The history of science is peppered with some pretty dubious research… grafting second heads onto dogs, growing bits of human brains inside mouse embryos, experiments with syphilis, and the list goes on. We have delivered many episodes on some pretty horrific things done in the name of science back in the day which is why we’re suitably discomforted by a study on orphan kids called “The Monster Study”.
Born in 1906, Wendell Johnson stuttered grotesquely. He and his family went to great lengths to treat his stutter: sugar pills, a frightening (and disappointing) faith healer, and chiropractic work. At 16 he even attended a stuttering “school” where he chanted and swung dumbbells. None of it helped. Can’t think of why!
Eventually, Johnson made his way to the University of Iowa to study English (he was more of a writing guy). Well, that university just so happened to be home to the most famous centre for stuttering research in the world. The coincidence! Diving into psychology for his master's study, Johnson became a speech pathologist because he needed one himself.
The thing with speech is that you can’t test on animals so the students themselves became test subjects. They drew blood, hooked themselves to electrodes, and even shot guns off near each other's ears to see if it affected their stuttering. But it wasn’t all rogue science. Johnson made some significant observations through his early studies that convinced him that stuttering was conditioned; it was learned.
Lead theories at the time were that the stuttering disorder originated in misdirected brain signals. But Johnson called bullshit. He was certain that stuttering was a learned behaviour. Damn those overreacting helicopter parents!
So if stuttering was learned, that meant it could be unlearned but it also meant that it could be… taught. Enter the Monster Study, led by one of Johnson’s students, Mary Tudor. Luckily the university had an ongoing relationship with an orphanage where they could recruit unknowing research subjects. Well, that all seems above board.
Within the orphanage, there were 10 kids who had an existing stutter. In weekly sessions, half of them were told to pay no attention to what others said about their speech and that they would grow out of it. The other half were told that their speech was terrible. Sigh.
Another group of children who had normal speech were told they had symptoms suggestive of an impending stutter. They were told to never speak unless they could do it absolutely right!
And then the last lucky group (again comprised of children with normal speech) were given compliments on their lovely enunciation.
Sounds science-ish, right?
Well, remember the kids who spoke normally and were scared into believing something was seriously wrong with their speech? Yeah, they stopped talking, performed worse in class, and became withdrawn and fractious. And although when they did speak, their speech was normal, they began to act like stutterers with inhibitive, sensitive and embarrassed demeanours.
Feeling bad about her methods with these kids, Tudor went back to the orphanage to do some follow-up therapy. But it didn’t do much good. Her thesis sank immediately into obscurity but for a ghost life among Iowa speech pathology students; the university library its academic mausoleum.
And then came the lawsuits. In 2003, three surviving orphans sued the State and University of Iowa for millions of dollars, citing among other things the infliction of emotional distress and fraudulent misrepresentation.
Did the kids ever recover? And did Johnson end up finding a cause? Or is the road to stuttering paved with eagle-eared parents?
SOURCES:
The Stuttering Doctor's 'Monster Study', Gretchen Reynolds March 16, 2003 https://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/16/magazine/the-stuttering-doctor-s-monster-study.html
The “Monster” Study, Franklin H. Silverman, .I. Fluency disord. 13 (19881, 225-231) https://www.uh.edu/ethicsinscience/Media/Monster%20Study.pdf
The Monster Study - Practical Psychology July 8, 2022 https://practicalpie.com/the-monster-study/
Why The Monster Study On Stuttering Was Unethical, Jeremy Dean https://www.spring.org.uk/2022/12/monster-study-stuttering.php
PREVIOUS EPISODES MENTIONED:
What The Hell Happened To The Left-Handers?
https://omny.fm/shows/the-wholesome-show/what-the-hell-happened-to-the-left-handers
https://youtu.be/Rfbr1YjRQ_I
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Rod 00:00
The history of science is peppered with some dubious research. you're gonna say liberally sprinkled. There are a number I think we've touched on some of these. We haven't touched on others, but we'll get there. So there's things like, you know, where dudes were grafting a second head onto a dog to see what they could do.
Will 00:14
You know that was an undergrad research projects
Rod 00:22
Graft myself to a car. What do you do?
Will 00:26
like Moscow State University or something like that.
Rod 00:29
Go get to dog. We're actually one dog and one piece of dog. There are these great ones, the parental attachment studies they did with baby macaques. I don't know if you know much about those, but they're not great.
Will 00:40
I do know parental attachment studies, but not the baby macaques
Rod 00:45
kind of like, trying to test how much you know, attachment to mother and stuff matters to infants development. Turns out a lot.
