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Wendell Johnson's Monster Study

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The Belmont Report was written to protect human subjects in research studies. This report led to the creation of the Institutional Review Board Guidebook, which was last updated in 1993 (IRB Guidebook, 1993). Protection for human subjects began with the Nuremberg Code when judging the human experimentation done by the Nazis (IRB Guidebook, 1993). Other studies had been conducted using human subjects that led to the Belmont Report. One such unethical study is Johnson’s Monster Study that was conducted in 1939 on a group of orphans (Reynolds, 2003) that violated the Institutional Review Board guidelines, and should not be repeated. Wendell Johnson, an assistant professor at University of Iowa, wanted to study if stuttering was environmental and behavioral in nature and not strictly biological (Reynolds, 2003). This study is called the “Monster Study” because “it reminded people of the Nazi experiments on human subjects” (Reynolds, 2003). He set up a study, using a group of children at a local orphanage, which would test children who had a …show more content…

First, there was no informed consent. It was not fully disclosed to the orphans what they were participating in. Nor was this information disclosed to the teachers or matrons who worked at the orphanage. The orphans, teachers, and matrons were told to believe that the children would be receiving speech therapy. Without the proper information given, no one willingly chose to withdraw from the study. Second, the children were exposed to a study that caused “significant risk of serious impairment” (IRB Guidebook, 1993). Some of the children had damaging life-long effects from this study. The adults responsible for the care of the children were not given a consent, where risks and benefits were revealed. The children were available for the study and their guardians were not told the full truth about the study and what it

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The monster Study is the case of experiment conducted on 6 children naming it an experiment. A psychologist professor Dr. Wendell Johnson at the University of Iowa was a speech pathologist and was interested in carrying out an experiment to find out the answer for established belief of stuttering was an inborn disability with the help of one of his graduate student Mary Tudor (Thorson, n.d.). He selected 22 orphan student and separated them into two groups of the same size – stuttered and non-stuttered. In the stuttered group not all kids were stuttered but six of them were.

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In 1939, Mary Tudor, graduate student at the University of Iowa, conducted a stuttering experiment under the supervision of psychologist Dr. