Faculty Forum

The writer is working on a biography of the late John 8. Watson (1878-1958) and was very interested in reading the piece on the "Rat Rabbit" problem in the February 1977 issue of TOP. As a sort of postscript to the February piece, there is still another interpretation of Watson and Rayner's study of Albert in the conditioned fear experiment. This was called to my attention by Russell M. Church of Brown University, who reinterpreted the Watson and Rayner experiment in a paper he wrote in 1966 (see Lipsitt, 1970). Lipsitt points out that "Church suggests that because the aversive stimulus used in the study, noise, was not presented contingent upon the occurrence of the conditioned stimulus (the white rat) but instead was presented contingent upon the child's response of touching the animal, the paradigm is that of an instrumental punishment procedure, rather than of classical aversive conditioning" (p. 288). , My feeling is that this reinterpretation is essentially correct. Lipsitt goes on to say: "The Church observations on the Watson and Rayner experiment should serve as a caution that our distinctions among classical and operant paradigms may not be honored as much in experimental practice as they are in our conceptualizations. It is nevertheless of more than passing interest that Watsc~n made his point about the learning capacities of infants by demonstrating an instance of instrumental rather than of classical conditioning" (pp. 288-289). Still another view of Watson's experiment with little Albert, not mentioned in the February piece, was that of Harry F. Harlow (1949). He said: "The formation of social-emotional learning sets is not to be confused with mere stimulus generalization, a construct applied in this field with undue freedom. Actually a learning set once formed determines in large partthe nature and direction of stimulus generalization. In the classic study in which Watson conditioned fear in Albert, the child developed a fear of the rat and generalized this fear, but failed to develop or generalize fear to Watson, even though Watsor must have been the more conspicuous stimulus. Apparently Albert had already formed an affectional and social-ernotional learning set to people, which inhibited both learr~ing and simple Pavlovian generalization" (p. 64). And still another and recent interpretation of little Albert has been put forwar13 by Paul G. Creelan (1975). He says "I suggest that we can interpret this experiment [with Little Albert] as a symbolic repetition of an event that took place recurrently in puritanical households, the occasion of a loud, threatening warning at the child's playing, not with the symbolic rat but with his genitals, those tiny peninsular aspects of a boy's self-identity which are ambiguously self-and-other, just as the rat with which 'Little Albert' sits and plays is alternatingly close and then far away. In this experiment Watson identifies with the punishing parent, frightening 'Little Albert' away from his masturbation, his exper~ments related-to the at-~abbit" problem, such as that of Edward ChaceTolman (1951, pp. 4-7; 286-287). This "Rat Rabbit" problem is certainly one of the historic experiments in psychology that has produced a variety of interpretations, and has been referenced hundreds of times.