Will 00:53
The macaques
Rod 00:54
Who cares about fucking monkeys, right? Exactly. And with this more recent studies, you grow bits of human brains inside mouse embryos and they grow brain elements, which is fine. classics the Tuskegee syphilis experiment. Which one day I'm sure one of us will. Anyway, Little Albert you know the infamous you don't know that one
Will 01:15
it's like fat Albert's
Rod 01:17
Yes, Fat Albert. No but the really quick gist is they wanted to talk about the classical conditioning where you pair a stimulus with the thing that's unrelated and you then you remain in what bottom line was they got a little kid and the classic was showed him a white fuzzy bunny and he went white fuzzy bunny. Then they turn white fuzzy bunny and like Bang a Gong or something and kid to go Jesus Christ, freak out and cry. Eventually, you could take the gong away into showing the white fuzzy bunny and he'd wig out
Will 01:45
cool. So like, like Pavlov that were being cruel to kids
Rod 01:48
horribly worse. I'll tell you about that when one day. There's also one called unit 731. Ultra fucked up Japanese experiments on prisoners of war.
Will 01:59
No that is my failsafe. You will never do this because that is too far.
Rod 02:05
No, no, no it's the way I'll tell it.
Will 02:06
No, no, no, I've got that in my list. And I I no, if I do that, then it's like that's it. You found you've run out of humanity.
Rod 02:15
Yeah, it's true. But so all these all these projects, let's call them. They have really benign or ambiguous names on the whole like, little Albert doesn't mean much. The Tuskegee syphilis experiment doesn't really tell you much. Unit 731 You know, so I find that kind of intriguing because often, what they did underneath these bland descriptions, etc, was fairly. So what I think is interesting, though, is these bland names. They represent such horrible realities are these bland descriptions. So what in the hell would they have done in a study that was come to be known as the monster study? doodly doo doo doo doo.
Will 02:53
Welcome to the wholesome show. The podcast that definitely wraps its tongue around the whole of science.
Rod 02:59
See, that's a good one. I have no problem with that one. And it's on topic.
Will 03:02
I'm Will Grant
Rod 03:03
I'm Rod Lambert's. Wendell Johnson, was born in 1906. And as a boy, he quite stuttered grotesquely. He was often rendered speechless by his impediment.
Will 03:13
Okay, yeah, it was a big thing
Rod 03:16
stuttered hard. So apparently, he'd spoken just fine until he was five or six. And then a teacher said to his parents, I think he's starting to stutter. And this turned into an obsession with his speech from his parents and from him as well. And they're like, What the fuck and so as his voice became more hesitant, and he self consciously would repeat sounds and basically he started to become super aware. So that all kinds of ways to try and treat him that ran the gamut of early 20th century Stuttering Therapy.
Will 03:41
It wasn't it wasn't one of those left handers that had it drummed out of him or anything.
Rod 03:45
headedness comes in, but not dramatically. So family doctor gave him sugar pills.
Will 03:52
like a placebo let's see if the placebo fixes him.
Rod 03:55
maybe in 1912 they thought sugar had healing properties. faith healer would scream from a stage and try and you know, kind of help him out by wrath of God and all that
Will 04:07
screaming from stage. Okay, yep.
Rod 04:09
Chiropractor. You seem to be stuttering. Let's snap the spine.
Will 04:13
We've gone through a lot of the not the not the cures I would have guessed
Rod 04:17
No, not at first. at 16 He was apparently becoming almost unintelligible with his speech. He begged to be allowed to go off to a stuttering school. I don't know where it was, but it was not where he was. So he had to take a choo choo train. And he was there for three months and he was asked to do things like recite aloud in a very monotonous and deliberately flat tone while swinging dumbbells like a metronome and chant "have more backbone and less wishbone"
Will 04:45
like early 1900s you know quack remedies that's that's a good one but they really did seem let's go in on the brutal
Rod 04:53
that wasn't one o f the crack ones. That was a good one
Will 04:55
have more backbone and less wishbone. Maybe that's a pretty good like a gym poster. Like you know, you know pain is weakness leaving the body
Rod 05:04
what does it hurdle the dead and eat the young or something that was another one I saw a woman at the gym wear this on a t shirt.
Will 05:10
Yeah, but there you go. have more backbone have less wishbone put that on a gym poster,
Rod 05:15
I use it to warm up before we started recording. I didn't work, didn't work, nothing happened. Nothing worked. So he quit. And he said the quote was, I went to the station, stuttered to the ticket agent enter the conductor, and basically close my eyes and despair, and went home. So his inability to express himself meant he was more into writing the literature. Not surprisingly, he didn't want to do the talking stuff. And apparently, he developed a portal for antic humour. So he was you know, physical gag guy and like to make jokes. Practical Jokes. Yeah. Fair enough. And apparently, so he was
Will 05:47
so the writing and the physical gag but not speaking.
Rod 05:51
Yeah, and apparently is quite popular. Like he couldn't even speak much, but he could entertain people liked him. he ended up being class president and he was the valedictorian of a tiny little high school with that he went to Roxbury, Kansas.
