Wendell Johnson's "Monstrous Experiment" (7 photos)

In the middle of the last century, American psychologist Wendell Johnson, together with graduate student Mary Tudor, conducted one of the most cruel experiments on children.







Unlike other cruel but useful for science experiments, this experiment only crippled the psyche of children and did not bring the desired results, proving only the fallacy of Wendell Johnson's assumptions

Until the age of five, Wendell Johnson was a very ordinary child with quite intelligible and well-structured speech for his age. However, at one point his teacher decided to tell his parents that the boy was starting to stutter. It is unknown whether this was the impetus for the disorder to appear, but after that conversation Johnson became literally obsessed with his own speech. Soon the boy really began to repeat sounds several times, and then he began to stutter so much that sometimes he literally lost the power of speech due to the defect.

At a fairly early age, the boy began to analyze his defect and came to the conclusion that he himself had created the problem, having become concerned about his speech after the teacher’s words. Later, he concluded: “Stuttering does not begin in the child’s mouth, but in the parent’s ear” and went to confirm his hypothesis at the University of Iowa, where at that time the defectology center was especially developed.

How his own defect influenced the future of Wendell Johnson

Wendell Johnson did not see any other paths for himself after school. He purposefully went to the University of Iowa, which at that time was the main place in the country actively studying speech pathology. At the educational institution, the guy received a bachelor's degree, a master's degree, and then became a graduate student.





Wendell Johnson

Together with his fellow students, the young specialist enthusiastically conducted a variety of experiments. Many of the graduate students, like himself, suffered from a similar problem, and therefore the young people often acted as test subjects in each other's experiments. Sometimes the studies were quite cruel: the young people used electric shock, fired pistols near each other's ears, put plaster casts on each other's hands to check whether immobilizing the dominant hand could untangle brain signals.

By the 1940s, specialists at the University's Center for Defectology believed that the main cause of stuttering was physiological disorders. Numerous experiments showed that the neuromuscular reactions of stutterers differ from those observed in people without the defect. However, Wendell Johnson was almost certain that this opinion was wrong. Based on his own experience, he believed that stuttering is a learned behavior not associated with physiological processes. To prove his idea, the man needed to conduct an appropriate experiment - this is what he did in 1938.

A cruel experiment in which 22 children from an orphanage took part

Wendell Johnson decided to test whether his assumption corresponded to reality on healthy children. The man attracted a timid but ambitious graduate student, Mary Tudor, to his experiment. Her task was to convince children without a defect that they were about to start having problems with stuttering.

The orphanage in Davenport was chosen as a "laboratory" for the experiments. The girl went there in January 1939 with a dictaphone, a notebook, chalk boards and a dynamometer. It was not difficult to attract the institution to participate; at that time, the University of Iowa officially cooperated with the orphanage.



The orphanage in Davenport

For her research, Mary Tudor needed to select subjects. A total of 22 children were selected for the experiment, 10 of whom actually stuttered, and 12 had no speech problems and were chosen randomly. The first were divided into two subgroups: five children were told that their speech was terrible, the other five were told that their speech was absolutely normal. The worst group was 12 healthy children, who were systematically instilled with the idea that their speech was wrong, and therefore they urgently needed to engage in self-therapy and take control of it.

Of course, no one was told that an experiment was being conducted on the children. The children were simply told that a speech therapist would be conducting classes with them for a certain period.



Five months of humiliation from Mary Tudor

The experiment lasted from January to the end of May 1939. Every few weeks, Mary Tudor came to the orphanage and held a 45-minute lesson with each participant in the experiment. Tudor constantly told the children with speech disorders that all their problems were temporary and would soon disappear. She urged the children not to react to what others said about their abilities and to believe in the speedy recovery from the defect.

With the second part of the children, who initially had no problems, things were different. The remaining 12 pupils were regularly humiliated, told that they were not making any progress at all, had weak willpower and should remain silent "if they cannot speak correctly."



The effect of the experiment on the children bore fruit after the first "sessions" of the pupils with Tudor. However, all of them did not correspond to what the author of the experiment, Wendell Johnson, wanted to achieve.

The children from the group, who had not previously had any problems with speech, became extremely withdrawn and taciturn. Almost all of them developed severe anxiety, because of which they were afraid to talk unnecessarily and constantly corrected themselves. At the same time, the pupils experienced a decline in school buildings, all those who had previously studied well or even excellently, now moved into the category of "C" students. At the same time, no one had any stuttering. The experiment was a failure: previously healthy children developed a lot of problems with self-esteem and psyche, and Johnson's theory was not confirmed.

In addition, there was no particular success in the group of children with speech defects, who were assured of a "speedy recovery" for five months. Only one child showed some progress, all the others continued to stutter as they did before the experiment.

Concealment of the results and criticism of the experiment

In the 20th century, the experiment of Wendell Johnson and Mary Tudor was not noticed. Despite his unwavering belief in his rightness, Johnson decided not to publish the results of the study and "hush up" the unsuccessful and crippling experiment. It was first talked about in 2001 after information about what was happening in the orphanage was made public.

In his lectures and research, Wendell Johnson continued to promote the idea that stuttering was a consequence of psychological influence. Mary Tudor's findings contradicted Wendell's, but remained in the shadows. In her report on the experiment, she wrote:

"It seems unlikely that a stutterer can be made to stutter. The accompanying tics, shuffling and self-consciousness, can be induced. These can be taught and reinforced. But clinical stuttering cannot. It is either there or it is not."



Wendell Johnson and Mary Tudor

After the experiment, Mary could not come to terms with the thought of what she had done. She returned to the shelter several times, talked to the children and tried to fix the situation. However, all the conversations she had were unable to turn back time.

In the 21st century, Johnson's experiment was called the "Monstrous Experiment." Those who suffered at the hands of scientists filed a lawsuit against the state and the educational institution.

On August 17, 2007, 6 participants in the experiment received compensation from the state of Iowa in the amount of $925,000