WE ARE ALL LITTLE ALBERTS NOW

 

In 1920, the American psychologist John B. Watson of Johns Hopkins University embarked on a disturbing experiment to develop irrational phobias in human beings. He paid an impoverished mother one dollar so he could experiment on her infant son, who he renamed ‘Little Albert.’

Watson exposed Little Albert to rabbits and puppies. Little Albert happily played with the animals until Watson loudly clanged metal pots and pans to alarm the baby. A phobia of furry creatures was successfully installed and Little Albert was sent on his way to live with it for the rest of his one dollar life.

A delighted Johns Hopkins raised Watson’s salary by 50% to keep him at the university, but later fired him for sleeping with one of his students. Watson then went to work in… can you guess? I’ll give you a moment to guess what industry Watson went on to work in.

That’s right, advertising! 

Watson was employed by the J. Walter Thompson agency and tasked with scaring consumers into purchasing certain products. Watson made out, for example, that not using a particular brand of toilet roll would land your arse on an operating table.

In his advertising, Watson played upon what he termed the ‘fear response’, part of what was understood to be the ‘hypochondriac culture’ of the 20th century. Watson sought to appeal to readily malleable emotions rather than recalcitrant, rational intellects.

Watson claimed that he was able to do what he did because of a ‘lack of individuality in the emerging mass society’. In 1935 he wrote a book called ‘Influencing the Mind of Another’ where he boasted that he ‘could make any human being afraid of any object in the world.’

Watson famously viewed human beings as programmable machines. He said that we are ‘made’ and not ‘born.’ Maybe he thought this because he was a machine himself, a machine that could not pity a distressed infant. Maybe he thought we are all like him. Was he right?

Right or wrong, his approach was certainly effective. We are part conditioned by his methods and much of our culture is made in his image. Taking the baton from the holy men who preceded him, this machine man used fear to control us and he made us love it.

In his book, ‘Mechanical Man: John B. Watson and the Beginnings of Behaviourism’, Kerry Buckley wrote that Watson inspired a ‘progressive dream’ where science is ‘a new religion’ with ‘a binding faith for its practitioners.’  

Get on your knees. We are all Little Alberts now.