Will 06:03
Well, good on him
Rod 06:04
So anyway, he was apparently a real clown, and the people in his hometown thought he's great. 1926 So 20 years old, 2021. He goes to Uni in Iowa, the University of Iowa to study English and but also at the University of Iowa, and I'm not sure if this is a coincidence or not. It had the most famous Centre for stuttering research on the planet. Apparently one of his eventually his former students who became a an emeritus professor because he retired of speech etc. at Brooklyn College, so he was very well known at the end. Like most stutterers, he was baffled by his stuttering. He's like, what's Why do I do this? Why do I do this? What the hell was going on?
Will 06:41
Fair enough?
Rod 06:42
So apparently, he got right into sussing it out. So he spent hours trying to figure out what he was doing that made him and basically anyone stutter like, what is it that I am? What I'm not doing? Why the fuck is this happening? Asking questions like, What is it that makes people stutter? Are there patterns to stuttering other something?
Will 06:59
Yeah, surely
Rod 07:00
What the hell's going on? Which I think is very reasonable, smart dude, who's got what seems to be quite a debilitating situation
Will 07:06
and that you feel otherwise normal, but not able to get the words out?
Rod 07:10
Yeah, I can think it'd be horrible. when I've interacted with hardcore stutterers, I just think I want to help and that's, I think, at times worse, because you kind of. what do you do? Do you help? you stay dead silent? It's fucking hard.
Will 07:23
Put him in a wheelchair and you push the wheelchair. I think that's they say.
Rod 07:28
a morphine drip. Yeah, the suffering you can see, it's palpable, and it's horrible to watch. So at the time, mid 1920s, Speech Pathology, he says, getting that word wrong specificity was really in its infancy. And so people weren't really there lots of ideas, but it wasn't really a coherent field. And it was struggling to be seen as a real science and wanted to be bonafide, etc. So the unit of Iowa was right at the vanguard of this. handy. So by the time when I got there, there are all kinds of studies going on. And he was really keen. So he went there for English, but he ended up going into psychology instead did his master's in it. And he basically said, I became a speech pathologist, probably wrote it, because I needed one.
Will 08:10
Yeah, okay, fair enough. They don't really exist at the time not swinging the dumbbells and getting yelled at by being a religious folk
Rod 08:17
and eating sugar. So many of his fellow graduate students also terrible stutters.
Will 08:21
So they were all in on it to find out
Rod 08:24
Yeah, yeah. So they'd use each other as guinea pigs.
Will 08:26
Yeah, I can understand that.
Rod 08:27
And the things they would do, it's just quite a wide range. So they draw blood, they'd hook themselves to electrodes, they'd bash their knees to test reflexes. They'd be walking around, and they would carry notebooks and they would literally stop mid conversation and walk. If some some one of their colleagues said something in a weird stuttery way to make a note of it to see if they are useful, which is not a bad idea. They'd shoot guns off and make loud noises right next to each other's ears to see if being startled would affect your stuttering. Turns out it didn't. But if you do it to normal
Will 08:58
try, oh, thank you. Thanks.
Rod 09:02
But also do things like and this is the left hand this comes in, they put casts on each other's dominant arm, because there was a theory about if you were dominant, right handed and forced to write with your left or left and foster right with your right. Yes, it would tangle your brain somehow.
Will 09:16
Well, that's not a bad one.
Rod 09:18
And we did talk about what you told me about that. I did. So he did a specific study early on. So this one, he would give starters, a page that was bordered in red, so I'd have a red border around the page. And to get them to read it aloud in front of an audience. which of course not, of course, apparently would make their stuttering way worse, like because definitely
Will 09:37
an audience makes it worse
Rod 09:38
doesn't help at least in general. Afterwards, they will then tend to stutter anytime they read a page marked with red, even if they are reading it just one person not even an audience.
Will 09:47
So some sort of some sort of visual trigger or something going on or a psychological trigger.
Rod 09:52
Then he what he did next was he blacked out words where the person who was reading would particularly stutter, he would he would block out the words where they started. So you'd get him to read go where they started
Will 10:01
so get rid of that word. So just skip the bits of the speech where you're stuttering
Rod 10:07
Well I don't know if they give instructions, but he just did that and he'd go back to them. And when they read it again and they reached the word next to the crossed out one, they would stutter next to the crossed out one. Okay. So, again, these triggers, they started basically, they were conditioned to stumbling at that point in the text. So he also showed that individual stutterers were consistent. They weren't necessarily consistent between stutterers, but individuals had particular habits. Yeah,
Will 10:29
like particular triggers or particular words or particular loads particular sounds.
Rod 10:34
So like, they'd stumble over the same sounds. And they'd dread the sounds they'd stumble over. So you'd get people they'd try and say, you know, like, my dad, yeah, change the word. Yeah, couldn't get farther it fricatives, the fingers and so on, we're often difficult. They'd whisper when they're about to reach some of these troublesome fricatives, he noticed their eyes would bulge.
