Baby Albert Experiments NARRATOR: In the early part of the 20th century, psychologist John Watson and Rosalie Rainer set out to teach a baby boy called Little Albert to fear white rats using the principle of classical conditioning. This is a film of their work. The film shows several phases of their study. First, as you see here, the investigators demonstrated that prior to conditioning, Little Albert had no fears of any animals including, of course, white rats. Watson and Rainer then sought to teach Albert to fear white rats through classical conditioning. In the conditioning phase of the study, which was not filmed, the investigators struck a steel bar with a hammer whenever Albert reached for a rat, making a very loud noise that greatly upset and frightened Albert. After six such pairings of the loud noise and the rat, it was believed that the boy had been conditioned to fear white rats. That is, Albert was now expected to react fearfully to white rats whether the rats were paired with loud noises or not. In this next film sequence, we see Albert interacting with a white rat after the conditioning process. The investigators believed that the child's reaction during this trial demonstrated his newly acquired fear of white rats. Finally, the investigators expected that little Albert's conditioned fear of white rats would generalize to stimuli that were similar in key ways to a white rat. In this film segment, they were trying to demonstrate that the child now also reacted fearfully to similar objects such as a rabbit, a dog, a furry object, and a white mask worn by Watson himself.