Where phobias come from and instructions on how to give phobias to your children

In the 1920s a paper was published where the methods were horrific but at least they got some very interesting results. Two scientists took a nine month old baby they named Albert, placed him in a room and exposed him to a number of fluffy things such as, a lab rat, a small dog, cotton wool, and a rabbit. Albert showed no fear of these things…. yet. They then placed a lab rat in the room with Albert and allowed him to play with it, but whenever he touched the rat they made a loud and terrifying noise behind Albert using a steel bar and a hammer. This made him distressed and cry. They repeated this “several” times and then over the next few days they exposed him to the lab rat, the dog, cotton wool and the rabbit again (this time with no noise), but Albert had associated fluffy things to the horrible noise stimulus and was scared and distressed whenever he was exposed to any of the fluffy things. Albert had gained a phobia. As the paper coldly and almost proudly put it “he is even scared of Santa Claus”. The scientists never unconditioned Albert. There have been many searches for the baby Albert and he was believed to have been found in the records in 2014. He had died in 2007 so unfortunately he couldn’t have been interviewed but his family noted that he was always scared of dogs and they made fun of him for it. Poor poor little Albert. This and other research has led to the associative model of phobia development. Some researchers have criticised this model noting that most people with phobias often don’t remember any bad experiences associated with the subject of their phobia. However, this research relies on people remembering the associating experience, and poor little Albert was only 9 months old and it is extremely unlikely that anyone has memories from that age. However, it should also be said that the human brain is the most complicated thing in the universe and by no means am I saying the associative model is the only way phobias develop. What I’m saying is that if you want to give your children or grandchildren phobias the “Little Albert” technique seems to be a good way to go. I think I might try and make my kids scared of three wheeled vans to create a new generation of Mr. Beans.
The other takeaway from this post is that scientists used to do some crazy unethical experiments. It is a good thing we became regulated requiring all experiments to be approved by human ethics committees. Unfortunately, the alternative therapy movement hasn’t had the same shift towards regulation and seem to be happy to experiment on their patients (e.g. Canadian women who died after being wrapped in mud, plastic wrap and blankets and then left for 9 hours in a hot room to “sweat out the toxins”).