Guppy Love

It has long been observed– though not scientifically– that women seem to show a vague preference for men who are already spoken for. This observation is known as the wedding ring effect, and there are numerous competing theories as to why it may be. Some suggest that the wedding ring is a cue that a man is “safe,” a passing opportunity for empty flirting; while others theorize that the female psyche sees the ring as an indication that another woman has deemed him worthy. There is also the possibility that the increase in feminine attention is purely imagined, a way for a married man to reassure himself that he’s still got “it” (or for that matter, that he ever had “it” to begin with).

It is weighty philosophical matters like these which have plagued civilization since its inception, but like so many of the great riddles, the answer may be found in a fish–in this case in a little matter called guppy syndrome.

The animal kingdom analog of the wedding ring effect is called the guppy syndrome because it was in the guppy that it was first documented. Perhaps it is more properly called mate-choice copying. To observe the effect one takes a large tank filled with female guppies, and adds about the same number of relatively indistinguishable male guppies. It doesn’t take too long for the guppies to get adjusted to the new environment and, like any society, they soon begin mating. As is true with most species, it is the females who determine who gets to score, and an odd thing occurs: despite the fact that the males are all pretty much alike, some guys get all the luck, and others are spurned.

Why are the females all lining up to mate with a small, eclectic group of males? Is there a subtle physical difference that the females are basing their choices upon? Is there something in their social countenance? Are some of the males just too smart to make good mates?

In 1996 when this effect was first identified, a myriad of cruel scenarios were introduced to discover what was happening–for some reason, many scientists have a keen interest in finding out what makes individuals more attractive to the opposite sex. Generally a female guppy is attracted to a male with more color, but they found if a female is given the choice between a lonely but very colorful male and a lesser-colored but actively mating male, she’ll go against norms and choose the male with less color. When a group of females are separated and allowed to watch a male and female going at it, that male is generally quite popular with the ladyfish when everyone is allowed to mingle again; this holds true even after more males are introduced.

There are a couple of theories as to why this happens. Perhaps the sight of unabashed sexual congress drive the females into a frenzy of passion. Maybe the females assume that the male’s previous partner had discovered some inconspicuous yet crucial quality that made him a superior mate. Or perhaps practice is the key to being a good mate, and females will always pick the male they know has put in some hours.

Mate-choice copying can be observed in several species of fish and birds, but the real question is: can we extrapolate this behavior to humans? Fish aren’t known for their intelligence, rationale, or discrimination, so there are plenty of people who say that one can see this happening in people too.

In a singles’ bar one might observe that there is a group of men who receive the lion’s share of courting, but that’s as far as the analogy dares to go. In the night club there is no uniformity among the men, nor are there any controls over the assertiveness of potential suitors; there is very rarely copulation in full view of all the attendees. Those pesky “scientific ethics” hinder any effort to reproduce the Guppy Syndrome with humans in a controlled environment.

Since no one is willing to replicate the circumstances of the guppy syndrome for people, one can only speculate about the contortions a human mind makes in mate-choice copying. The Wedding Ring Effect is one such contortion, but once again those damnable ethics bar us from doing any really sordid testing. In one disappointingly tame attempt to study this, a woman was sent to sit in a bar for a long time. Sometimes she wore a wedding ring, and others not. Observers tracked how often she was approached. Their findings suggested that heterosexual human males don’t pay attention to jewelry– whether or not she brandished a wedding band made little difference in terms of philandering frequency.

Another, better-devised experiment was conducted where women were shown a series of photographs and asked to indicate which man they preferred. The moderately creepy cards had similar men’s faces on the left and right, and a woman’s face in the center; in each she was looking at one of the men, and wearing either a smile or a neutral expression. After perusing the array, the women generally indicated that the men receiving the virtual positive feminine attention were the more desirable.

So it seems there is some guppy in us and our mating techniques, though it’s hard to say just how much. So far, only one practical application of the data has arisen: in the wild one might sometimes spy a guy in a white lab-coat brandishing a life-sized portrait of a woman’s face that smiles toward him. Thanks to steady march of scientific progress, the fish-probing researcher of today just might be the ladies’ man of tomorrow.