Will 10:55
So the fricative is the fffff
Rod 10:57
these kinds of noises, they bashed their knees, they click their fingers, they shake the head, they try and force the sound out or get rid of the disruption. So they'd work very hard on this. But this would vary between stutterers. I mean, it's just, it's just my heart goes out to these people, because what a fucking nightmare not be able express yourself clearly for whatever reason. But he also noticed, situation specific effects. So for example, there were certain situations where even terrible stutters would not stutter. So like when they were singing, and there was a king speech movie that had that dude, and it was the king scratch movies, I mean, songs in his ears or something. I watched it. So he knows this was interesting. Also, if they were speaking with children or dogs, so there was no pressure to be understood, or they didn't feel so
Will 11:42
I like that.
Rod 11:43
I do too. I did.
Will 11:44
I did learn the other day that dogs recognise the voice that you put on when you're speaking to your dog, which must be
Rod 11:51
Meaning, if you put on your Russian accent
Will 11:54
Well, depending on what accent you use to speak to your dog. Some some people might speak in their Russian accent, some might use others. But dogs learn that is the voice for me. That's the one where you're talking to me.
Rod 12:06
So you have your special dog accent.
Will 12:07
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And you shouldn't do that in front of other people. If that's your
Rod 12:11
I do, though.
Will 12:12
Yeah, everyone does a little bit.
Rod 12:13
But my dog voices aren't racial.
Will 12:15
No. Sure. Why would they? Why? Why your dog is not a racist.
Rod 12:21
I think one of them is She's a bogan dog. Staffy. I told you bargain dog. There was also the story of a stutterer who severe stutter or who talking about the situation specific stuff, basically live the life of a nomad because he could communicate vocally only when he was establishing himself in a new town.
Will 12:40
But once he gets to know people,
Rod 12:41
apparently,
Will 12:42
Oh, wow.
Rod 12:43
So the results that he saw from the red border line and stuff, and also the observations of people having situation specific stuff, basically, he was utterly convinced stuttering was a conditioned and learned response
Will 12:54
only,
Rod 12:55
only.
Will 12:57
so anyone can get it. But these people have been conditioned by it.
Rod 13:03
And he believed basically, associated behaviours of stuttering would go away if the stutterer could relax and didn't anticipate some kind of speech blockage or problem. So this was radical. Because in the 1920s, early 30s, the main theories were basically physiological, there's something wrong with misdirected brain seeing something in the brain. And the senior professors at his uni in Iowa were very much proponents of this, and this was the university for this. But he said naa bullshit, partially because his own experience did not support that theory
Will 13:37
his own experience, doesn't mean that there isn't a physiological bit in him.
Rod 13:42
Are you arguing?
Will 13:44
just saying Wendell Johnson, one's own experience, can't close that loop.
Rod 13:49
It's a small sample space. But he said, look, for example, he had no family history of stuttering. So it's like How the hell could it be inherited if there was nothing to inherit? And apparently, a former student of his who became quite famous in the world said, basically stuttering is learned behaviour was kind of like his mantra. Like it's learned behaviour. It's learned behaviour. He was very, very strong.
Will 14:09
Yeah, Mantra is not typically that great in science. I'm not saying it's wrong. I'm just saying that it becoming a mantra doesn't mean it's science.
Rod 14:21
No. But he was convinced, like utterly convinced. this is the jam. This is the stuff. And he had anecdotal data that kind of reinforces so he had some assistants and him they would question the mothers of many youngsters and say, Look, when did the disorder begin? And how did the family react? And he basically tested age matched normal speakers with the people who had the stuttering kids as well. So did some kind of sciency shaped stuff. And he found many of them also had some speech defects. So normal speakers so to speak, but the difference was for the stutterers, and the quote here, their parents overreacted and made the children panic and produced full blown stuttering. So his thesis is the diagnosis causes the condition. And we can see the argument like,
Will 15:11
no, no, no, no, I can believe that there could be if you're saying it's, you know, there's triggers that, you know, you reinforce a pattern and you make it feel worse to you and then it keeps going that way. Maybe,
Rod 15:22
maybe. he termed this the diagnosogenic theory, produced by diagnosis. And it became the cornerstone of his writing his teaching
Will 15:37
so could he theoretically go and diagnose people who didn't have it and then it emerges?
Rod 15:45
It's fair to say there's a study coming
Will 15:52
oh, why are people bad?
Rod 15:54
Who said it's bad? This guy cares. This one's great. So he figured basically, his disorder did not lie in his brain or his biology, but in his learned behaviour. years later, he said, Look, stuttering This is a great sentence. Stuttering begins not in the child's mouth, but in the parents ear. So the summary is for him for Wendell Johnson stuttering was learned. It didn't require underlying bio physiological defects. Therefore, it could be unlearned.
Will 16:22
Well, okay, good.
Rod 16:24
It also meant that stuttering could be called forth.
Will 16:28
Mm hmm.
Rod 16:29
So it seems as basically his argument is apparently very provocative and powerful. And it has enormous implications for speech therapy. It's time for Johnson's probably most widely famous project, the one that was later named the monster study. you're gonna be fine, you'll love this one. So the main goal of this study was to see whether telling non stuttering children that they stuttered would make it happen that's cool.
Will 17:04
Oh, dear. Oh, in cool, cool science. Just you know, possibly
Rod 17:10
finding shit out. You had a hypothesis like it was good science.
Will 17:14
Ah, no. It was not good science.
Rod 17:17
So far. He had a hypothesis
Will 17:19
it was asking a question. Yes.
Rod 17:22
That's true. His hypothesis is actually that you could. and of course like all good academic research it began with recruiting a grad student to do work for
Will 17:31
Yeah, of course.
Rod 17:32
Because he's not an idiot. So 1938 He got one of his MA students 22 year old called Mary Tudor. She was described in one source I don't know why as avid but timorous
Will 17:49
What precisely is timorous? Is that like timid? but like a vibrating timid,
Rod 17:57
vibrating timid. that sounds like a bird. Hang on, is that the warbler? No, it's vibrating Timid. So he got Mary in. And that's that's the start and what are the next obviously? children
Will 18:13
Yes.
Rod 18:14
Luckily his uni had an existing an ongoing relationship with the Iowa soldiers and sailors orphans home in Devonport.
Will 18:24
Orphans. Yeah.
Rod 18:28
So would you call them the off cast, the extras?
Will 18:33
One of my favourite books ever to read to the kids is the Lemony Snicket series just just beautiful. But the way that Count Olaf uses the word orphan as an insult and often, well no, he's more orphans. He's more jovial evil
Rod 18:50
fun evil. portrayed in the televisions by Doogie Howser. So the Iowa soldiers and sailors orphans home was founded as a refuge for the offspring of men killed in the Civil War.
Will 19:04
What year are we?
Rod 19:07
Very early 1900
Will 19:09
1938, okay, so it's still going since then. It wasn't just the orphans from the war
Rod 19:16
That's how it began. In 39, it was the height of the Great Depression and had more than 600 orphans and what they called Demi orphans, destitute parents who were alive but couldn't take care of the kids
Will 19:26
like Thor. If Thor had no parents, he becomes a demi orphan
Rod 19:32
So they basically you can't afford kids who put him in an orphanage and they're in little cottages. but apparently at least it was not as harsh as the nearby Industrial School for Boys.
Will 19:43
Look, fair enough. I mean, the industrial school for boy does sound great. It's like you're in the sausage factory right here.
Rod 19:50
Your parents died. Why don't you come and actually you're gonna go to the industrial school for boys.
Will 19:54
Oh my god
Rod 19:55
which was apparently as forlorn as the Institute for the feeble minded children at Glenwood.
Will 20:02
I like that there must have been amongst these kids some sort of bad ranking and just thinking okay, well at least we're not at the industrial or at the feeble minded home.
Rod 20:14
the dickheads you name them?
Will 20:16
no not dickheads. people who had a bit of hutzpah and said what was on the tin is what it's like, like this is what that they're like we are giving explicit names. Not hiding behind anything here.
Rod 20:27
Yeah. So it's good that this one the Iowa soldiers and sailors orphans home was actually, it was up there in such rankings. So January 17 1939m Mary Tudor, not the Queen, took her first of many drives to the orphans home and she had a notepad, chalkboards. She had a smedley dynamometer
Will 20:48
who doesn't have a Smedley dynamometer?
Rod 20:50
I have one in my pocket, it apparently measures hand strength. a lot of it to do with left and right handedness measurements. Experimental conditions. I know you're gagging for the science.
Will 21:03
Orphans
Rod 21:04
It's definitely orphans, so they chose 22 orphans, who all believe that we're going to receive speech therapy.
Will 21:13
you know, in these sorts of studies, I often think, Okay, what would it be like now, if you want to do this and you're filling out your ethics application? I can just imagine the Ethics Committee
Rod 21:27
I mean to imagine. I'd be sitting there going, Ah, how do we put this differently?
Will 21:33
children no longer have parents, you're not using a slur word anymore
Rod 21:38
and live together clustered in a facility that is facilitated by government funding and or benevolent funds from, let's say, foreign service people. 22 orphans. Yeah, they all thought they were going to receive speech therapy. It's not untrue.
Will 21:55
And so we're working on the presumption they had no speech impediments before?
