Elephants on Acid (20 page)

The Harriet Lane Nursery Home, 1919. An attractive young woman releases a rat onto a mattress. The rat twitches its nose, sniffing the air. Then it scurries across the fabric toward a pudgy, round-faced infant. “Little Albert, look at the rat,” the woman says. Albert gurgles and reaches out his hand. His fingers brush the rat’s fur. At that instant—BANG!—a middle-aged man standing behind the child smashes a hammer against a steel bar. The sound rings out like a gunshot. Albert flinches with shock. He sucks in his breath, his lips tremble, and he begins to cry.

The man with the hammer was John Broadus Watson, a professor of psychology at Johns Hopkins University. Depending on whom you ask, he was either senselessly scaring a child or conducting an experiment that would revolutionize modern psychology.

The purpose of the experiment was simple. Watson hoped to find out whether he could make eleven-month-old Albert fear a white rat. Why he wanted to do this was a little more complicated.

Let’s begin with the experiment itself. When Watson first met Albert—or Little Albert, as he became popularly known—the young boy didn’t fear many things. Watson described him as “stolid and unemotional” and “extremely phlegmatic.” When presented with a variety of objects—a white rat, a rabbit, a dog, a monkey, a Santa mask, a burning newspaper—Albert stared at them, showing little reaction.

Watson set out to break down Albert’s stoutheartedness and teach him fear. During the first experimental session, Watson’s assistant, a graduate student named Rosalie Rayner, showed Albert a rat. Twice Albert reached out to touch it, and each time Watson struck the hammer against the bar. Albert started violently when he heard the jarring sound, but he didn’t cry. Not yet.

The experimenters gave Albert a break for a week, then brought him back for more. Again and again they showed Albert the rat and hit the steel bar as soon as he touched the animal. Pretty soon Albert grew wary of the rat. He was learning to associate it with the scary noise. But he didn’t easily give in to fear. Instead, he stubbornly stuck his thumb in his mouth and tried to ignore the experimenters. Frustrated, Watson pulled the child’s thumb out of his mouth, showed him the rat again, and then—BANG!—hit the bar.

After repeating this process seven times, Watson and Rayner finally achieved the desired result. Albert took one look at the rat and, without the bar having been struck, burst into tears. He had learned to fear the rodent.

Over the next month and a half, Watson and Rayner periodically retested Albert. His fear of the rat not only remained—though they did refresh his memory of the scary noise a few times—but also spread to similar objects he hadn’t feared before. The brave little boy had become a coward. He now whimpered and cried when presented with a rabbit, a dog, a fur coat, cotton wool, a Santa mask, and even Watson’s hair.

Watson had hoped to reverse the process, removing Albert’s newly acquired fears, but he never got the chance. Albert’s mother, who worked at the nursery as a wet nurse, left and took her son with her. Nothing is known of what became of the boy.

Watson’s fear-reversal technique would have consisted of teaching Albert to associate the rat with pleasurable sensations. Watson wrote that he could have achieved this in a number of ways. For instance, he could have given Albert candy whenever Albert saw the rat, or he could have manually stimulated the child’s erogenous zones in the presence of the rat. “We should try first the lips, then the nipples and as a final resort the sex organs,” Watson noted. Perhaps it’s just as well Albert got out of there when he did.

So what exactly did Watson think he was achieving by teaching an infant to fear a rat? It was all part of his attempt to make psychology less philosophical and more scientific. Psychologists, he felt, spent too much time pondering vague, ambiguous things like emotions, mental states, and the subconscious. He wanted psychologists to focus on measurable, visible behaviors, such as the relationship between stimulus and response. Something happens to a person (a stimulus occurs) and the person responds in a certain way. Action A causes Response B. All very quantifiable and scientific. In Watson’s mind, there was no need for patients to lie on a couch and talk about their feelings. Instead, by studying the stimulus-response interaction, scientists could learn how to control human behavior. It was just a matter of applying the right stimulus to trigger the desired response. He once famously boasted:

Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select—doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors.

