by Alex Boese
After repeating this process seven times, Watson and Rayner finally achieved the desired result. Albert took one look at the rat and, without the bar having been struck, burst into tears. He had learned to fear the rodent.
Over the next month and a half, Watson and Rayner periodically retested Albert. His fear of the rat not only remained—though they did refresh his memory of the scary noise a few times—but also spread to similar objects he hadn’t feared before. The brave little boy had become a coward. He now whimpered and cried when presented with a rabbit, a dog, a fur coat, cotton wool, a Santa mask, and even Watson’s hair.
Watson had hoped to reverse the process, removing Albert’s newly acquired fears, but he never got the chance. Albert’s mother, who worked at the nursery as a wet nurse, left and took her son with her. Nothing is known of what became of the boy.
Watson’s fear-reversal technique would have consisted of teaching Albert to associate the rat with pleasurable sensations. Watson wrote that he could have achieved this in a number of ways. For instance, he could have given Albert candy whenever Albert saw the rat, or he could have manually stimulated the child’s erogenous zones in the presence of the rat. “We should try first the lips, then the nipples and as a final resort the sex organs,” Watson noted. Perhaps it’s just as well Albert got out of there when he did.
So what exactly did Watson think he was achieving by teaching an infant to fear a rat? It was all part of his attempt to make psychology less philosophical and more scientific. Psychologists, he felt, spent too much time pondering vague, ambiguous things like emotions, mental states, and the subconscious. He wanted psychologists to focus on measurable, visible behaviors, such as the relationship between stimulus and response. Something happens to a person (a stimulus occurs) and the person responds in a certain way. Action A causes Response B. All very quantifiable and scientific. In Watson’s mind, there was no need for patients to lie on a couch and talk about their feelings. Instead, by studying the stimulus-response interaction, scientists could learn how to control human behavior. It was just a matter of applying the right stimulus to trigger the desired response. He once famously boasted:
Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select—doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors.
Watson designed the Little Albert study to prove that a simple stimulus, such as banging on a steel bar, could produce a wide range of complex emotions in a child—namely, fear of rats, dogs, rabbits, wool, hair, fur coats, and Santa Claus. The experiment was a deliberate swipe at Freudian psychology, which, Watson sneered, would probably have attributed Albert’s fears to repressed sexual urges.
Watson made his case well, and behaviorism, as he named his approach, became a dominant school in psychological research for the next fifty years. Which is why many would call the Little Albert experiment revolutionary. Many others, however, argue that while the experiment may have been good drama, it was bad science and didn’t prove anything, except that any child will cry if you harass him enough.
Watson would have liked to continue his infant studies, but he never had the chance. His wife smelled a rat and found out his affair with his graduate student assistant, Rosalie Rayner. The judge in the subsequent divorce proceedings remarked that the doctor was apparently an expert in misbehavior. Because of the scandal, Watson was forced to leave Johns Hopkins.
Lurid rumors would later suggest Watson was not only sleeping with Rayner, but also using her as a subject in various sex experiments, measuring physiologic responses such as her pulse rate as he made love to her. This is offered as the true reason for Watson’s dismissal—the story being that his wife discovered his records of this research. However, there is no good evidence to substantiate such gossip. Watson frequently did express an interest in studying the human sexual response, but if he had conducted such experiments, he probably would have mentioned them to someone. After all, he wasn’t one to shy away from the frank discussion of sexuality.
Blacklisted by academia, Watson headed to Madison Avenue and the lucrative world of advertising. There he put his stimulus-response theories to great effect, introducing techniques that are used to this day. He designed successful ad campaigns for coffee, baby powder, and toothpaste, among other items. Watson figured that getting a consumer to perform a desired action, such as buying a product, was simply a matter of applying the correct stimulus. One stimulus that invariably worked was sex. If Watson could have reached out and directly stimulated consumers’ erogenous zones, he would have. Instead he had to settle for visual arousal. So the next time you see bikini babes selling beer, know that you have John Watson to thank.