The Unburdened Mind

“I don’t think I feel things the same way you do.”

The man sits at the table in the well-fitted attire of success—charming, witty, and instantly likeable. He is a confident, animated speaker, but he seems to be struggling with this particular point.

“It’s like… at my first job,” he continues, “I was stealing maybe a thousand bucks a month from that place. And this kid, he was new, he got wise. And he was going to turn me in, but before he got the chance I went to the manager and pinned the whole thing on him.” Now he is grinning widely. “Kid lost his job, the cops got involved, I don’t know what happened to him. And I guess something like that is supposed to make me feel bad, right? It’s supposed to hurt, right? But instead, it’s like there’s nothing.” He smiles apologetically and shakes his head. “Nothing.”

His name is Frank, and he is a psychopath.

In the public imagination, a “psychopath” is a violent serial killer or an over-the-top movie villain, as one sometimes might suspect Frank to be. He is highly impulsive and has a callous disregard for the well-being of others that can be disquieting. But he is just as likely to be a next-door neighbor, a doctor, or an actor on TV—essentially no different from anyone else who holds these roles, except that Frank lacks the nagging little voice which so profoundly influences most of our lives. Frank has no conscience. And as much as we would like to think that people like him are a rare aberration, safely locked away, the truth is that they are more common than most would ever guess.

“[M]y mother, the most beautiful person in the world. She was strong, she worked hard to take care of four kids. A beautiful person. I started stealing her jewelry when I was in the fifth grade. You know, I never really knew the bitch — we went our separate ways.” –Hare, Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us

The word psychopathy dates back in an early form to the 19th century, but as a modern term it’s primarily used in reference to the work of Canadian psychologist Robert Hare. Hare’s PCL-R tool (Psychopathy Checklist – Revised) was developed to test for a wide range of socially deviant behaviors and personality traits, the most important being the absence of any sense of conscience, remorse, or guilt. The result of this combination is a destructive, self-serving, and often dangerous individual sometimes called “the born criminal.”

The psychopath’s world is a strikingly skewed one in which the normal laws of human emotion and interaction do not apply—yet it serves as reality for a sizable portion of humanity. Spanning all cultures and eras, roughly one man in every 100 is born a clinical psychopath, as well as one woman in every 300. They are so common that every person reading this sentence almost certainly knows one personally; indeed, a significant number of readers are likely psychopaths themselves.

Many potential psychopaths might not even realize they have the condition, nor has there traditionally been any easy way for others to recognize them. The leading scientific test is Hare’s PCL-R, but to be valid it must be performed by a qualified professional under controlled conditions. For those who can’t be bothered with such expensive frills, we present the PCL-DI: an alternative, PCL-inspired test guaranteed to appear scientific.

The concept of the psychopath is only the latest and most refined in a long string of attempts to account for a certain pattern of conduct. In the 19th century, psychiatric clinicians began to notice patients in their care who fit no known diagnosis, but who nevertheless displayed strange and disturbing behaviors. They were impulsive and self-destructive. They had no regard for the feelings and welfare of others. They lied pathologically, and when caught, they shrugged it off with a smirk and moved on to the next lie. It was a puzzle—because while there was clearly something unusual about these patients, they showed none of the psychotic symptoms or defects in reason thought necessary for mental illness at the time. Indeed, apart from a tendency to follow foolish and irresponsible impulses that sometimes got them into trouble, they were coldly rational—more rational, perhaps, than the average citizen. Their condition therefore came to be referred to as manie sans délire (“insanity without delirium”), a term which later evolved into moral insanity once the central role of a “defective conscience” came to be appreciated. By the 20th century, these individuals would be called sociopaths or said to suffer from antisocial personality disorder, two terms that are still used interchangeably with psychopathy in some circles, while in others are considered distinct but related conditions.

