Unit 4 · Learning Theory · Reading 3 of 13
Why It Works: Contingency, Watson, and Little Albert
Before you read
Your phone buzzes for texts, apps, and alarms. Why don't you feel excited at every buzz? Keep that question in mind while you read.
Words you'll own by the end
- Contiguity: how close together in time two things happen.
- Contingency: how reliably one thing predicts another (Robert Rescorla).
- Behaviorism: the view that psychology should study only observable behavior (John B. Watson).
- Little Albert: Watson's 1920 study that conditioned fear in a baby.
1. Close in time isn't enough
Reading 2 ended with a puzzle. Why did Pavlov's dogs link the metronome to food, and not a toy or another dog that happened to be in the room? Early theorists thought contiguity, or closeness in time, was what mattered. If two things happen together, you link them.
Robert Rescorla (working with Allan Wagner) showed that's not the whole story. What matters is contingency: the neutral stimulus has to reliably predict that the UCS is coming. The metronome worked because it always came right before food. A toy that sat in the room whether or not food arrived predicted nothing, so the dogs ignored it.
This adds a thinking part to classical conditioning. The learner is, in a sense, figuring out what predicts what. Most learning theorists today favor Rescorla's model. Timing still helps: learning goes best when the UCS follows the NS quickly.
Check-in: A dog hears a bell every time it's fed, but also hears the same bell 20 other times a day with no food. Will the bell become a strong CS?
2. John B. Watson: only study what you can see
John B. Watson is often called the father of behaviorism. Before him, many psychologists used introspection: asking people to look inward and report their thoughts and feelings. Watson thought that was too subjective. He argued psychology should study only what can be observed and measured: actions, not thoughts or the unconscious.
Behaviorists believe our actions are the result of past conditioning: rewards, punishments, and our environment. Watson was so confident in this that he famously claimed that, given "a dozen healthy infants" and control of their world, he could train any one of them to become any kind of person: doctor, lawyer, artist, or thief.
3. The Little Albert study
In 1920, Watson set out to show that phobias could be learned through classical conditioning, not caused by hidden forces in the unconscious, as Freud suggested.
He worked with a baby known as Little Albert. At first, Albert liked a white rat and played with it happily. Then, each time the rat appeared, Watson made a very loud noise by striking a metal bar behind him. Albert hated the noise. He cried and tried to get away. After a number of these pairings, Albert showed fear as soon as he saw the white rat, with no noise at all.
Try it: Label the Little Albert study
Use the five parts from Reading 2.
Ethics check
This study would never be approved today. Albert may have suffered long-term harm, and Watson did not get proper informed consent from Albert's mother. Connect this to the research ethics you learned in Unit 1.
Check-in: What was Watson trying to prove with Little Albert?
Am I ready for a pop quiz?
Check a box only if you can say the answer out loud without scrolling up.
Come back to your "before you read" question
Most phone buzzes don't excite you because they don't reliably predict anything good. That's contingency. Is there one sound on your phone that does reliably predict something you care about? Write it down. It's your own Rescorla example.