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The cruelest experiment in human history: Abused orphans to make them stutter - Walla! health

2021-05-01T00:02:18.655Z


American psychologists have humiliated, insulted and abused young orphans, in order to make them stutter. The story of the "monster experiment", one of the cruelest chapters in the history of psychology


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The cruelest experiment in human history: Abused orphans to make them stutter

Two American psychologists have humiliated, insulted and abused young orphans, in an attempt to prove that emotional distress causes stuttering.

The story of the "monster experiment", one of the cruelest chapters in the history of psychology

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  • stutter

  • medical history

  • Orphans

Strider Schleider Putschnik

Wednesday, 28 April 2021, 13:08 Updated: 13:53

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They deliberately abused, belittled, mocked and embarrassed a group of orphaned children, with the aim of making them stutter.

Children in a class in the 1930s, illustration (Photo: ShutterStock)

Throughout human and scientific history, several experiments have been conducted that compete for the title of "most cruel experiment," some of which we have already written about in this section. But the experiment we will tell you about this time is really a leading contender for this dubious title, and the name attached to it testifies to that from the first moment. The "monster experiment" is an experiment conducted by American psychologists Wendell Johnson, Mary Tudor and several other colleagues, in which they deliberately abused, belittled, mocked and embarrassed a group of orphaned children, in order to make them stutter.



Wendell Johnson believed that drawing attention to speech hesitation or repeating words in children alone could cause stuttering in those children. In other words, he believed (and wanted to prove) that if attention is paid and deliberately and publicly addressed to normal disturbed speech patterns in children - whether in a wavy brush, as a medical diagnosis, or through nonverbal responses to the way those children speak - it in itself may cause stuttering to appear. From where,Or aggravate existing stuttering.

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If his theory were correct, it was possible to seemingly take a group of children without speech defects and make them start stuttering by having people around them publicly and decisively address any mistake or delay in their speech (just make it clear that these are signs of completely normal speech patterns in children).

There has to be a real monster to carry out such an experiment, and unfortunately in medical history there have been such monsters as well.

The building that housed the orphanage in Davenport, Iowa, where the orphans recruited for the experiment lived (Photo: Official Website, Wikimedia Commons)

In 1939, Johnson decided to test his theory in the field, using Tudor, a student at the University of Iowa. He asked her to carry out the experiment, under his supervision. The two selected 22 orphaned children who lived in the Davenport Iowa Orphanage for sailors and soldiers orphans. 10 of these children were defined as having stuttering, by their teachers or by the mother of the house in the institution where they were staying. The other 12 children were defined as having proper and fluent speech by the staff of the institution and by independent factors.



The children were divided into small groups for the experiment: 5 of the stuttering children were declared "non-stuttering". That is, this label was removed from them and the research staff as well as the staff caring for the orphanage and their teachers were instructed to treat them as normal children and not to treat a defect in their speech. The goal was to see if this attitude would lead to an improvement or cure of stuttering. The 5 other stuttering children continued to be labeled as “stutterers” and the staffs were instructed not to change their attitude towards them.

"Treat them as stuttering"

As for the dozen children who did not stutter before entering the experiment - where things started to get darker and professional ethics evaporated: 6 of them were treated with praise and compliments for their verbal abilities and speech and were labeled as having "normal speech".

The other six children, on the other hand, were labeled 'stuttering', and the meaning of this labeling can be learned from words written by Mary Tudor herself, in the only surviving record of this horrific experiment:



"It means they were told that speech disorders were actually stuttering," Tudor wrote. .

The rest of the documents documenting this experiment have disappeared or been destroyed, and quite a few believe it was done on purpose, to save her and Johnson's reputation.

"They were told that the disturbances they had in speech were in fact stuttering."

Classroom students in the 1930s (Photo: ShutterStock)

For five months, from January to May, Tudor used to visit the orphans who participated in the experiment, and held meetings with them, during which she reacted stagedly to the way they spoke according to the experimental group to which they were classified.

The teachers of the orphans were also instructed to treat them according to the classifications of the experiment.



"The value of good speech must be instilled in them, and in order for a person to be able to speak properly, his speech must be fluent" - they were told.

"Pay close attention all the time to their speech, and stop them when they have any speech disorder. Stop them, and instruct them to repeat the words again. Do not let them speak unless they can say things properly. The goal is to make them very aware of the manner. "They should also be given opportunities to speak, so that their mistakes in speech can be pointed out to them."

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On paper, the experiment was successful (though it is worth asking here, in what world to make orphaned children develop stuttering is a success?). The children who started the experiment without speech impairment and received the scar treatment dictated by the experimenters actually developed a variety of speech problems in the end. To Johnson's displeasure, however, these deficiencies seem to have been mainly due to anxiety that those children had developed about their own speech, rather than actual stuttering. There were no real changes in speech patterns among children from all experimental groups. "They looked like stuttering. But they spoke fine," Tudor wrote with dry conciseness.



"It was very difficult to get her to talk, even though she spoke freely the previous month," Tudor wrote in a summary of one of her meetings with one of the trial participants - a 5-year-old girl in total. Another girl "stopped talking almost at all," even with her best friend she did not exchange a word. And about another child she wrote that he "hid his eyes in his hand or arm most of the time."

Somehow his reputation survived.

The Wendell Johnson Center for Speech and Hearing at the University of Iowa (Photo: Official Website, University of Iowa)

Although the experiment lasted only a few months, its consequences were long-lasting - the children's grades and functioning at school plummeted, their speech was delayed and restrained - either because they developed anxiety and were afraid to speak or because they suffered real stuttering.

"It just ruined my life. I can't talk anymore," said Mary Nixon, one of the participants in the experiment in an interview with the New York Times many years after that experiment.



Tudor and Johnson were apparently themselves aware of the ethical and moral problematics of their experiment, as it is impossible to explain otherwise why Johnson chose not to publish his groundbreaking research and findings.

The experimental materials were never submitted for peer review and were not published on any scientific or other platform.

However, they exist to this day in the research library of the University of Iowa and can be consulted there.



To this day, however, Johnson's research is considered to be the broadest and most comprehensive database on the relationship between a patient's feelings, thoughts, and attitudes and speech impairments.

And the Center for Speech and Hearing at the University of Iowa still bears his name today.

Compare it to the experiments of the Nazi doctors

One hypothesis about the genesis of the study was the fear that the cruelty of Johnson and Tudor orphans who participated in their study would be likened to the experiments of Nazi doctors, whose existence shocked the entire world in those years.



From an exchange of letters between Tudor and Johnson after the experiment it can be learned that they were aware of the ongoing damage caused to orphans following their participation in this experiment.

Tudor came to the orphanage three more times after the end of the experiment in an attempt to repair the damage done to the boys and girls, but she failed to provide them with strong enough positive care that would reverse the negative consequences of the harsh treatment they suffered during the experiment.



In 2007 alone, 7 of the orphans who participated in this experiment received compensation from the state of Iowa, although it is arguable how appropriate it is.

The 7 won a total settlement of $ 1.2 million, for psychological and emotional damages caused to them as a result of their participation in the experiment.

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