Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [169]
Watson and Rayner delayed further trials for a week “in order not to disturb the child too seriously,” as they wrote—a curious comment, since they intended to and did disturb him seriously when they continued. In the course of half a dozen more pairings in which the rat was placed close to Albert and the bar hit behind his head, Albert developed a full-fledged conditioned fear response to the sight of the rat:
The instant the rat was shown the baby began to cry. Almost instantly he turned sharply to the left, fell over on his left side, raised himself on all fours and began to crawl away so rapidly that he was caught with difficulty before reaching the edge of the table.
Still more experiments showed that Albert had generalized his fear to other furry things: a rabbit, a dog, a seal coat, cotton wool, and Watson sporting a Santa Claus mask. After a month’s layoff, Albert was tested again, and, as Watson and Rayner reported with apparent gratification, he cried and was afraid of a rat and a number of furry stimuli shown him without any accompanying clanging of the steel bar.
Shockingly—by today’s ethical standards of research—Watson and Rayner made no effort to decondition Albert, who left the clinic several days after the final tests. They did say in their report that “had the opportunity been at hand we should have tried out several methods [of deconditioning],” which they outlined. They then jested that twenty years hence some Freudian analyst might extract from Albert a pseudo-memory of having tried to play with his mother’s pubic hair at age three and been violently scolded for it.
Watson paid a high price for what he had done in the course of the collaboration, though not what he had done to Albert. He developed a mad passion for beautiful young Rosalie Rayner and began an affair with her. He was seen around town with her, was away from home a great deal, and carelessly (or perhaps by unconscious design) left in a pocket a passionate note from Rosalie that his wife, Mary, found. He had been unfaithful on previous occasions and Mary had known about some of the episodes and weathered them, but this involvement was far more threatening to her and she felt compelled to take action.
She thought up a way to get damning evidence of his involvement, hoping to use it to force him to give up Rosalie instead of risking a scandal that would cost him his professorship. The Watsons dined at the home of Rosalie’s parents one evening, in the course of which Mary said she had a headache and would like to lie down for a while in Rosalie’s room. Alone and with the door shut, she searched the room and found and made off with a batch of love letters from Watson, who had been uncharacteristically expressive in them and rather explicit about his and Rosalie’s lovemaking.
But when she confronted Watson and threatened to expose him, he refused to break off with Rosalie. Mary decided to sue for divorce, and either she or her brother, to whom she had lent the letters and who had made copies of them, sent them to Frank Goodnow, president of the university. At that time and in that place, such conduct by a professor was utterly impermissible. In late September 1920, Goodnow summoned Watson to his office and demanded his resignation; Watson hotly defended himself but had no choice except to comply. When he left the office, he went home, packed a bag, and headed for New York, his dazzling career in psychology abruptly and permanently ended just as the movement he had spearheaded was succeeding.
Watson later married Rosalie and had two sons with her. He landed a job in New York, which eventually earned him a very large salary, as resident psychologist to the