 texts included a discussion of Jones in their coverage of the Little Albert story. This is a little surprising because Jones’s deconditioning of a young boy’s fear of rabbits would seem to fit naturally with the Little Albert story, especially because Mary Cover Jones had been one of Watson’s students.
The hypothesis that inaccuracies about the generalization testing and findings would not be that prevalent was generally supported, but the description of Watson and Rayner’s (1920) generalization stimuli and findings varied greatly across textbooks. Fifteen texts reported the findings accurately, although in most cases not completely. Three texts provided an accurate and rather complete description of the findings, four reported that the fear generalized to a rabbit, dog, and sealskin (or fur) coat, and seven had the fear generalizing to other (or several) furry objects or in one case, other white or furry objects. The remaining text claimed the fear response generalized to “other stimuli that Watson had presented along with the rat at the initial meeting” and then specifically mentioned the rabbit, wool, and Santa Claus mask. Only 1 of these 15 texts, however, mentioned that although Albert’s fear generalized to Watson’s hair, it did not generalize to the hair of the two observers. Seven of the other eight texts were inaccurate because they committed a whiteness generalization error like those described by Harris (1979). These descriptions included claiming Albert’s fear generalized to “other furry white objects,” “other white stimuli including a man with a white beard,” “other stimuli that resembled the rat in being white and furry,” “other white fluffy items including Watson’s fake white beard,” “white rabbits and a mask with a white beard,” “the sight of a white rabbit,” and “a white fur coat.” None of the texts at least claimed that the dog was white. Some of these errors are likely due only to a poor choice of phrasing the description (e.g., the conjunction rather than disjunction of white and furry) and can easily be corrected. The generalization error in the other text was rather idiosyncratic. It reported that the fear generalized to “other small animals and odd-looking masks.”
These whiteness generalization errors have been pointed out before (e.g., see Harris, 1979), so it appears that some text authors have either not read the relevant critical literature or if they did, ignored it (as Paul & Blumenthal, 1989, found). It is worth noting that only 2 of the 23 texts cited any of the critical studies, and they only cited Paul and Blumenthal (1989).Watson and Rayner (1920) did not report the color of the rabbit, dog, or the sealskin coat. Thus, to determine whether they were white or nonwhite, film footage or still photographs developed from the film footage would need to be consulted. There are many websites providing archival film footage of the Little Albert study online (e.g., www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xt0ucxOrPQE and www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hBfnXACsOI). Such film footage typically includes some of the objects used in the preconditioning fear assessment (e.g., the dog and the monkey) and some of the objects used in the generalization testing (e.g., the rabbit, the dog, and the sealskin coat), making it clear which stimuli are nonwhite and which are white.
Photo Problems
The photo analysis found that 3 texts included two photos of Little Albert, 18 included one photo, and 2 did not include any photos. One of these latter two texts, however, provided a sequence of three drawings depicting a boy (much older than Albert) being conditioned to a white rat. Eight texts used the photo of Albert playing with a white rat, eight used the photo of Albert responding to Watson in a mask (the same mask in all the photos), five used the photo of Albert showing fear of the white rat, and three used the photo of Albert showing fear of the rabbit during generalization training. It should be noted that none of these three latter texts included a whiteness generalization error, possibly because the rabbit is clearly nonwhite in the photo. The photo in which Watson is wearing a mask (Harris, 2011) seems to have created a problem for textbook authors in that it was described as a “Santa Claus” mask in two texts, as a “bunny” mask in two texts, as an “odd-looking mask” in one text, and not described at all in the other three texts.