The psychopath does not merely repress feelings of anxiety and guilt or fail to experience them appropriately; instead, he or she lacks a fundamental understanding of what these things are. When asked a question such as “What does remorse feel like?” for instance, the typical psychopath will become irritated, deflect the question, or attempt to change the subject. The following response from a psychopathic rapist, asked why he didn’t empathize with his victims, shows just how distanced such a person can be from normal human emotion:

“They are frightened, right? But, you see, I don’t really understand it. I’ve been frightened myself, and it wasn’t unpleasant.” –Hare, Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us

Arriving at a disaster scene, a psychopath would most likely gather to watch with the rest of the crowd. He might even lend assistance if he perceived no threat to his own safety. But he would feel none of the panic, shock, or horror of the other onlookers—his interest would fall more on the reactions of the victims and of the crowd. He would not be repulsed by any carnage on display, except perhaps in the same sense as serial killer Paul Bernardo when he described cutting up one of his victims’ bodies as “the most disgusting thing he had ever done.” He was referring to the mess it made.

Despite this emotional deficiency, most psychopaths learn to mimic the appearance of normal emotion well enough to fit into ordinary society, not unlike the way that the hearing impaired or illiterate learn to use other cues to compensate for their disabilities. As Hare describes it, psychopaths “know the words but not the music.” One might imagine that such a false and superficial front would be easily penetrated, but such is rarely the case, probably because of the assumption we all tend to make that others think and feel essentially the same way as ourselves. Differences in culture, gender, personality, and social status all create empathy gaps that can seem almost unfathomable, but none of these is as fundamental a divide as the one that exists between an individual with a conscience and one without. The psychopath’s psychology is so profoundly alien to most people that we are unable to comprehend their motives, or recognize one when we see one. Naturally, the industrious psychopath will find this to his advantage.

Some psychologists go so far as to label the psychopath “a different kind of human” altogether. Psychopathy has an environmental component like nearly all aspects of personal psychology, but its source is rooted firmly in biology. This has caused some researchers to suspect that the condition isn’t a “disorder” at all, but an adaptive trait. In a civilization made up primarily of law-abiding citizenry, the theory goes, an evolutionary niche opens up for a minority who would exploit the trusting masses.

This hypothesis is supported by the apparent success many psychopaths find within society. The majority of these individuals are not violent criminals; indeed, those that turn to crime are generally considered “unsuccessful psychopaths” due to their failure to blend into society. Those who do succeed can do so spectacularly. For instance, while it may sound like a cynical joke, it’s a fact that psychopaths have a clear advantage in fields such as law, business, and politics. They have higher IQs on average than the general population. They take risks and aren’t fazed by failures. They know how to charm and manipulate. They’re ruthless. It could even be argued that the criteria used by corporations to find effective managers actually select specifically for psychopathic traits: characteristics such as charisma, self-centeredness, confidence, and dominance are highly correlated with the psychopathic personality, yet also highly sought after in potential leaders. It was not until recent years—in the wake of some well-publicized scandals involving corporate psychopaths—that many corporations started to reconsider these promotion policies. After all, psychopaths are interested only in their own gain, and trouble is inevitable when their interests begin to conflict with those of the company. This was the case at Enron, and again at WorldCom—and Sunbeam CEO Al Dunlap, besides doctoring the books and losing his company millions of dollars, would allegedly leave his wife at home without access to food or money for days at a time.Hermann Goering

The thought of these people wearing suits and working a 9-5 job conflicts with most people’s image of psychopaths gleaned from films like The Godfather and The Silence of the Lambs. But it shouldn’t be surprising. A lack of empathy does not necessarily imply a desire to do harm—that comes from sadism and tendencies toward violence, traits which have only a small correlation with psychopathy. When all three come together in one individual, of course, the result is catastrophic. Ted Bundy and Paul Bernardo are extreme examples of such a combination.

