John B. Watson's Experiment: The Little Albert Experiment

The Little Albert Study is a well-known experiment, in the psychology field, that tested to see if a person can be emotional conditioned to a specific stimulus. The researcher, John B. Watson, was inspired by Ivan Pavlov’s experiment process, in which Pavlov conditioned the dog to drool every time he rings the bell. Motivated by his discovery, Watson wants to create an experiment to show that emotions can be conditioned to people as well.
Classical conditioning is a learning process of one associating a stimulus to another. Watson begin the process by getting a young participant, known as Little Albert, and expose him to particular objects to see if he will react to them in anyway. Albert was exposed to a white rat, a rabbit, a monkey, and
It involved manipulating a baby to get a specific result that Watson tried to achieve. This is similar to Walster 's manipulating self-esteem experiment which he manipulated his clients. Walster got several girls and gave them a personality test that purposely said "you 're amazing" or "you 're bad" to the participants, to see how they will behave. What was wrong about Walster 's experiment, the girls do not know this test was rigged and led to believe it until the experiment was over. This could have meant that the female participants, who got "you 're bad", could have been negatively affected by believing that they are not great as they believe to be thus hurting their self-esteem. This is also bad to those who got "you 're good" because they may have an ego boost that may lead to their undoing in relationship or performance. Just like Walster 's experiment, Watson did not attempt to reverse the harm he did to Albert. Albert was forced to deal with the loud noise that made him cry that caused him to react negatively to any furry
It is not wrong for him to test this theory but the way it was executed caused criticism in his work. What Watson should have done, to make his work more ethical, is if he can conditioned a positive emotion on an individual. Instead of banging loud noises, every time Albert sees the white mouse, Watson could have made Albert laugh with silly noises. After this occurs to Albert a few times, Albert will associate the white mouse with happiness instead of crying. This will still show that emotions can be conditioned on people and more of an ethical method as it will not hurt the baby physically nor