This photo with Watson wearing a mask is the same photo that Harris (2011) reported had errors in the captions to it in some introductory texts (e.g., that the mask was identified as a clown mask). He said that the mask is the Santa Claus mask that Watson used, but he admitted that given that the photo is at least a third- or fourth-generation copy, it may not be clear what type of mask it is that Watson is wearing in this photo. Another contributing factor to the ambiguity of this photo is that Watson’s hand that is holding the mask in place blocks the visibility of the area where the white beard would be on the mask. However, Noland White (personal communication, April 8, 2014) pointed out that in the film footage of the study, Watson is not wearing a suit jacket in the pretesting phase and Albert is on a dark pallet, but in the footage of the generalization testing phase of the study, Watson is wearing a jacket and Albert is sitting on a white pallet. Thus, because (a) Watson is wearing a jacket and Albert is sitting on a white pallet in this photo with the ambiguous mask and (b) according to Watson and Rayner (1920), the Santa Claus mask was the only mask used in generalization testing, this mask must be what Watson and Rayner called the “Santa Claus mask.” Regardless, the current findings clearly support the claim that the identity of the mask is ambiguous, at least to introductory textbook authors. It is worth noting that the ambiguous mask that Watson is wearing in this photo does not resemble the Santa Claus mask that Watson is wearing on page 30 of his (1928) book, Psychological Care of Infant and Child. The white Santa Claus beard and mustache are clearly depicted in this latter photo. However, there are also problems with this photo. It might be an artist’s drawing and not even a photo, and if it is a photo, it appears to have been retouched to emphasize the beard and mustache. In sum, it is my opinion that any misidentifications of the ambiguous Santa Claus mask are clearly understandable. The nature of the mask in the photo is definitely ambiguous. This ambiguity is also likely at least partially responsible for leading one text author to report Albert’s fear as generalizing to “other small animals and odd-looking masks.” The mask in the photo is definitely “odd-looking.”
Both the captions for the ambiguous photo in the two texts that claimed that it is a Santa Claus mask stated that in the photo, Albert is generalizing his fear to other “white, furry objects.” In the two texts claiming that it is a bunny mask, one says that Albert is generalizing his fear of the white rat to the mask because it is similar to the white rat, and the other text only says that Watson and Rayner are showing Albert an unusual bunny mask. The four captions that do not specifically identify the mask have nothing informative to say about the photo or provide an inaccuracy about the generalization findings. One merely says that this is a photo of Little Albert with Watson and Rayner; one asks the question, “How did Watson and Rayner condition Little Albert to fear small, furry objects?”; the one that describes the mask as odd-looking says that the fear generalized to “other small animals and odd-looking masks;” and the other one says that Little Albert was conditioned to fear a white rat and demonstrated that fear to a rabbit, a dog, and a sealskin coat. In this latter text, the photo is a numbered figure, and the reference to the figure in the text proper refers to the fear conditioning of Albert to the white rat, and the photo clearly does not illustrate that. In sum, these eight captions have nothing informative to say about the photo, provide misinformation about the generalization findings, or are problematic in some way.
Aside from this problem with the captions for the ambiguous Santa Claus mask photo, most of the other photo captions were accurate and described what was depicted in their respective photos. Only four captions failed to describe what was depicted in the photo, and one caption described Albert being conditioned to fear a white lab rat but oddly, the photo showed Albert playing with a rat. There were also two photos without captions.
Recent Story Developments
With respect to the third hypothesis regarding coverage of the recent developments in the Little Albert story, only nine texts (39%) mentioned the claim that the identity of Little Albert had been established, and only six of these texts actually used Douglas Merritte’s name. Eight of the nine texts cited Beck et al. (2009) as support for the claim, and one of these texts also cited Beck et al. (2010). Strangely, one text cited Harris (2011) instead of one of the Beck et al. articles as the reference for the Merritte claim, and the Harris article is clearly anti-Merritte (i.e., arguing Merritte is likely not Little Albert). In support of the third hypothesis which proposed that anti-Merritte articles would not be cited, only three of the nine texts cited any anti-Merritte articles. One cited Powell (2011), one cited Powell (2010) and Reese (2010), and one cited Powell (2010, 2011) and Reese (2010). The other six texts did not even mention that the claim had been challenged. Thus, either the anti-Merritte sentiment has been left out of the story in these six texts or the authors of these texts are not aware of it. It was also surprising that only nine texts mentioned the Douglas Merritte claim because the initial Beck et al. article was published in the American Psychologist in 2009, providing sufficient lead time for coverage in the sampled textbooks. The copyright dates for these nine texts were spread about equally (1–3) across the 4 years, 2012–2015. Also surprising was the finding that only 1 of the 23 texts cited the Fridlund et al. (2012a) article that discussed Merritte’s possible neurological impairment, given that 19 texts (83%) had copyright dates of 2013 or later and 9 (39%) had copyright dates of 2014 or 2015. However, the fact that the Fridlund et al. article was published in History of Psychology may be partially responsible for its lack of citation. Hopefully, the present article will lead more introductory psychology authors to include the Fridlund et al. article, the earlier articles concerning the Douglas Merritte claim, and the latest articles discussed in Note 6 claiming that Albert Barger, not Douglas Merritte, was Little Albert into their coverage of the Little Albert story.
