In the 1930s, a professor of speech pathology who had overcome a childhood stutter and had devoted himself to treating stuttering, sponsored a little experiment. One of his grad students made a deal with an orphanage that contained true orphans as well as children “whose parents had been forced to give them up for economic necessity.” His grad student, Mary Tudor, who was leading the study selected 10 children who were stutterers as well as another 12 who had shown no signs of stuttering to participate. The orphanage gave permission, although it seems they didn’t know what they were giving permission for; the children were not asked for their permission, nor was the staff, nor were the parents.

The 22 children, ages 5-16, were split into 4 groups: one group where stutterers were labeled as non-stutterers; group 2, where stutterers were labeled as stutterers; a third group where non-stutterers were labeled as stutterers; and group 4 where non-stutterers remained non-stutterers. A panel of five “judges” evaluated the children on their fluency of speech without knowing their history of stuttering or which group they were in. The children labeled as stutterers were told that tests showed that they were showing indications that they would become stutterers and that they had to be very careful not to make mistakes. The children who were labeled as non-stutterers were told that any little mistakes they made were inconsequential. And, at the end of the study, the same five-judge panel evaluated the children again.

In between the two evaluations, Tudor met with the children 8-9 times and reinforced these messages, enlisting the staff to reinforce them between her visits, pointing out any mistakes they made in their speech over and over again, and telling them not to make mistakes.¹

The results: all of the children labeled as stutterers, regardless of whether they showed signs of stuttering before the first evaluation, showed definite results of stuttering after the second evaluation. They also became more withdrawn and isolated, reluctant to speak, and spoke little even decades later. When a reporter caught up with them in their elderly years, they still suffered from the effects of the experiment.

Later, another speech pathology team evaluated the experiment. Their deduction: not only didn’t the study prove that labeling someone as, and treating them as, a stutterer caused them to stutter; it was also, they said, so badly designed that the study couldn’t prove anything one way or another.

And yet, Tudor believed that the children had been induced to stutter – although she refused to believe that they would continue to stutter, that she had done lasting harm. The study’s results, however, were never published and the eminent speech pathology professor whose theory they were meant to prove, never mentioned them again. Between the time that the study occurred and was ready for publication, the atrocious “medical experiments” taking place in the Nazi concentration camps during WWII had come to light, and the American medical community had become more disciplined² in their ethical treatment of participants.

In 2001, a reporter from The Mercury News misused his credentials as a student at the school that had sponsored the study to get ahold of the names of the participants in the study. He tracked them down, exposed the purpose of the study and encouraged them to write letters to Tudor, now in her 80s. He carried their vitriol to her, published his stories, and got fired from the paper for unethical behavior.

Bad behavior all around.

This is just one of the stories in When Science Goes Wrong, which span the broad field of sciences, Neuroscience, Meteorology, Volcanology, Engineering Geology, Gene Therapy, Nuclear Physics and Chemistry, Forensics, “Space Science,” and Speech Pathology.

Like I said, bad behavior all around.

Thirty or maybe fifty years from now, a book like this will include technological experiments, like Social Media, and AI, where we are all unwitting participants in a giant experiment that is transforming civilization and our children. Because just because tech giants can do something, they think that gives them right to do it, and those who dare to complain are labeled backward or unenlightened.

Just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should.

This book seems to be out of print, so you may have to keep an eye out for it in used bookstores.

But that’s the fun of used bookstores.

1. Here’s a management trick for you: if you want someone to change their behavior, catch them doing something right, not something wrong. ↩︎
2. I say “more disciplined” not “entirely disciplined” for they still have a lot of answer for. ↩︎