Watson, J. B., & R. Rayner (1920). “Conditioned Emotional Responses.” Journal of Experimental Psychology 3 (1): 1–14.
Self-Selection of Diet by Infants
“Eat your vegetables.”
“I don’t want to.”
“You’re not leaving this table until you finish them.”
“Waaaahhhhhhh!”
Scenes like this are all too common at dinner tables, as desperate parents try to force good nutrition on their resistant kids.
Wouldn’t it be easier just to let children eat whatever they want? Whenever frazzled parents compare notes, someone inevitably makes this tempting suggestion. And someone else is sure to chime in with, “Yeah, wasn’t there a doctor who conducted an experiment that proved that if kids are allowed to eat whatever they want, they naturally choose a well-balanced diet?”
Yes, there was such a doctor. Her name was Dr. Clara Davis. But despite the urban-legend-style rumors that circulate about her study, what, if anything, it proved is up for debate.
Davis’s study, conducted in 1928, was a culinary version of Psammetichus’s language experiment. Psammetichus had hoped to discover the natural language of humans by observing children who had never heard others speak. Similarly, Davis hoped to discover humankind’s natural diet by observing children who had never been fed solid food before and were therefore free of adult tastes and habits. Would they prefer a carnivorous, vegetarian, or omnivorous diet? And more important, would their bodies automatically make them desire the foods that met their nutritional needs, providing them with a well-balanced diet?
Davis used as her subjects three newly weaned infants between seven and nine months old at Cleveland’s Mount Sinai Hospital. She arranged for the infants—Donald, Earl, and Abraham—to eat alone, away from other children. At the beginning of each meal, a nurse placed a tray in front of the boy. On the tray were dishes containing different foods—chicken, beef, cauliflower, eggs, apples, bananas, carrots, oatmeal, and the like. The child was free to eat whatever he wanted from this tray, in whatever quantity he desired. The nurses had specific instructions about how the feeding should occur:
Food was not offered to the infant either directly or by suggestion. The nurses [sic] orders were to sit quietly by, spoon in hand, and make no motion. When, and only when, the infant reached for or pointed to a dish might she take up a spoonful and, if he opened his mouth for it, put it in. She might not comment on what he took or did not take, point to or in any way attract his attention to any food, or refuse him any for which he reached. He might eat with his fingers or in any way he could without comment on or correction of his manners. The tray was to be taken away when he had definitely stopped eating, which was usually after from twenty to twenty-five minutes.
Initially the children didn’t display great manners. They thrust their whole hand or face into the dishes. They threw food on the floor. When they tasted food they didn’t like, they spluttered and spat it out. But soon they figured out the routine. Like little princes, they would point at a dish with their stubby fingers, open their mouths expectantly, and wait for the food
to arrive.
Two of the children stayed on the diet for six months, the third for a year. At the end of this period, Davis examined her data and tried to draw some conclusions.
She found it impossible to discern any innate dietary preferences beyond noting that humans are definitely omnivorous. At first the children sampled dishes randomly, but soon they developed favorites they sought out no matter where the dishes were placed on the tray. However, their favorites changed unpredictably every few weeks. The nurses would say, “Donald is on an egg jag this week.” Or perhaps it would be a “meat jag” or a “cereal jag.” Milks, fruits, and cereals were, by volume, the foods the kids chose most often. They chose bone product, glandular organs, and sea fish least often.
Did the children make sensible choices that provided for their dietary needs? Here we should note that Davis conducted her experiment before scientists had a clear understanding of the role vitamins play in our bodies’ health. So from a modern perspective, her analysis seems less than rigorous. She basically eyeballed the kids, decided they looked plump and well nourished, and declared they had done a fine job of managing their dietary needs. She noted the children had come down with a series of illnesses during the course of the experiment—including influenza, whooping cough, and chicken pox—but she didn’t regard this as significant. And perhaps it wasn’t, given the germs they were exposed to at the hospital.
However, Davis did offer one tantalizing piece of evidence to indicate the existence of a self-regulating dietary mechanism. One of the children, Earl, had begun the experiment with a case of rickets. Davis added a dish of cod liver oil to his tray in the hope that he would voluntarily down the fishy liquid. Surprisingly, he did—for three months, until his rickets were cured. Then he stopped eating it. Perhaps his body made him desire the medicine he needed. Or perhaps it was random chance. It’s difficult to say.
Davis declared her experiment a success, but she readily admitted this wasn’t an invitation to laissez-faire rules in the dining room. As her critics often point out, and as she acknowledged, there was a trick to her experiment: The children had no unhealthy options. Davis gave the infants no canned, dried, or processed foods, no peanut butter sandwiches, no chocolate milk, no cheese, no butterscotch pudding, no ice-cream sundaes—in other words, no tasty but unhealthy enticements to lure them from the path of righteous eating. Davis had stacked the deck in her favor. As long as the kids consumed enough food, the odds were they would get a balanced diet.
So if you’re a parent and want to try your kids on Davis’s eat-whatever-you-want diet, feel free. It probably won’t do any harm. But realize the first step is to eliminate junk food. All Happy Meals, crisps, pizza, and fizzy drinks must go. Then watch your child’s eyes widen with delight as you offer him a selection of cooked marrow, spinach, raw carrots, unprocessed whole wheat, and cauliflower. You probably won’t be able to count to five before you hear the “Waaaahhhhhhh!” Most parents will quickly conclude it’s easier to stick with the pizza and force the little darlings to eat a few vegetables now and then.
Davis, C. M. (1928). “Self-Selection of Diet by Newly Weaned Infants: An Experimental Study.” American Journal of Diseases of Children 36 (4): 651–79.
The Masked Tickler
The Leuba household, 1933. An infant lies awake in a crib. Suddenly a man opens the bedroom door and walks toward the baby. He is wearing a cardboard mask with narrow slits cut out for his eyes. He stands over the child without saying a word. He holds himself tense, as though consciously trying to suppress his body language. Then he reaches down and pokes the child gently beneath the armpit. The child looks up and smiles. The man nods slightly, his hands continuing to move as if following a predetermined pattern. He pokes along the ribs, under the chin, on the side of the neck, inside the knees, and finally runs a finger along the soles of the feet, all without making a sound. When the child laughs the man abruptly steps away, picks up a journal, and busies himself writing in it for the next few minutes.
A stranger observing these events might have been alarmed. What was the masked man doing? Was he an intruder? Did he mean to kidnap the child? But there was no cause for concern. The man was Dr. Clarence Leuba, the child’s father and a professor of psychology at Antioch College. His mysterious actions were part of an experiment to understand the phenomenon of tickling.
Leuba wondered why people laugh when they’re tickled. Tickling, after all, is not self-evidently funny. Many find it painful, especially if done to excess. So is the laughter a learned response, something we pick up as infants by observing others laugh when tickled, or is it an innate response?
Leuba reasoned that if laughter is a learned response to tickling, then it should be possible to raise a child who would not laugh when tickled. For this experiment to work, the child would need to be shielded from all displays of tickle-induced laughter. He could not hear his mother chuckle as she bent down to tickle him. Nor could he observe siblings cackle with glee as fingers sought out their armpits. If the laughter response was innate, the child would eventually laugh anyway, but if the response was learned, the child would respond to tickling with a blank stare.
Such an experiment would not be easy to conduct, but for the sake of science, Leuba decided to give it a try.
He volunteered his own household as the experimental setting. He could scarcely invade another family’s home to monitor their tickling behavior around the clock. And he would use his own newborn son as the test subject. In his research notes he designated the boy as R. L. Male.
