MONSTER STUDY
The experiment involved children from Iowa Solders’ Orphan Home. Tudor and her team gathered 22 children, 10 stuttering and 12 with normal speech. The hypothesis of the study was observing if the labeling normal speech as wrong can cause stuttering. The children that were used for this experiment were unaware of the test was being enacted on them and did not give the researcher consent.
In the 1940’s, the origin of stuttering was studied by Mary Tudor at the University of Iowa. The head of the study Wendell Johnson theorized that calling attention to speech repetition causes stuttering.
Case number 15, Mary Korlaske, saw Mary Tudor as a motherly figure throughout the experiment. Mary Korlaske was unexpectedly dropped off at the orphanage by her mother during the depression. She often wondered why her mother abandoned her and her siblings. Korlaske would often talk a lot to impress Tudor in hopes she would be adopted. Tudor took special interest in Mary and other kids who stuttered to see if the impediment could be manipulated. The consensus was that if there was stuttering, the kids should try and fix it using their will power.
The experiment caused many of the children to develop regressive speech patterns. For example, six years old Norma Jean Pugh went from being talkative to barely speaking. When speech pathologists arrived to the orphanage after the study, they found 3/5 stuttering orphans and 5/6 of the normal speaking orphans displayed speech interruptions. Tudor left after she finished her graduate thesis but found the experiments to be draining emotionally and physically.
Mary Tudor was contacted about the orphans regressed speech and she went back to the orphanage to see the orphanage to try and help. Tudor’s efforts to reverse the experiment’s effects on the orphan’s speech patterns failed and them to cope with their new speech impediments. Years later Mary Tudor received a package from Mary Korlaske stating “I could have been a scientist, archaeologist or even president. Instead I became a pitiful stutter. The kids made fun of me, my grades fell off, I felt stupid. Clear into my adulthood, I still want to avoide people to this day.”
In 2017 the participants, sued the proctors of this lab for the damage that was done as a result of the unethical study. Mary Tudor defended her experiment saying the information from the results showed valuable information, but she never published the findings out of fear of backlash from the public. The study showed that evaluative labeling was a strong factor in influencing behavior. The results supported her hypothesis, but she caused immense damage to the speech of several children at the orphanage.
Sources:
Associated Press. "'Monster Study' Still Stings." CBS News - Breaking News, 24/7 Live Streaming News & Top Stories, 6 Aug. 2003, www.cbsnews.com/news/monster-study-still-stings/.
"The Monster Study: Stuttering Experiment." Learning History, 14 Jan. 2019, www.learning-history.com/monster-study-stuttering-experiment/
ERUBINFIEN. "Ethics and Orphans: The `Monster Study' (6/10/2001)." Wayback Machine, web.archive.org/web/20110927051740/www-psych.stanford.edu/~bigopp/stutter2.html.
"The 'Monster Study' on Stuttering." PsyBlog, 29 July 2010, www.spring.org.uk/2007/06/monster-study.php.
Silverman, F. (1988). The “monster” study. Journal of Fluency Disorders, 13(3), 225–231. https://doi.org/10.1016/0094-730X(88)90049-6
Onedio.co. "The Monster Study That Used 22 Orphans As Subjects!" Onedio.co, 20 June 2016, onedio