Rod 22:00
I'll get to that. experimental condition, so 10 of them, the teachers and the matrons, etc, at the facility said, they're stutterers. so they're clearly stutterers and that was known. So Mary, and five other grad students, they served as judges, so they listened to the children speak and they graded them on a scale from one to five, one is poor speech, five is fluent. And they agreed with the school, these 10 are stutterers. They're struggling. And they were described by the grad students and other judges with descriptions like unwilling to talk but certain definite stuttering phenomena, or tension, prolongations, explosiveness, repetitions, a stutterer. So it's pretty clear. So these 10 were divided into two groups. Group one A, the experimental group, they were told that they did not stutter.
Will 22:52
So these are stutterers and they're told they don't.
Rod 22:55
So they were given sentences like this, you'll outgrow the stuttering and you will be able to speak even much better than you are speaking now. That we're told pay no attention to what others say about your speaking ability for undoubtedly, they do not realise that it's only a phase you're going through.
Will 23:09
Okay, so they're doing the undiagnosed.
Rod 23:12
Yep, you got it. That's bullshit. Don't worry about it. It's gonna go away.
Will 23:16
Or not necessarily bullshit, but it's gonna go away.
Rod 23:18
It's cool. Group one, B, so five, the other five stutterers were told, yeah, your speech is garbage. It's as bad as everyone says. And that's it.
Will 23:26
Okay, so they didn't say you'll have it for life.
Rod 23:29
No, it's just crap. we agree
Will 23:31
So they could have been more evil at this point. They limited their evil
Rod 23:37
they might have been but not that I saw. the other 12. So that was the 10 stutterers. the other 12 were chosen at random from the fluent orphans, as they were known colloquially.
Will 23:53
It's a weird shopping list
Rod 23:55
it is. So the first ones were group one A and one B. This is group two a, they ranged from five to 15. And they were told things like this. The staff has come to the conclusion that you have a great deal of trouble with your speech. Uh huh. You have many of the symptoms of a child who is beginning to stutter. You must try to stop yourself immediately. Use your willpower. Do anything to keep from stuttering. Don't ever speak unless you can do it right? You see how in the name a person see how Keith stutters, don't you? Well, he undoubtedly started the same way as you. So they were told that, good science. That was 2A. 2B similar ages, five to 15. They were told, no you speak great. And we're going to tell you how awesome you are. And your enunciation is perfect.
Will 24:43
I get it as for different conditions that make sense. It is it is solidly designed experiment.
Rod 24:50
And that's what we care about. Yeah, good science. Yeah. Well, well, methodsalized. So the experiment ran from January to May of 1939. So what's that? five months. each session ran for about 45 minutes with every child every few weeks
Will 25:05
they just say the same thing over and over again?
Rod 25:07
I think there was more to it, but it boiled down to reinforcing the particular conditions.
Will 25:11
Now what a boring thing to do
Rod 25:13
for Mary,
Will 25:14
yeah, well for the the orphan as well to sit there and have them told you speech is awesome over and over again or your speech is bad.
Rod 25:22
So the first session that to sort of kick it off, so they tested the child's IQ and handedness. And why was that? because there was a popular explanation for stuttering at the time that was caused by a cerebral imbalance. So basically, like if you were born left handed, like I said earlier, and you use your right hand, you'd get these nerve impulses misfiring and would affect your speech and other such things. Johnson thought this was a load of garbage, but he got Tudor to check it because he could refute it. Yep. There was no correlation between handedness and speech impediments. The science worked well. Anyway, had the experiment go. The real fun. And by fun, I mean, air quotes. Group 2A, people who didn't have a stutter, but were told they did.
Will 26:04
Yes. So this is the one for whom ethically wasn't a great study.
Rod 26:09
Here's some examples after her second session. This is Mary's second session with a five year old called Norma Jean Pugh. Mary wrote it was very difficult to get her to speak. Although she spoke very freely the month before. second session. She didn't want to talk. nine year old Betty romp her final evaluation. Small quotes practically refuses to talk, held hand or arm over her eyes most of the time. Hazel Potter 15 She was the oldest, she became much more self conscious and she talked less. she started to snap her fingers and to try and stop herself because she would often say ahh before words and so she'd snap her fingers to try and stop saying ahh and ahh was also a symptom of trying to correct herself. they all performed worse in the academics in class. One boy refused to read any more in class wouldn't recite stuff. An 11 year old called Clarence, who was described for some fucking reason, chubby and diffident child. To be fair, many how most of my school reports from primary school were as well chubby diffident. He began to start anxiously correcting himself and Tudor's words, he stopped and told me he was going to have trouble on words before he even said them. She asked him how he knew and he said, Look, that sound wouldn't come out. It feels like it's stuck there. 12 year old woman called Mary or girl at the time to to ask her did your best friend know about your stuttering? And she said no, because I hardly ever talked to her now.
Will 27:38
Great, great, great.