Only one serious obstacle lay in Leuba’s path—his wife. With a single giggle she could ruin everything. In his report he cryptically noted that “the mother’s cooperation was elicited.” This doesn’t give us much of a clue about her reaction to the idea. Did she laugh, or roll her eyes and say, “For God’s sake, Clarence, why?” We will never know. But somehow Leuba did obtain her promise of assistance.
And so the Leuba household became a tickle-free zone, except during experimental sessions when R. L. Male. was subjected to laughter-free tickling. During these sessions, strict guidelines were followed. The tickler concealed his face behind a twelve-by-fifteen-inch piece of cardboard. He maintained a “smileless, sober expression, even though his face was hidden behind the cardboard shield.” And the tickling followed a regular pattern—first light, then vigorous—in order of armpits, ribs, chin, neck, knees, then feet. Occasionally Leuba used a tassel.
Even outside of the experimental sessions there were guidelines to be followed: “The baby should never be tickled when he can see or hear a person laughing or when laughter is being produced or facilitated in him by jouncing, a peek-a-boo game or the like.” Perhaps, for the mother’s benefit, this rule was posted on the refrigerator.
The experiment proceeded. The rules were enforced. But, unfortunately, a few lapses occurred. On April 23, 1933, Leuba recorded a confession from his wife—on occasion, after her son’s bath, she had “jounced him up and down while laughing and saying ‘Bouncy, Bouncy.’ ” Perhaps this was enough to ruin the experiment. That is not clear. What is clear is that by month seven, R. L. Male was happily screaming with laughter when tickled.
Leuba was undeterred. When his daughter, E. L. Female, was born in February 1936, he repeated the experiment, with the same result—laughter at seven months. You sense a certain regret in Leuba that his children kept turning out so normal. Laughter, Leuba concluded, must be an innate response to being tickled. There went his chance at raising the world’s first untickleable child.
Did the children suffer any psychological damage as a result of the experiment? Did they develop a profound fear of masked men, a fear they could never quite understand? We don’t know. A follow-up study was not conducted.
Leuba’s study received scant attention from the scientific community, although fifty-eight years later Dr. Harris did cite it in her mock-tickle-machine study (see chapter two). However, a faint echo of Leuba’s experiment can be found in Americ
an popular culture. In the 1970s a masked villain named the Tickler appeared on an episode of the TV show Spidey Super Stories. With feathers attached to his fingers, the Tickler incapacitated his victims with laughter before robbing them. A mere coincidence? Probably. But it’s fun to imagine Dr. Leuba, frustrated by the slow progress of his research, sneaking out of his home one evening and embarking on a new career as a comic-strip super villain.
Leuba, C. (1941). “Tickling and Laughter: Two Genetic Studies.” Journal of Genetic Psychology 58: 201–9.
A Girl Named Gua
From the start, Winthrop and Luella Kellogg knew their adopted daughter, Gua, was different. It wasn’t just her physical appearance—her lumpy overhanging brows or the black hair that hung down on either side of her face like sideburns. There were other things. Her jumping, for instance. Her great strength would send her flying through the air, from window to bed or from porch to ground. When startled she would instinctively vault forward two or three feet. All the other babies would simply look around bewildered.
“Of course she’s different,” people told them. “She’s a chimp!” But the Kelloggs were determined to ignore this surface difference. In their eyes, she was just a little girl—though admittedly one hairier than most.
The experiment occurred to Winthrop Kellogg in 1927, while he was a graduate student in psychology at Columbia University. He had read an article about cases of wild children raised by animals. Even after being returned to society, such children often continue to act more animal than human. They grunt and crawl around on all fours. Kellogg wondered what would happen if the situation were reversed. If an ape were raised by a human family, would it learn to act like a human, walking upright and eating with a knife and fork? Kellogg suggested to his wife, Luella, that they take a chimpanzee baby into their home and find out. They would never put it in a cage or treat it like a pet. Instead they would cuddle it, talk to it, spoon-feed it, and clothe it like a child. At the least, Kellogg figured such an experiment would offer valuable insights into the relationship between environment and heredity.