“Do I feel bad when I hurt someone? Yeah, sometimes. But mostly it’s just like… uh… (laughs). I mean, how did you feel the last time you squashed a fly?” –Unnamed rapist/kidnapper

If psychopaths often appear where we don’t expect them, neither does the clinical term always apply where we think it might. Nazi Luftwaffe chief Hermann Goering is thought to have met the diagnostic criteria, but Hitler’s own behavior was frequently inconsistent with that of a psychopath. Columbine killer Eric Harris fit the description, but his accomplice Dylan Klebold did not. In total, only about 20% of a typical prison population qualifies as psychopathic (half of the violent offenders), and the difference from the general population is readily apparent to those who know them well. Even the most hardened of normal offenders can find their psychopathic cellmates unnerving.

The same discovery awaits most anyone who becomes close to such an individual. In romantic relationships, a psychopath may be charming and affectionate just long enough to establish intimacy with a partner, and then suddenly become abusive, unfaithful, and manipulative. The bewildered partner might turn to friends and family with their story, only to be met with disbelief—how could the warm, outgoing individual everyone has come to know possibly be guilty of these acts? All too often, the abused partner blames the situation on themselves, and comes out of the relationship emotionally destroyed.

But from a comfortable distance, the impression given off by a psychopath is often highly positive. The same absence of inhibitions and honesty that makes psychopaths so dangerous also gives them unusual powers of charisma through self-confidence and fabricated flattery. The aforementioned Sunbeam CEO Al Dunlap was a legend in business circles—“a corporate god,” some called him—precisely for his ruthless, results-oriented business style and in-your-face, furniture-hurling personality. In social circles, psychopaths are often the most popular friends among members of both sexes. And strikingly, in entertainment media such as films and books, it’s not just the villains who tend to have psychopathic personalities—it’s the heroes, too.

One doesn’t have to look far to find examples of this kind of protagonist. James Bond, the promiscuous, daring secret agent who can ski down a mountainside while being chased by armed attackers without breaking a sweat, is a textbook case. Frank Abagnale Jr., the charming con-man on whom the recent book and film Catch Me if You Can were based, is another highly likely candidate. And nearly every character played by action stars such as Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone—the ones who vow revenge on an enemy and rampage about while coolly spouting one-liners—would qualify for a diagnosis.

“I wouldn’t be here if my parents had come across when I needed them,” he [‘Terry,’ imprisoned bank robber] said. “What kind of parents would let their son rot in a place like this?” Asked about his children, he replied, “I’ve never seen them. I think they were given up for adoption. How the hell should I know?” – Hare, Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us

The reasons we look up to these conscience impaired people are unclear. Recent Bond film Casino Royale didn't shy away from acknowledging Bond's psychopathic tendenciesMost likely it has something to do with the confidence they exude, the ease they seem to feel in any situation—a trait that comes easily in someone essentially incapable of fear or anxiety. Maybe we’re easily suckered in by their natural glibness and charm. Or maybe on some level we envy the freedom they have, with no burden of conscience or emotion.

The psychopaths, for their part, will never know things any other way. Most experts agree that the condition is permanent and completely untreatable. It’s been theorized that their situation is the result of a kind of inherited learning disorder: without dread or anxiety to deter them, psychopaths are unable to make the associations between behavior and punishment that make up the building blocks of a normal conscience. That being the case, it is questionable whether a description such as “evil”—which is not uncommon in both the popular and scientific literature—can really be applied to individuals incapable of understanding what it means.

But to those who cross their paths, this may be small comfort.

The Birth of a Language

Languages are thoroughly organic entities. Each one is complex and versatile, constantly shifting according to the needs of those who use it. When social, political or environmental changes create a gap in a language, its individual speakers use creativity and problem-solving skills to generate a solution. Successful changes to the language are spread quickly and often intuitively.

Another example of creativity influencing language is when small groups of children invent their own languages; however these do not tend to be languages in the fullest sense. They are typically simple, and based on the structures and/or vocabularies of languages that the children already know; they tend to function more as secret codes than anything else.