Rod 27:40
Two years later, she ran away from the orphanage and ended up with the rougher Industrial School for Girls.
Will 27:45
I feel like the naming of these place, it really says, just the way they go, this is what you are for forever. Like we can you know, merit based economy? No
Rod 27:57
You are a factory. you're a piece of a factory now. You're 4, that will do. So overall, the experience was a complete failure. like utter. Utter failure. So six normal children who called stutterers, two improve their speech fluency, two had no change and two, their fluency fell a bit but the numbers were tiny. Like they judge it on a scale of one to five and they changed
Will 28:22
just tell me the stories of people that got a lot worse.
Rod 28:24
This is on stuttering. on stuttering, not whether they got worse.
Will 28:29
Yeah Okay.
Rod 28:30
From the actual stutterers who were told that they spoke okay, two showed a slight improvement in their fluency. two decreased a bit and one didn't change so it was like, no noticeable effect. But there were some enduring effects. You kind of noticed this earlier, all the non stuttering children who were told to act like stutterers, were told they did stutter acted like stuttering except for the stuttering. So they exhibited the other behavioural changes. So they didn't actually start to choke on words. But they do things like they'd become more inhibited. They were more sensitive. They were embarrassed to speak around people, they were less talkative. So basically, they got bludgeoned down, but it didn't make them stutterers.
Will 29:13
That's so weird.
Rod 29:15
Yeah. So in the sessions, they do things like they'd shuffle their feet, they'd whispered they'd snap their fingers like gulp, but they'd clamp their mouth shut, hands over the eyes, all that stuff. So that's what you're asking a moment ago.
Will 29:24
Okay, so they they assumed they did but their speech actually didn't get worse. Wow.
Rod 29:30
Just got wigged out about it.
Will 29:31
Ah, cool we can wig people out though.
Rod 29:33
Yay. Who would have known? by 1936, who fucking knew we could freak people out.
Will 29:40
science proves finally
Rod 29:42
Yep. You can break people. So they acted like stutterers but they weren't.
Will 29:47
Okay, that's something. Something
Rod 29:51
definitely an effect. The science work. So that was the main thing. It just didn't work. So what happened? What happened to the research, to Mary, to the orphans. So after Mary submitted her thesis 1939 she felt bad. She went back to the orphanage a few times and she basically try and do some follow up care and therapy.
Will 30:12
Did they take her thesis away for for that? shouldn't feel bad for doing science. certainly not in that time.
Rod 30:19
She told the children who were not stutterers but told they were, you're fine. And she tried to help them. And she wrote a letter to Johnson the year after that, basically what there was only a few quotes, I saw an article but basically she said, 1940. Junior woman to senior male. I believe that in time they those people will recover but we certainly
Will 30:40
the orphans
Rod 30:41
the ones who were told they did and didn't. they'll recover but we certainly made a definite impression on them. Isn't that delicately put.
Will 30:49
She's just saying we made an impression.
Rod 30:54
Her thesis apparently sank immediately into obscurity. It just disappeared. So Johnson, the supervisor, as her supervisor, he did not oversee her publication, which is really common and you know, co publish. He wrote a book or a comprehensive index of the University of Iowa's stuttering research. so is the name University for study and research. He wrote a comprehensive index and did not include that study in it.
Will 31:18
Okay. I must have known this seems a bit problematic.
Rod 31:23
He had inklings
Will 31:24
I mean, how involved was he in the study? He supervised
Rod 31:27
he designed it and stuff. It was his work. But apparently, it had a ghost life among Iowa's speech pathology students, because it was in the library.
Will 31:39
Yeah. Okay.
Rod 31:40
And so there was another student who was a former student of Johnson, who became a speech speech pathology Professor. So he said, Look, those who'd heard of this study nicknamed the monster study. it reminded people of Nazi experiments on human subjects
Will 31:59
of the time.
Rod 32:02
Of the time, wasn't it? Other professors at the time told Wendell Johnson, it would ruin his reputation if he published this
Will 32:09
but you can imagine any, any school? Yeah, there is always going to be studies that stand out that another student did recently or a while ago, and they spread stories, people will say, Oh, well, you know, there was that story that that?
Rod 32:24
Have you read it?
Will 32:25
I just I love the idea of of research that the students of a school will pass around. it's not public, but there's always the strong rules. the ghost study.
Rod 32:37
apparently was also described as it was chilling and disturbing, especially to think that Wendell Johnson of all people had sanctioned this research. He knew of the pain of being told that you're a stutterer. So people were kind of, there was a weird kind of contradiction, because he was very empathetic about folk in this situation, but off it went. also, there were lawsuits. Hard to imagine.
Will 33:00
I didn't think orphans could like I thought that was the point
Rod 33:04
Do you know what they do though? They marry a decent member of society.
Will 33:08
Ah, work their way into citizenship.
