User:Lilagoldman/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Little Albert experiment

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose this article because I was fascinated by the section of this week's reading regarding this experiment and the Bobo doll experiment. Specifically, I wanted more information about the criticism or modern ethical opinion of this experiment. Because I already wanted to read the Wikipedia article, I knew this would be a good one to evaluate!

Evaluate the article
The lead section is concise and easy to read. The introductory sentence does a great job of explaining the intent and purpose of the experiment. The first paragraph provides the initial information about the people who conducted the experiment which is necessary to understanding the rest of the article. The second paragraph gives a deeper explanation of the method and the hypothesis. I think that if someone wanted an overview of the experiment they would need to read the entire lead section, because the second paragraph contains the brief synopsis of the information someone would usually want when researching the Little Albert Experiment.

I think the final paragraph in the "Method" section should be in the "criticism" section. It talks about how the experiment would not be conducted under modern ethics standards, which sounds more like a criticism of the method than an explanation of the method itself.

The first sentence in the second paragraph in the "Identifying Little Albert" section should include Gary Irons as one of the publishers of the article "Finding Little Albert: A journey to John B. Watson's infant laboratory". Irons is referenced later as one of the authors without being established as an author at this point.

The last sentence of the third paragraph in the "Identifying Little Albert" section is grammatically incorrect and should be revised. This sentence switches subjects half way through and should probably be separated into two different sentences. Also, the use of the phrase "recent research has shown" to describe another speculation about the identity of Little Albert is misleading. It should be replaced with something like "recent research suggests" or "recent research challenges the assumption that Douglas Merritte is Little Albert" to express that the recent research does not have a concrete answer about Little Albert's identity.

There is a "citation needed" marker in the "Ethical Considerations" section, regarding the spurious claim that Little Albert would have probably gotten over the fear-conditioning from the experiment. I think this sentence should just be removed because it doesn't add much to the article and isn't backed by any research seemingly.

The entire "Ethical Considerations" section could go inside of the "Criticisms" section, because the ethical concerns posed are criticism themselves.

The "Criticisms" section has multiple poorly written sections which make it hard to read. The first sentence is a garden path sentence which makes it unclear whether the review is by Ben Harris or whether the review is about Ben Harris' interpretations. It should say something like "An article by Ben Harris about the Little Albert experiment and its subsequent interpretations [...]" in order to be more readable.

Later in the first paragraph, it says: "Though a film was shot during the experiment, textbooks interpret the movie differently." I think this sentence should use one word for the film, rather than using both film and movie to describe the same thing. There should also be clarification that the textbooks interpret the film differently from each other.

This sentence in the "Criticisms" section is also flawed: "It was said that most textbooks 'suffer from inaccuracies of various degrees' while referring to Watson and Rayner's study." The sentence has no citation for the quote it uses. It has the phrase "it was said" in lieu of the person or article that said this. The only citation in the whole paragraph is "Harris, 2011, 10", which doesn't have any link to an article or any other information about who "Harris" is or what they said. I think a claim like "most textbooks" should not be included unless it is factually based.

The main idea of the first paragraph of the "Criticisms" section is that scholarly sources disagree about the way the experiment was conducted based on poor records. If there are scholarly sources that discuss this problem, this a good point that can be included in the Wikipedia, but I think this paragraph could be more concise and get the same point across.

I think this article is strong in many ways. It gives a great, well-researched overview of the experiment itself and provides interesting facts about the effects and legacy of the experiment. For the most part, the tone is objective and informative and the writing style is clear and concise. In the last two sections, specifically in the first paragraph of the "Criticisms" section, I think the tone is more opinionated and the writing is more convoluted than necessary. In the "talk" section, there is a discussion about removing the photo of one of the infants who could have been Little Albert. It seems like the editors emphasize that Douglas Merritte is only speculated to be Little Albert, and don't want to sway the reader to believing that to be true or false. The Little Albert experiment wikipedia page is rated "B" and is part of the Psychology WikiProject. I agree with it's rating completely; I think it can be improved a lot through revisions and citations but it has all the components that an average Wikipedia reader would want.