[Music] but not everyone believes that biology is Destiny for many scientists it's your experiences in life that count your upbringing your education your environment Chief among these scientists is psychologist John Watson who offers a theory that is the mirror opposite of eugenics this was the Heyday of hereditarian and geneticists who said said that human beings were constrained by their genetic uh inheritance and Watson was saying that this is baloney that human beings were shaped solely by their environment over the years Watson studies the behavior of babies hundreds of them to Watson we arrive in the world a blank slate tabula rasa nearly everything is learned even things we think are instinctual like fear to prove that environment is more powerful than genetics Watson designs an experiment for an infant known as little Albert he's so confident he films it for [Music] posterity at first Albert shows little fear even when Watson places a burning newspaper in front of him Albert is also unafraid when he encounters a white rat for the first time in his life but then Watson shows Albert the rat accompanied by a loud clanging noise one of the few things that upsets little [Music] Albert and he does it again and does it [Music] again eventually Albert learns to fear not just the rat but all furry things even without the loud noise in Watson's mind the little Albert experiment is a success because it proves that fears are learned not inherited Watson calls his theory behaviorism and begins to popularize it he urges parents to take active control of their children's upbringing by shaping their environment to think of the home as a scientific Laboratory