Watson designed the Little Albert study to prove that a simple stimulus, such as banging on a steel bar, could produce a wide range of complex emotions in a child—namely, fear of rats, dogs, rabbits, wool, hair, fur coats, and Santa Claus. The experiment was a deliberate swipe at Freudian psychology, which, Watson sneered, would probably have attributed Albert’s fears to repressed sexual urges.

Watson made his case well, and behaviorism, as he named his approach, became a dominant school in psychological research for the next fifty years. Which is why many would call the Little Albert experiment revolutionary. Many others, however, argue that while the experiment may have been good drama, it was bad science and didn’t prove anything, except that any child will cry if you harass him enough.

Watson would have liked to continue his infant studies, but he never had the chance. His wife smelled a rat and found out his affair with his graduate student assistant, Rosalie Rayner. The judge in the subsequent divorce proceedings remarked that the doctor was apparently an expert in
mis
behavior. Because of the scandal, Watson was forced to leave Johns Hopkins.

Lurid rumors would later suggest Watson was not only sleeping with Rayner, but also using her as a subject in various sex experiments, measuring physiologic responses such as her pulse rate as he made love to her. This is offered
⁵¹
as the true reason for Watson’s dismissal—the story being that his wife discovered his records of this research. However, there is no good evidence to substantiate such gossip. Watson frequently did express an interest in studying the human sexual response, but if he had conducted such experiments, he probably would have mentioned them to someone. After all, he wasn’t one to shy away from the frank discussion of sexuality.

Blacklisted by academia, Watson headed to Madison Avenue and the lucrative world of advertising. There he put his stimulus-response theories to great effect, introducing techniques that are used to this day. He designed successful ad campaigns for coffee, baby powder, and toothpaste, among other items. Watson figured that getting a consumer to perform a desired action, such as buying a product, was simply a matter of applying the correct stimulus. One stimulus that invariably worked was sex. If Watson could have reached out and directly stimulated consumers’ erogenous zones, he would have. Instead he had to settle for visual arousal. So the next time you see bikini babes selling beer, know that you have John Watson to thank.

“Eat your vegetables.”

“I don’t want to.”

“You’re not leaving this table until you finish them.”

“Waaaahhhhhhh!”

Scenes like this are all too common at dinner tables, as desperate parents try to force good nutrition on their resistant kids.

Wouldn’t it be easier just to let children eat whatever they want? Whenever frazzled parents compare notes, someone inevitably makes this tempting suggestion. And someone else is sure to chime in with, “Yeah, wasn’t there a doctor who conducted an experiment that proved that if kids are allowed to eat whatever they want, they naturally choose a well-balanced diet?”

Yes, there was such a doctor. Her name was Dr. Clara Davis. But despite the urban-legend-style rumors that circulate about her study, what, if anything, it proved is up for debate.

Davis’s study, conducted in 1928, was a culinary version of Psammetichus’s language experiment. Psammetichus had hoped to discover the natural language of humans by observing children who had never heard others speak. Similarly, Davis hoped to discover humankind’s natural diet by observing children who had never been fed solid food before and were therefore free of adult tastes and habits. Would they prefer a carnivorous, vegetarian, or omnivorous diet? And more important, would their bodies automatically make them desire the foods that met their nutritional needs, providing them with a well-balanced diet?

Davis used as her subjects three newly weaned infants between seven and nine months old at Cleveland’s Mount Sinai Hospital. She arranged for the infants—Donald, Earl, and Abraham—to eat alone, away from other children. At the beginning of each meal, a nurse placed a tray in front of the boy. On the tray were dishes containing different foods—chicken, beef, cauliflower, eggs, apples, bananas, carrots oatmeal, and the like. The child was free to eat whatever he wanted from this tray, in whatever quantity he desired. The nurses had specific instructions about how the feeding should occur:

Food was not offered to the infant either directly or by suggestion. The nurses [
sic
] orders were to sit quietly by, spoon in hand, and make no motion. When, and only when, the infant reached for or pointed to a dish might she take up a spoonful and, if he opened his mouth for it, put it in. She might not comment on what he took or did not take, point to or in any way attract his attention to any food, or refuse him any for which he reached. He might eat with his fingers or in any way he could without comment on or correction of his manners. The tray was to be taken away when he had definitely stopped eating, which was usually after from twenty to twenty-five minutes.