In at least one case, however, a group of children was able to spontaneously invent a totally new language out of necessity. The children in question were deaf, illiterate, and devoid of all but the most basic language skills, yet they were able to devise an intricate method of communication to use amongst themselves. Nicaraguan Sign Language (or ISN, for either Idioma de Señas de Nicaragua or Idioma de Signos Nicaragüense) is a unique and remarkable linguistic phenomenon of recent years.

After the Sandinista revolution of 1979, Nicaragua opened a school program for deaf children at a special-education center as part of a nationwide campaign to increase literacy. A second school started operating in 1980, and by 1983 the two schools had 400 students between them.

However, progress proved hard to come by. There was no access to any of the hundreds of established sign languages from around the world; instead, the students were instructed in lip-reading and alphabet finger-spelling. Overall, though, the children seemed to retain very little of what they were taught. Because the young students had virtually no language skills, the finger-spelled letters meant nothing to them.

This was unsurprising. Prior to these attempts at teaching them to communicate, deaf children in Nicaragua had interacted with their respective families via idiosyncratic systems of very rudimentary gestures (known as mimicas in Spanish). This meant that deaf children from different families couldn’t even understand each other, let alone form friendships.

But an interesting effect appeared once the many deaf children had begun interacting in the group setting of the schools. The children started learning and elaborating on one another’s mimicas, and the resulting system of signs rapidly grew. The amazed teachers watched as their students began to communicate quite successfully among themselves. This was immeasurably more than any little ‘secret code’ based on an existing, spoken language; these children were inventing the entire structure of ISN along with the vocabulary. They were, in a sense, teaching themselves to use language in general.

When the Nicaraguan Ministry of Education became aware of ISN, its members found themselves baffled by the phenomenon. They asked for help from sign-language specialist Judy Shepard-Kegl, then of Northeastern University in Boston. Intrigued, she set out for Nicaragua to document and analyze the fledgling language. She boldly started out by directly interacting with deaf teenagers at a vocational school. There, she was able to figure out a handful of the more straightforward signs – such as “house” and “what’s up?” – but found herself confounded by the majority of the communication. Frustrated, Kegl moved on to a school for younger children.

The difference between the teenagers’ and the children’s language was striking. The younger speakers of ISN included many more subtleties – for example, verb agreement, in which the number, gender, and/or location of the subject(s) is indicated with verb inflection. It was obvious that the children were using their language at a substantially more fluent level than the teenagers, a finding which coincided with the theorized “critical period” for language acquisition. The idea holds that, in general, young children can rapidly absorb and master new languages until the age of six; the ability declines quickly until age twelve, and after that any acquisition of a new language requires substantially more effort.

In the case of ISN specifically, Kegl suggests that the gestures exchanged by the older students were interpreted by the younger ones as language input. The younger children learned the gestures and very naturally began to add to them, filling in any linguistic gaps encountered along the way. This was what allowed ISN to become a language, rather than a mere set of signs. At this point the older children learned ISN from their younger classmates; their less fluent usage was akin to any second-language acquisition in adulthood. Of course it is still possible that the language could change over time, but it has developed enough that the process would be no different from the gradual shifts of any language.

Kegl and her husband, James Shepard-Kegl, went on to found two experimental schools – the Escuelita de Bluefields and Escuelita de Condega – to teach and observe ISN directly. Teachers at the schools are careful not to introduce any elements of other sign-language systems; these could possibly contaminate the development of ISN. The language now has an estimated 900 to 1200 signers.

The implications of a spontaneously-created language are numerous. Prominent linguists such as Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker have interpreted ISN’s birth as evidence supporting their respective theories that human beings possess an innate capacity for complex language. Obviously it would be unethical to perform an experiment to see whether a group of children left to grow up completely isolated will develop a language, but the circumstances under which ISN was born were similar.

Late prominent American Sign Language researcher William Stokoe, however, believed that the development of ISN may have been helped along by the children’s limited exposure to Spanish and to other forms of signing. Either way, it is incredible that such an elaborate language was improvised and refined by a group of children who had never truly read or heard a single word. ISN’s origins – along with the fact that it is still thriving after twenty years – stands as a testament to the human mind’s natural ambition to express complex ideas, even in the face of serious obstacles.

