Watson told the Albert story in print at least four times in four years, and Mary Cover Jones told it once more in his journal with his approval. The versions are all public domain and all online, so the drift can be followed detail by detail. None of the changes is large. What matters is that they all run in the same direction.

1920: the paper

“Conditioned Emotional Reactions”, with Rosalie Rayner, in the Journal of Experimental Psychology for February 1920. This is the only version with the laboratory notes, and the only one that says how many subjects there were: “Experimental work has been done so far on only one child, Albert B.” The bar is “a suspended steel bar four feet in length and three-fourths of an inch in diameter.” The baby weighs “twenty-one pounds at nine months of age.” He “practically never cried.” At the baseline he was “confronted suddenly and for the first time successively with a white rat, a rabbit, a dog, a monkey, with masks with and without hair, cotton wool, burning newspapers, etc.” On the third blow of the bar, at eight months and twenty-six days, “the child broke into a sudden crying fit.” At the end, “Albert was taken from the hospital the day the above tests were made.” The paper says that the response “persist[s] and modif[ies] personality throughout life,” and in the same breath that it had faded “with a certain loss in the intensity of the reaction” over the month.

1921: the magazine

“Studies in Infant Psychology”, by “Dr. John B. Watson and Rosalie Rayner Watson, New York City”, in The Scientific Monthly for December 1921, written after the dismissal and the marriage. The notes are reprinted, with small changes of wording (“Combined stimulation” for “Joint stimulation”), and the surrounding prose is new. Albert was chosen “particularly because of his stolid and phlegmatic disposition.” The experimenters “first showed by repeated tests that Albert feared nothing under the sun except loud sounds (and removal of support).” The sound test has grown an ending: on the third blow “he broke into a crying fit, turned to one side and began to crawl away as rapidly as possible with head averted.” The 1920 notes have the crying fit and nothing after it. The sentence about the bar’s weakness has changed its subject: in 1920 “had the sound been of greater intensity or of a more complex clang character … the number of joint stimulations might have been materially reduced”; in 1921 “had the sound been of greater intensity and the child more delicately organized … one or two combined stimulations might have been sufficient to condition the emotion.” The baby, not the bar, is now the reason it took seven. The mask note has gained a clause that the 1920 notes do not have: “He was again pronouncedly negative, although on all previous occasions he had played with it.” The article says of the removal of fears that “the report on this phase of our laboratory work is not yet completed.” No such report was ever made on Albert.

1924: the lectures

Behaviorism, published by Norton in 1924 and reprinted in 1925, the seventh lecture, “Emotions”, with the same text printed again, in nearly the same words, in Psychologies of 1925. “Since 1918 we have been at work upon this problem.” Albert is now “an infant weighing twenty-one pounds, at eleven months of age” where in 1920 he weighed that at nine. He “was the son of one of the wet nurses in the Harriet Lane Hospital. He had lived his whole life in the hospital. He was a wonderfully ‘good’ baby. In all the months we worked with him we never saw him cry until after our experiments were made!” The bar is now “about one inch in diameter and three feet long,” struck “with a carpenter’s hammer.” The first note of the conditioning session now begins “White rat which he had played with for weeks was suddenly taken from the basket (the usual routine).” Before the experiment, Watson says, “Albert had been playing for weeks with rabbits, pigeons, fur muffs, the hair of the attendants, and false faces,” and the 1921 clause about the mask stays. The 1920 paper’s baseline had been a single sudden showing of each object. The judgement of the result has hardened from “as convincing a case … as could have been theoretically pictured” to “Surely this proof of the conditioned origin of a fear response puts us on natural science grounds in our study of emotional behavior. It is a far more prolific goose for laying golden eggs than is James’ barren verbal formulation.”

The eighth lecture opens with the ending that misled everyone. “No further tests could be made upon Albert B., the youngster in whom the conditioned responses had been built up, because he was shortly afterwards adopted by an out-of-town family. It was just at this time that my work at Johns Hopkins was interrupted.” Neither candidate for Albert was adopted; both grew up with their mothers. And the fourth lecture, pages earlier, holds the sentence that came to stand for the whole: “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. I am going beyond my facts and I admit it, but so have the advocates of the contrary and they have been doing it for many thousands of years.”

