Editing Little Albert experiment (section)

==Criticisms==
A detailed review of the original study and its subsequent interpretations by Ben Harris (1979)<ref name="Arc-Whatever" /> stated:
{{blockquote|Critical reading of Watson and Rayner's (1920) report reveals little evidence either that Albert developed a rat [[phobia]] or even that animals consistently evoked his fear (or anxiety) during Watson and Rayner's experiment.  It may be useful for modern learning theorists to see how the Albert study prompted subsequent research ... but it seems time, finally, to place the Watson and Rayner data in the category of "interesting but uninterpretable" results.}}

It is difficult to be certain exactly what happened during the Little Albert experiment since concrete evidence and scientific records are lacking. Though a film was shot during the experiment, textbooks interpret the movie differently. Various sources give contradicting accounts of events that took place, and they raise questions about exactly what stimuli were used, which stimuli the baby came to fear, and what happened to the child after the experiment. It was said that most textbooks "suffer from inaccuracies of various degrees" while referring to Watson and Rayner's study. Texts often misrepresent, exaggerate, or minimize the range of Albert's post-conditioning fears.<ref>Harris, 2011, 10</ref>

Other criticisms stem from the health of the child (cited as Douglas Merritte) who was not a "healthy", "normal" infant as claimed in the study, but one who was very ill and had exhibited symptoms of [[hydrocephalus]] since birth—according to relatives he never learned to walk or talk later in life. The child would die five years after the experiment due to complications from the congenital disease. It is stated that the study's authors were aware of the child's severe cognitive deficit, abnormal behavior, and unusually frequent crying, but continued to terrify the sick infant and generalize their findings to healthy infants, an act criticized as academic fraud.<ref name="Bartlett" /><ref name="HoPsych" /> These accusations were successfully challenged in the same journals that published the initial claims.  The articles refuting the "sick baby" claim explain that the child was actually William (called Albert by his family) Barger, and that the child was, in fact, healthy.<ref name="Digdon" />