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John Watson's Experiment: The Little Albert Experiment

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11PSC11C- AT1- 715797T PART B- Explain how this design was undertaken The Little Albert Experiment demonstrated that classical conditioning works in human beings. Albert was a 9-month-old baby who had not previously demonstrated any fear of rats.Psychologist John Watson placed a rat on the table in front of Albert at the beginning of the experiment, and Albert had no reaction. Then on several separate occasions John Watson began making loud noises whilst showing Albert the rat. Following this Albert cried in reaction to the noise and, after a period of conditioning, cried in response to the rat even without the loud noise. This was the start to classical conditioning. When putting aside the fame and fortune of this experiment, Watson violated most ethical standards according to ethical research of today 's time. No approval was provided, no guarantee of the subject’s safety was …show more content…

Nowadays you are given the right that you can withdraw at any stage during a study without consequence (Xavier College, 2018). In saying that participants have to be given as much information about the certain study as possible before it’s conducted so that they can ultimately make a decision about participating based on facts that they know. This is termed “debriefing” (Xavier College, 2018). In the Little Albert Experiment Albert’s mother was unaware of the conditions. Little Albert was harmed during and their was an existing potential that he could have faced life-long harm as a worst case scenario (Alexander Burgemeester, 2017). While there are many former psychologists questioning the behaviour of the father of “behavioral psychology”, the method used in this study was certainly not classed as good psychology and there was poor professional conduct throughout (Xavier College, 2018). Overall there was only one subject and the experiment lacks any form of

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Part A: The professor was driving to work one day, and another driver ran a red light, then hitting him. After this incident, whether the situation was harmless or not does not matter; as we saw with Watson's study, with little Albert and the white rat/rabbit. (Reference: Watson exposed a child to a series of stimuli with a white rat and a rabbit, then observing the child's reactions. The child initially showed no fear response on either animal. The next time Albert was exposed to the white rat, Watson made a loud noise by hitting a metal pipe with a hammer.

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He saw that the more personal, or close, the real participant had to be to the fake one, while they were being shocked, affected the obedience as well. He also noticed that if there were two other fake participants teaching that refused to shock their learners that the real participant would not comply. Finally, he tested the experimenter telling the real patient to shock the learner by telephone, instead of actually being there in person, reduced obedience as well (McLead). The Milgram experiment and the Nuremburg trials can relate extensively to explain how the Holocaust happened the way it did.

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Alex was conditioned to react in a passive manner when confronted with any action that could be considered ultra-violence. Classical conditioning experiments have been performed on humans with a large degree of success. One of the most notable and most controversial classical conditioning experiments done on humans was Watson’s “Little Albert” experiment. This experiment was conducted to test the fear response in humans. The experiment started off by introducing Albert to several animals, a white rat, monkey, bunny and a dog (Creelan).

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This essay will discuss the role of ecological validity in psychological research, drawing on material from the DE100 textbook ‘Investigating Psychology’. It will begin by giving a description of what ecological validity is, and consider it in relation to different examples of research. The research used to discuss the role of ecological validity will be based around social learning and aggression, behaviourism, and memory. Firstly the study of Bandura et al. will be considered, his experiments on children copying violent behaviours using the Bobo doll experiment.

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A psychologist named Stanley Milgram carried out an experiment focusing on the conflict between obedience and personal conscience. Three people were involved in this experiment: a teacher, a learner and an experimenter. The learner and experimenter were actors so that it was rigged for the participant to be the teacher. In this experiment, the learner has a list of paired words where the teacher names a word, awaiting the answer to be the paired word. If incorrect, a shock is to be administered, increasing with every wrong answer to a potential of 450 volts, which could kill a human.

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05.06 Discussion-Based Assessment The first thing we discussed was classical conditioning. It sort of all started after Pavlov’s experiment with the dogs. John B. Watson, a psychologist, began his testing on emotional conditioning. John’s theory was that people are not born with a fear of objects.