Epilogue
Although there are some inaccuracies in the coverage of the Little Albert story in the introductory psychology textbooks in this study, current textbook authors seem to be doing a pretty good job in their coverage of the Little Albert story. Most of the inaccuracies are concerned with the generalization testing and findings in Watson and Rayner’s (1920) study, specifically with the nature of the objects to which Albert’s fear generalized. This study, along with the other previous articles pointing out inaccuracies in textbook coverage of the Little Albert story, should help authors to get their generalization “stories” straight. Cornwell and Hobbs (1976) provided a nice précis of the Watson and Rayner study, which I highly recommend. Text authors might also want to revisit the original Watson and Rayner article, which was reprinted in American Psychologist in 2000, to clarify any questions that they still may have concerning the Little Albert story. In addition, the ambiguous photo of Watson supposedly in the Santa Claus mask scaring Little Albert created problems for authors. Thus, it is probably a good idea for the authors who used this photo to replace it in the next edition of their text with one of the other photos that are not problematic. The photos of Little Albert playing with a white rat, showing fear to a white rat, or showing fear to a rabbit would all be good replacement choices. Finally, reading, or rereading, the articles concerning the recent unsettled issues in the Little Albert story would also likely provide more insight into the Little Albert story. All such articles that were published prior to this study or are presently in press are cited here.
Although Watson and Rayner’s Little Albert study has many limitations and methodological flaws (e.g., the study used only one subject, the procedural details were poorly reported, the measurements of fear were subjective and imprecise, and the stimuli used to test for generalization were inadequate) and might be considered by some to be merely an unconfirmed pilot study (Samelson, 1980), it has become one of psychology’s most famous (infamous) studies and a mainstay in introductory psychology textbooks. Regardless of its lack of methodological rigor, the important contribution of the Little Albert study in promoting the behaviorist movement in the first half of the twentieth century cannot be denied. In addition, Watson and Rayner’s speculation about what treatments of child anxiety would be like laid the groundwork for exposure therapy, systematic desensitization, counterconditioning, and modeling (Field & Nightingale, 2009). Hence, Watson and Rayner’s contribution to modern clinical psychology was also substantial.
Field and Nightingale (2009) provide an interesting discussion of the Little Albert study’s contribution to modern clinical psychology by contrasting what modern clinical psychology is now versus what it would be like in a parallel universe in which the Little Albert study never took place. This begs the question: Whatever happened to Little Albert in this parallel universe? According to Field and Nightingale, because he dreamt of a white animal and terrifying sounds echoing throughout the corridors of the hospital, his instincts told him that he had to get away from such a dangerous place. So he crawled into a laundry basket and hid beneath the dirty blankets, and the basket was ushered through the foreboding hospital corridors, loaded into the laundry truck, and taken to the laundry company. Yes, Albert had escaped. There was a nationwide search, but Albert was not found. Somehow he grows up to be in charge of the rodent house at the national zoo in Washington, DC, and Watson and Rayner never published an article on conditioned emotional responses. Most importantly, introductory psychology textbook authors and teachers in this parallel universe never have to worry about getting the Little Albert story straight. The question “Whatever happened to Little Albert?” is moot.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.