The "Monster Study" - Something everyone should know about

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This 1939 study was done on 22 orphans. Ten of the children were picked specifically because they stuttered, these kids were ranked on their speech fluency from 1 (poor) to 5 (fluent). Five were put in group IA (the experimental set) and would be told their speech was fine. The other ten were place in group IB (the control group) and would be told their speech was "as bad as people say".

The remaining 12 children had been picked randomly from a group of normally fluent kids. Six were assigned to group IIA, they were to be told that their speech was not normal at all and that they were beginning to stutter and that they must correct this immediately. The remaining six were placed into group IIB, they were normal speakers, they were treated as normal speakers and even given complments on their enunciation.

The gist of the study was to see what the impacts of various approaches were. Specifically:

-Would removing the label "stutterer" form those who stuttered (and had been labelled as such) have any impact on their speech fluency?

-Would endorsement (ie: reinforcement) of the label "stutterer" previously applied to someone have any effect on their speech fluency?

-Would the endorsement (ie: reinforcement) of the label "normal speaker" previously applied to someone have any effect on his speech fluency?

-Would calling anyone previously regarded as a normal speaker a "stutterer" have any effect on their speech fluency?

The results were almost immediate and would end up horrifying at least some the researchers throughout their lives.

The non-stuttering kids in the IIA group started talking far less by as early as the second session.

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The children in IIA responded immediately. After her second session with 5-year-old Norma Jean Pugh, Tudor wrote, "It was very difficult to get her to speak, although she spoke very freely the month before." Another in the group, 9-year-old Betty Romp, "practically refuses to talk," a researcher wrote in his final evaluation. "Held hand or arm over eyes most of the time." Hazel Potter, 15, the oldest in her group, became "much more conscious of herself, and she talked less," Tudor noted. Potter also began to interject and to snap her fingers in frustration. She was asked why she said 'a' so much. "Because I'm afraid I can't say the next word." "Why did you snap your fingers?" "Because I was afraid I was going to say 'a.'"

All the children's schoolwork fell off. One of the boys began refusing to recite in class. The other, eleven-year-old Clarence Fifer, started anxiously correcting himself. "He stopped and told me he was going to have trouble on words before he said them," Tudor reported. She asked him how he knew. He said that the sound "wouldn't come out. Feels like it's stuck in there."

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Letters between Mary Tudor and Wendell Johnson that were written shortly after the experiment ended showed that the children's speech had deteriorated significantly. Mary Tudor returned to the orphanage three times to try to reverse the negative effects caused by the experiment but lamented the fact that she was unable to provide enough positive therapy to reverse the deleterious effects.

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While the study was originally designed on determining the impact of positive and negative reinforcements, what it really revealed was just how impressionable children are. Replace the subject of "stuttering" with "gender and fluidity" and what do you think you'll get?

This is why pushing the mental illness of gender dysphoria onto children, as if it's biologically natural, is so dangerous.