Doctor Watson’s Phobia Factory

In the early decades of the twentieth century the discipline of psychology was still in its infancy, but beginning to make significant headway. Pioneering researchers were enthusiastically unraveling the human mind, and some were willing to go to alarming lengths to satisfy their curiosity.

One such trailblazer was a behaviorist named John B. Watson. In 1919, his curiosity was aroused after observing a child who showed an irrational fear of dogs. Watson supposed that a shiny new human would not possess an inborn fear of domesticated animals, but if “one animal succeeds in arousing fear, any moving furry animal thereafter may arouse it.” In order to satiate his scientific appetite, he undertook a series of experiments at Johns Hopkins University to determine whether an infant could indeed be conditioned to fear cute-and-cuddly animals by associating them with scary stimuli. A couple decades earlier Pavlov’s notorious dogs had been conditioned to salivate at the sound of a bell; Watson hoped to expand upon the concept.

In 1920 Watson secured access to a “healthy, stolid, and unemotional” nine-month-old infant named Albert B., the son of a wet nurse who worked in the hospital. He was assisted by Rosalie Rayner, a graduate student at the university. The researchers’ first order of business was to establish a psychological baseline. They tried exposing the infant to a white rat, a rabbit, a dog, and a monkey, and Albert reached for each animal with cheerful curiosity. The researchers brought him items such as masks and clumps of cotton, and he manipulated the objects with interest. They placed a long steel rod behind Albert’s head and struck the metal sharply with a claw hammer, and he flinched with evident distress. The infant’s baseline reactions to these stimuli were duly noted, and two months later the peculiar series of “joint stimulation” experiments was underway. Excerpts from Dr. Watson’s notes outline its progression:

Age: 11 months, 3 days

• White rat suddenly taken from the basket and presented to Albert. Just as his hand touched the animal the bar was struck immediately behind his head. The infant jumped violently and fell forward, burying his face in the mattress.
• Just as the right hand touched the rat the bar was again struck. Again the infant jumped violently, fell forward and began to whimper.

Age: 11 months, 10 days

• Rat presented suddenly without sound. When the rat nosed the infant’s left hand, the hand was immediately withdrawn. It is thus seen that the two joint stimulations given the previous week were not without effect.
• Joint stimulation. Fell over immediately to right side and began to whimper.
• Rat alone. The instant the rat was shown the baby began to cry. Almost instantly he turned sharply to the left, fell over on 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.

Watson also wondered whether Albert would transfer these acquired fears to other animals or objects. After a five-day furlough, additional experimentation ensued:

Age: 11 months, 15 days

• Rat alone. Whimpered immediately, withdrew right hand and turned head and trunk away.
• Rabbit alone. Negative responses began at once. He leaned as far away from the animal as possible, whimpered, then burst into tears. When the rabbit was placed in contact with him he buried his face in the mattress, then got up on all fours and crawled away.
• Fur coat (seal). Withdrew immediately to the left side and began to fret. Coat put close to him on the left side, he turned immediately, began to cry and tried to crawl away on all fours.
• [A lab assistant] brought the Santa Claus mask and presented it to Albert. He was again pronouncedly negative.

Age: 11 months, 20 days

• Rat alone. Withdrawal of the whole body, bending over to left side, no crying. Fixation and following with eyes. It was thought best to freshen up the reaction by another joint stimulation.
• Just as the rat was placed on his hand the rod was struck. Reaction violent.
• Rabbit alone. Leaned over to left side as far as possible. Began to whimper.
• When the rabbit was left on Albert’s knees for a long time he began tentatively to reach out and manipulate its fur with forefingers. While doing this the steel rod was struck. A violent fear reaction resulted.
• Rabbit alone. Started immediately to whimper, holding hands far up, but did not cry.

