Whatever happened to little Albert?

John B. Watson and Rosalie Rayner's 1920 conditioning of the infant Albert B. is a well- known piece of social science folklore. Using pub- lished sources, this article reviews the study's actual procedures and its relationship to Watson's career and work. The article also presents a history of psycholo- gists' accounts of the Albert study, focusing on the study's distortion by Watson himself, general textbook authors, behavior therapists, and most recently, a prominent learning theorist. The author proposes pos- sible causes for these distortions and analyzes the Albert study as an example of myth making in the history of psychology.