Initially the children didn’t display great manners. They thrust their whole hand or face into the dishes. They threw food on the floor. When they tasted food they didn’t like, they spluttered and spat it out. But soon they figured out the routine. Like little princes, they would point at a dish with their stubby fingers, open their mouths expectantly, and wait for the food to arrive.

Two of the children stayed on the diet for six months, the third for a year. At the end of this period, Davis examined her data and tried to draw some conclusions.

She found it impossible to discern any innate dietary preferences beyond noting that humans are definitely omnivorous. At first the children sampled dishes randomly, but soon they developed favorites they sought out no matter where the dishes were placed on the tray. However, their favorites changed unpredictably every few weeks. The nurses would say, “Donald is on an egg jag this week.” Or perhaps it would be a “meat jag” or a “cereal jag.” Milks, fruits, and cereals were, by volume, the foods the kids chose most often. They chose bone product, glandular organs, and sea fish least often.

Did the children make sensible choices that provided for their dietary needs? Here we should note that Davis conducted her experiment before scientists had a clear understanding of the role vitamins play in our bodies’ health. So from a modern perspective, her analysis seems less than rigorous. She basically eyeballed the kids, decided they looked plump and well nourished, and declared they had done a fine job of managing their dietary needs. She noted the children had come down with a series of illnesses during the course of the experiment—including influenza, whooping cough, and chicken pox—but she didn’t regard this as significant. And perhaps it wasn’t, given the germs they were exposed to at the hospital.

However, Davis did offer one tantalizing piece of evidence to indicate the existence of a self-regulating dietary mechanism. One of the children, Earl, had begun the experiment with a case of rickets. Davis added a dish of cod liver oil to his tray in the hope that he would voluntarily down the fishy liquid. Surprisingly, he did—for three months, until his rickets were cured. Then he stopped eating it. Perhaps his body made him desire the medicine he needed. Or perhaps it was random chance. It’s difficult to say.

Davis declared her experiment a success, but she readily admitted this wasn’t an invitation to laissez-faire rules in the dining room. As her critics often point out, and as she acknowledged, there was a trick to her experiment: The
⁵²
children had no unhealthy options. Davis gave the infants no canned, dried, or processed foods, no peanut butter sandwiches, no chocolate milk, no cheese, no butterscotch pudding, no ice-cream sundaes—in other words, no tasty but unhealthy enticements to lure them from the path of righteous eating. Davis had stacked the deck in her favor. As long as the kids consumed enough food, the odds were they would get a balanced diet.

So if you’re a parent and want to try your kids on Davis’s eat whatever-you-want diet, feel free. It probably won’t do any harm. But realize the first step is to eliminate junk food. All Happy Meals, crisps, pizza, and fizzy drinks must go. Then watch your child’s eyes widen with delight as you offer him a selection of cooked marrow, spinach, raw carrots, unprocessed whole wheat, and cauliflower. You probably won’t be able to count to five before you hear the
“Waaaahhhhhhh!”
Most parents will quickly conclude it’s easier to stick with the pizza and force the little darlings to eat a few vegetables now and then.

The Leuba household, 1933. An infant lies awake in a crib. Suddenly a man opens the bedroom door and walks toward the baby. He is wearing a cardboard mask with narrow slits cut out for his eyes. He stands over the child without saying a word. He holds himself tense, as though consciously trying to suppress his body language. Then he reaches down and pokes the child gently beneath the armpit. The child looks up and smiles. The man nods slightly, his hands continuing to move as if following a predetermined pattern. He pokes along the ribs, under the chin, on the side of the neck, inside the knees, and finally runs a finger along the soles of the feet, all without making a sound. When the child laughs the man abruptly steps away, picks up a journal, and busies himself writing in it for the next few minutes.