A: Back before they had too many rules about what you could and couldn’t get away with in a psychological study, experimenters would often inflict all sorts of damage on the participants of their studies in the course of pursuing their objectives. One of the most famous and controversial studies was conducted by John Watson and Rosalie Rayner using an 11-month old boy who came to be known as Little Albert (no relation to Fat Albert). With Little Albert, Watson demonstrated that many fears are conditioned through an association with other fearful situations. Before the experiment, Little Albert was a normal baby, afraid of loud noises but not much else. Little Albert loved playing with small animals – that is, until Watson taught him to be afraid of a white rat (a real one – not a Mafia snitch). He was able to accomplish this by banging a steel rod with a hammer whenever Little Albert was given the white rat to play with. Little Albert’s fear also generalized to other similar objects, such as Watson’s white hair and a Santa Claus mask. And while Watson clearly demonstrated that fear could be conditioned, since the conditioning was never reversed – he also showed just how cruel psychologists could be.