Rod 33:11
Remember, these aren't the industrial school orphans. These are the good ones. so in 2003, Anyway, there were three surviving orphans from the you don't stutter but we're going to tell you that you do Group. the most messed with group. So all three of them sued the state and the University of Iowa for millions. And many of the things they said were, you know, infliction of emotional distress, fraudulent misrepresentation of what they're participating in, blah, blah, blah. So one of them said, she thought of herself as a freak all her life. She still hates to talk except to her family and a few people in church.
Will 33:47
So 60 years later.
Rod 33:48
Yeah, something like. another. Imagine trying to wreck a child's voice. I've moved on, I married a good man, I talk okay. And one other one. I could never tell my husband about it. It just ruined my life. So they're pretty upset. 2001 The University of Iowa issued an apology. They called the experiment both regrettable and indefensible. We're sorry.
Will 34:11
And such lawyer speak
Rod 34:12
Isn't it? I tried to find out if this got paid out. And the best I could find was a little snippet in Wikipedia that said, the university paid a settlement to some of the surviving folks up over around 900,000 in 2007. So some money appears to have changed hands but not a lot and later, they would have been fucking old. Very, very old. And Wendell himself. So he defended his diagnosogenic theory right till the end of his life like he was like not you get the diagnosis that causes it. And apparently he had a massive heart attack at 59 while he was still writing a 4000 word essay for the Encyclopaedia Britannica on speech disorders. And it's difficult to tell it's a bit ambiguous whether he was literally writing and slumped over his desk or this is one of the things he was doing when he died. So he had a colossal heart attack at 59.
Will 35:06
Oh, that's not good.
Rod 35:08
But the piece for the Encyclopaedia was published posthumously, and it included a lot of emphatic words about how people with speech disorders have traditionally known the scorn, ridicule and even revulsion of their society. So he was very clear that people with these disorders feel fucked, and they get treated badly and they feel terrible. So it's interesting had this kind of this empathy. And many people who became big in the speech pathology world in the early 21st century, at least, were students of his, and they became eminent professors, etc. And they really thought he was a great dude. Like they say, he was a nice man who really gave a shit. And so one of them says,
Will 35:45
could be and he had a lapse, yeah, had a bad moment.
Rod 35:49
Well also some of the things they say is like, he thought he was trying to do a good thing. So there's one guy who was the Vice President and Dean of Uni of Iowa. His name is D.C. Spriestersbach. But he said things like this look, Wendell was a wonderful, empathetic man, and he understood the torment of a speech defect, he wouldn't have been able to bear it if he thought he'd actually forced someone to stutter. Which sounds strangely contradictory. He goes on to say, I have to assume it was because he firmly believed it would serve a greater good, that would help others who stuttered reverse it, fix it, whatever.
Will 36:30
ethically. I don't know how this is, but if you believe in this diagnosisgenic that you could have just gone with. Alright, let's try to tell those people, you know, that have it. Okay. It's gonna go away. Let's see what that does. Yeah, that's, that's not as ethically bad. I don't think it's ethically good.
Rod 36:48
But I mean, not surprising. He wanted to demonstrate that he was right, you know. And he tried. So bottom line was a lot of his work about what happens after stuttering begins still stands. once it started, but what he never cracked was what causes it. So the current model say genetic biology, etc, etc, etc. But environmental conditions need to tweak it usually. So you can have a predisposition, but that doesn't mean go full on.
Will 37:17
Do you have anything on on on stuttering rates? Like are they going down over time?
Rod 37:21
I haven't seen a trend analysis. I didn't look for it. But the there's something like 1% of the population at least in the US.
Will 37:28
Yeah. Okay.
Rod 37:29
But they do. It does seem to suggest that a stressed out parent and an overactive focus on the problem can certainly exacerbate it, but not cause it.
Will 37:38
I can just imagine that there might have been 100 years ago, a much stricter parenting regime
Rod 37:45
fuck yes. old school.
Will 37:47
Yeah, yeah. Well, particularly for an orphan. But, but that might have softened quite a bit in time
Rod 37:54
I don't think it was a bad guy. Like I think he was genuinely trying to pinpoint what was going on. The problem was if you're the orphan who was in the group that really needed to be
Will 38:05
It's not rocket science. But you know, when you're planning your experiment, don't try and trigger a condition.
Rod 38:13
And the irony was he didn't trigger the condition, but he certainly managed to fuck them up.
Will 38:17
But like, Yeah, we could we could we could explore if radiation leads to cancer by getting a random set of people and putting a whole lump of uranium in their underpads. And let's see what happens. But I don't know if that's the way that we should approach science
Rod 38:34
because we already know it does. I see what you're saying that you're making a bigger point. you're making a bigger point, not specifics.
Will 38:41
We don't try and trigger things. We just don't.
Rod 38:44
Not anymore, but the monster study did