Albert’s profound negative response to the rabbit was taken as evidence that the conditioned fear had indeed transferred to other animals, just as Watson had predicted. Albert also showed anxiety in the presence of a dog, and was vexed by a wad of cotton. However when the researchers gave Albert his wooden toy blocks, he immediately started playing and gurgling contentedly.

Watson next sought to determine whether these acquired fears had any substantial staying power. The researchers granted the infant a one month reprieve, after which they once again confronted Albert with his fuzzy phobias:

Age: 12 months, 21 days

• Santa Claus mask. Withdrawal, gurgling, then slapped at it without touching. When his hand was forced to touch it, he whimpered and cried. He finally cried at the mere visual stimulus of the mask.
• Fur coat. Wrinkled his nose and withdrew both hands, drew back his whole body and began to whimper as the coat was put nearer. In moving his body to one side his hand accidentally touched the coat. He began to cry at once, nodding his head in a very peculiar manner.
• The rat. He allowed the rat to crawl towards him without withdrawing. The rat was then allowed to crawl against his chest. He first began to fret and then covered his eyes with both hands.
• The rabbit. After a few seconds he puckered up his face, began to nod his head and to look intently at the experimenter. He reached out tentatively with his left hand and touched the animal, shuddered and withdrew the whole body. The experimenter then took hold of his left hand and laid it on the rabbit’s back. Albert immediately withdrew his hand and began to suck his thumb. Again the rabbit was laid in his lap. He began to cry, covering his face with both hands.

John B. WatsonWithout a doubt, the thirty day hiatus was insufficient to expunge the artificially-induced fear. One last scientific question remained: could these conditioned emotional responses be removed through laboratory methods? Watson had originally intended to end his experiment by “re-conditioning” the infant to neutralize the fear response, but he ultimately opted to drop that portion of the experiment due to a lack of time. When he published the results of his study, however, he suggested that the best re-conditioning method would have been to replace the traumatizing metallic CLANG! with a positive stimulus such as A) physical stimulation of “first the lips, then the nipples and as a final resort the sex organs”; B) candy or food; or C) constructive activities.

The psychological community received Watson’s results with rapt fascination. Several months later, in spite of his new-found popularity, the officials at Johns Hopkins asked Watson to resign from the university. But the request had nothing to do with the questionable ethics of his baby-scaring experiments; he was dismissed due to unauthorized “experimentation” with a lovely young graduate student. Watson’s wife discovered evidence that he and his assistant Rosalie Rayner had participated in unabashed physical stimulation of one another’s sex organs, and consequently Watson lost his career and his marriage amidst a flurry of publicity.

By modern standards, Watson’s infant-phobia experiment was grossly unethical for numerous obvious reasons. The research was undertaken during the rough-and-tumble adolescence of psychology, a time when the subjects’ well-being was seldom considered equal to the scientific rewards. Moreover, the experiment itself was rife with procedural flaws which rendered the results ambiguous at best. For instance, the researchers only tested with one subject and one negative stimuli, and the tests tended to be improvised and slapdash. Although Watson himself conceded that the experiment was imperfect, he considered the results to be valuable to science. “These experiments would seem to show conclusively that directly conditioned emotional responses as well as those conditioned by transfer persist, although with a certain loss in the intensity of the reaction, for a longer period than one month,” he wrote in his infamous paper. “Our view is that they persist and modify personality throughout life.”

Today, the “Little Albert” experiment is the stuff of psychological legend. It has been thoroughly cited, scrutinized, expanded, and embellished since its publication in 1920. But as is true with many fundamentally flawed studies, the scientific community ultimately categorized the experiment as intriguing-yet-uninterpretable. Though Watson spent the rest of his career begging to differ, no firm conclusions can be drawn from his hard-earned data–except perhaps that one should avoid employing experimental psychologists as babysitters.

As for Albert, he and his mother slipped into obscurity immediately following the study, and were never publicly identified. No one knows what ultimately became of the tormented infant, nor whether his repulsion of cute-and-cuddly creatures haunted him into adulthood.