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While arguably one of the defining psychological studies of the 20th Century, the research was not without flaws. Almost immediately the study became a subject for debate amongst psychologists who argued that the research was both ethically flawed and its lack of diversity meant it could not be generalized. Ethically, a significant critique of the experiment is that the participants actually believed they were administering serious harm to a real person, completely unaware that the learner was in fact acting. Although Milgram argued that the illusion was a necessary part of the experiment to study the participants’ reaction, they were exposed to a highly stressful situation. Many were visibly distraught throughout the duration of the test

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Name : Muhammed Irshad Madonna ID : 250509 Subject : Medical Ethics Due Date : 8/01/2018 Paper : 1-The Milgram Experiment The Stanley Milgram Experiment is a famous study about obedience in psychology which has been carried out by a Psychologist at the Yale University named, Stanley Milgram. He conducted an experiment focusing on the conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscience. In July 1961 the experiment was started for researching that how long a person can harm another person by obeying an instructor.

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The Little Albert experiment was a case study showing empirical evidence of classical conditioning in humans. The study also provides an example of stimulus generalization. It was carried out by John B. Watson and his graduate student, Rosalie Rayner, at Johns Hopkins University. The results were first published in the February 1920 issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology. After observing children in the field, Watson hypothesized that the fearful response of children to loud noises is an innate unconditioned response.

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The experiment was executed well. Yet, there are unethical practices happened during the experiment. First, the participants were not fully informed about the experiment. The researchers did not explain to the participants the processes in conducting the experiment. The participants were not informed that they would be arrested by cops in their homes.

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His experiment was all a hoax. The shock machine was fake. All he wanted was to know how many people would be obedient and how many would be defiant. Much to Milgram’s surprise sixty-five percent of people did what were told of them, and only thirty-five percent were

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Modern psychology now bases its theories in feasibility and replicability. The fact that most of the constructs in Freud’s theory such as the id, ego and superego cannot be tested and proven has made the theory invalid today. On the other hand, behaviorism is still very valid as its based on scientific laboratory experiments. Behaviorism has been replicated in many studies with the same results being achieved. The theory is still valid in modern therapeutic applications through behavior modification and behavioral therapy e.g flooding and shaping.

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Medical Research has the potential to advance society and make life better for everyone in it. However, the ends cannot justify the means; the rights of the subjects of research cannot be violated no matter the possible benefit to mankind. Despite this, time and time again, it has been very easy for, at least allegedly well-meaning scientists to violate the rights of their research subjects because they wanted to help society as a whole. Such experiments were not performed in secret by a minority of scientists; they were often done “by respected investigators at leading medical institutions and were published in medical journals (Scandals and Tragedies 3). " It is vital that we understand the circumstances of these experiments and why they happened so

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For this paper, I chose to write about the Little Albert experiment The overall importance of this study was to discover if a human could be conditioned to develop a bias, fear, or generalized fear of an animal, object, or person based the stimuli placed around the involved person, animal or object. Watson & Rayner (1920) suggested that “in infancy the original emotional reaction patterns are few, consisting so far as observed of fear, rage and love, then there must be some simple method by means of which the range of stimuli which can call out these emotions and their compounds is greatly increased.” This means that before any conditioning occurs, the subject should have a pure response, but after minor and simple experimentation and conditioning,

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In 1913, the behaviorist movement began with the studies of John Broadus Watson (1878-1958), a pioneering figure in the development of the psychological school of behaviorism. He published an article entitled ' 'Psychology as the behaviorist views it ' ' in which he had the impression that psychology shouldn 't deal with what the people say that they think or feel, in other words, he reduced and dehumanized the human mind and its consciousness. To put it differently, he asserted a claim that the study of the human mind would be concerned only with people 's actions and behavior. Watson 's work relied upon the experiments of Ivan Petrovich Pavlov (1849-1936), a Russian Nobel laureate psychologist who had worked on animals ' responses to conditioning. For instance, in his best-known experiment, Pavlov rang a bell and then gave a dog some food.

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