Little Albert
You may recall a previous article that I posted to the blog as an April Fool’s Day joke last year. Aside from being a joke, the article was intended to point out the fact that there seem to be countless rumors and myths surrounding the nature of Little Albert’s conditioning. I mentioned in that article that, to the best of my knowledge, no one really knew what exactly had happened to Little Albert. What I didn’t know at the time was that two people had embarked on a journey nearly seven years before that article was written to solve the mystery behind what happened to Little Albert. Roughly six months after my initial post, their findings were made public in an article entitled, “Finding Little Albert,” published in the October 2009 issue of the American Psychologist.
Hall P. Beck and Sharman Levinson examined every ounce of evidence they could find that might form a trail leading to the identity of Little Albert. Beck and his students were able to narrow down when Watson and Rayner filmed Albert based on correspondence between Watson and Frank Goodnow, president of Johns Hopkins University, concerning the purchase of the film roll used in filming the study. Beck and his students knew that Albert was assessed for a baseline at 8 months, 26 days, so knowing the date the study was filmed allowed them to get an idea of when Little Albert might have been born.
Beck and Levinson were able to find census reports from 1920 that were done for the Harriet Lane Home, where Little Albert’s mother was documented as residing during the time of the study. Using the census data and looking at all possible wet nurses from the Harriet Lane Home during that time frame, they were able to narrow the search down to three women. Of those three women, Arvilla Merrite seemed most likely to be Little Albert’s mother, since she had a child born March 9th, 1919 (8 months and 26 days before December 5th, 1919), and since she was the only one of the three mothers to be both Caucasian and to have record of having a child while serving as a wet nurse at Johns Hopkins. Arvilla Merrite’s son was named Douglas Merritte. Albert B. was most likely a pseudonym given to Douglas for the study.
The article is a very interesting, and I would highly recommend if you haven’t already that you check it out. If you’re a college student, or have access to EBSCOhost, you can do a search for “Finding Little Albert” which will give you access to the full text article. The article goes into much more depth than I did here to discuss how they came to the conclusion that Albert B. was most likely Douglas Merritte.
So now that we know who Little Albert really was, whatever became of him? Sadly, Douglas Merritte passed away at the young age of 6 from hydrocephalus. There are no records to indicate whether or not the conditioning of his fears were generalized to all things white, or all things furry, and no mention of whether or not the conditioning remained with him until the end of his life. A picture of his grave can be found at:
http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=pv&GRid=22681621&PIpi=8256255
If Douglas were still alive, today would have been his 91st birthday. Happy birthday Douglas. We’ll miss you.
A special thanks to comments on the previous blog entry pointing to the article published in the American Psychologist.