1924: the sequel

Mary Cover Jones, “A Laboratory Study of Fear: The Case of Peter”, in the Pedagogical Seminary for December 1924, “Accepted for publication by John B. Watson.” Her summary of Albert is the first by someone who was not there, and it already differs from the notes. “Albert, eleven months of age, was an infant with a phlegmatic disposition, afraid of nothing ‘under the sun’ except a loud sound made by striking a steel bar. This made him cry. By striking the bar at the same time that Albert touched a white rat, the fear was transferred to the white rat. After seven combined stimulations, rat and sound, Albert not only became greatly disturbed at the sight of a rat, but this fear had spread to include a white rabbit, cotton wool, a fur coat, and the experimenter’s hair. It did not transfer to his wooden blocks and other objects very dissimilar to the rat.” The 1920 notes do not give the rabbit a colour, record that the cotton wool produced no “shock”, and say that Albert refused Watson’s hair and played with the two women’s. Jones adds, accurately, that “Dr. Watson intended to continue the study of Albert in an attempt to answer this question, but Albert was removed from the hospital and the series of observations was discontinued.”

After 1924: the textbooks

Ben Harris surveyed the later retellings in 1979 and again in 2011, and the pattern he found was the one Watson had started. Hans Eysenck, in 1965, made Albert a “motherless orphan” who was “quite fond of white rats” and ended with “a severe rat phobia.” Martin Seligman, in 1971, used the blocks as evidence that fear of wooden things is against nature, not noticing that the blocks were a toy the experimenters used to calm him. Textbooks made the rat a pet, the rabbit white, the coat white, the cotton “white and fluffy”, and Albert a hospital patient; several had Watson remove the fear before the child left, which, Harris found, disappeared from the books only after his article. One 1988 textbook rewrote the notes so that Albert was “transformed … into a ‘cry baby’ fearful even of Santa Claus” in twelve days, and a television course made from it showed two conditioned babies, the second being a girl Watson had filmed because she had arrived already afraid. When Harris began supplying publishers with stills from the film, one of them captioned Watson’s Santa Claus mask as a “clown mask”.

Set beside each other, the five tellings move the same five things: the bar gets smaller, the baby gets heavier and calmer, the rat becomes an old friend, the crying grows, and the ending acquires an adoption. Nothing moves the other way. A reader who had only the 1924 version would have a fearless, well-fed baby who had played for weeks with every animal in the building and was then, by a single procedure, made afraid of all of them for life, and who was then taken away by strangers. A reader with the 1920 notes has a baby who flinched, whimpered, played with his blocks between blows, had to be re-frightened twice, let the rat climb on his chest at the end, and went home with his mother. The second reader is the one the experiment was written for.

Sources

• John B. Watson and Rosalie Rayner, “Conditioned Emotional Reactions,” Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 3 no. 1 (February 1920), pages 1 to 14. archive.org
• John B. Watson and Rosalie Rayner Watson, “Studies in Infant Psychology,” The Scientific Monthly, vol. 13 no. 6 (December 1921), pages 493 to 515. archive.org
• John B. Watson, Behaviorism, New York: Norton, 1924; the 1925 printing, lectures IV, VII and VIII. archive.org
• John B. Watson, “Experimental Studies on the Growth of the Emotions,” in Carl Murchison, ed., Psychologies of 1925, Worcester: Clark University Press, 1926. archive.org
• Mary Cover Jones, “A Laboratory Study of Fear: The Case of Peter,” Pedagogical Seminary, vol. 31 (1924), pages 308 to 315. psychclassics.yorku.ca
• Ben Harris, “Letting Go of Little Albert: Disciplinary Memory, History, and the Uses of Myth,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, vol. 47 no. 1 (2011), pages 1 to 17. Eysenck, Seligman, the textbooks, the 1988 rewrite, the doubled sample and the clown mask; Eysenck’s and the textbook’s words are quoted at second hand through this paper. appstate.edu