1939 Monster Study: Unraveling the Dark Side of Experimental Psychology
The history of psychology has a plethora of experiments and ground-breaking studies that paved the way for research and helped transform the field of experimental psychology into what it is today. But, as fascinating and impactful as these studies are, the deep-rooted ethical dilemmas they carry simply can not be ignored. One such ethical disaster happened in the summer of 1939 when Iowa’s renowned speech expert, Dr. Wendell Johnson, and his graduate student, Mary Tudor, performed a speech impediment experiment on 22 orphans at the Iowa Soldiers and Sailors Orphans Home in Davenport, Iowa. Today, however, the experiment is better known as the tale of the two health professionals who tortured innocent children in the name of inventing a cure for stuttering.
You know something is deeply problematic if it crosses lines in an era like the ’30s. Perhaps for this reason, Johnson and Tudor’s speech therapy experiment was nicknamed “The Monster Study”, further highlighting the gravity of the ethical ramifications and negative consequences.
The first ethical concern was Johnson and Tudor’s decision to experiment on a marginalized group of orphans, who were unable to give informed consent due to their age and orphaned status. It’s almost as if institutionalized children were selected on purpose because they were easily available with no one to protect them or ask questions on their behalf. Due to this reason alone, even Johnson’s own peers were horrified by the study, which was often compared to the Nazi human experiments conducted in concentration camps during the Second World War. Besides lack of informed consent, there was no institutional approval or permission sought either. The American Speech–Language–Hearing Association (ASHA), formed in 1925, was well-established at the time of Johnson’s speech impediment experiment, yet neither the association nor any other ethical committee was informed beforehand or even after the study.
Perhaps an even more serious ethical issue was the psychological harm inflicted upon the participants. Not only were the orphans not protected from mental, emotional, and lingual distress, but they were deliberately subjected to it. The letters between Mary Tudor and Wendell Johnson revealed that Tudor was trying to induce stuttering in healthy, normally fluent children, just to confirm a hypothesis given by her supervisor. Yet, none of the 22 orphans were told the intent of Tudor’s research and were deliberately kept unaware of what was going on. So, there was a considerable amount of deception, and participants were even led to believe that they would receive transformative and helpful speech therapy, which was only true for some of them. Despite the deception and emotional manipulation, the vulnerable participants were not debriefed after the experiment and only found out the truth six years after the experiment was conducted.
The Monster Study went on to cause significant psychological distress and lifelong consequences for participants, particularly those who received negative speech therapy and reinforcement. All the children’s academic performance and social interest declined, as they became much more conscious of their speaking ability and refused to talk or verbally interact with others, although they spoke quite freely one month before the experiment started. Moreover, the non-stuttering children who received negative speech therapy started to act like stutterers. Mary Korlaske, for instance, was a 12-year-old orphan and victim of the Monster Study. Two years after being subjected to negative speech therapy, she ran away from the orphanage and eventually ended up at the much worse Industrial School for Girls. ‘’I could never tell my husband about it,’’ Korlaske, who later became known as Mary Nixon, said in 2003, ‘’It just ruined my life.’’ Similar statements were given by other participants after they turned adults, confirming the horrifying consequences of Johnson and Tudor’s experiment.
Even if the Monster Study expanded the knowledge of speech development and provided the “largest collection of scientific information” on the phenomenon of stuttering, it did so at the cost of the emotional and psychological well-being of vulnerable children. “It was chilling and disturbing,” said Franklin Silverman, a professor of speech pathology at Marquette University and Johnson’s former student.
“And to think that Wendell Johnson, of all people, had sanctioned it. He knew the pain of being told that you stutter.’’
Over the years, numerous speech pathologists and psychologists have condemned the Monster Study and openly criticized its adverse effects on the participants’ speech and behavior. But even back then, it didn’t take long for Johnson and Tudor’s study to become national news, despite the researchers’ efforts to keep the experiment hidden. It’s safe to say Johnson feared his reputation being tarnished. Perhaps, he attracted what he feared. Perhaps, he simply received the consequences of his actions.
By 2001, the Monster Study started headlining articles in newspapers and speech-sciences journals. Two years later, it became the subject of a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against the State of Iowa and the University of Iowa. The institute had previously issued a public apology, but it was nowhere near enough to compensate for the lifelong psychological trauma inflicted upon the participants nor the haunting reality of the ethical dilemmas completely disregarded in the experiment. The lawsuit was filed by some of the surviving participants from Johnson’s study, seven of whom eventually received a total of $925,000 from the State of Iowa. In 2007, the University of Iowa once again called the Monster Study “regrettable”, stating that it “should never be considered defensible in any era.”
Besides the harrowing ethical concerns, Johnson and Tudor’s Iowa experiment had several other drawbacks. The notorious study had a prominent ripple effect that lasted for at least a few decades. From the 1950s until the early 1980s, speech therapists declined to work directly with young stutterers, fearing that their intervention or treatment could worsen the problem or cause emotional distress to the stutterers. They would instead counsel the children’s parents, giving them the tools needed to help their child. Sometimes this helped the stutterer. Other times it didn’t. So, for nearly three decades or maybe longer, Johnson and Tudor’s experiment interfered with speech therapies being conducted on a larger scale, which once again proves that the study was more detrimental than useful.
Johnson and Tudor’s Monster Study wasn’t without its experimental limitations, either. Many experts have concluded that the experiment was poorly designed and executed, which explains why the results were ambiguous at best and did not serve as concrete evidence for Johnson’s initial hypothesis.
In the May 2002 issue of The American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, the results of the Monster Study were explicitly deemed “insignificant.”
The experiment had low internal validity, as several extraneous and confounding variables were not kept constant. We know that before the experiment, Tudor tested each child’s I.Q. and identified whether they were left-handed or right-handed. This was done to eliminate the possibility that stuttering could be caused by cerebral imbalance, and she found no correlation between the two variables. However, Tudor missed other important extraneous variables such as the participants’ suggestibility, as well as the participants’ age, which varied greatly between two groups and even within a single group. The cognitive processes involved in speech development vary in different stages of childhood, and the participants were aged between 5 and 15 years. The children could also have pre-existing individual differences in speech abilities and psychological resilience. Furthermore, the study failed to keep the duration and intensity of speech therapy constant, which is another extraneous variable.
The external validity was low, despite it being a field experiment. This is because it was far from applied research, the study was conducted to merely satisfy Johnson’s obsession with speech improvement and could not be generalized to the larger population. The experiment was only conducted on orphans, so it did not consider the impact of parental involvement and support, along with a “normal” home environment, on children’s speech. The Monster Study could easily have observer bias since both Tudor and Johnson were fully aware of the experiment’s purpose and were desperate to get the results they wanted. It also had a small sample size of only 22 participants, all belonging to the same state, ethnicity, and culture, and even a similar age group. For these reasons, the results of the Monster Study are not considered valid or reliable.
All in all, the 1939 Monster Study is a prime example of unethical research practices in psychology. Based on this analysis, it is expected, or rather hoped, that future experiments will expand the research literature in psychology concerning speech impairments and their respective therapeutic interventions, while strictly following ethical and moral guidelines and eliminating as many limitations as possible.
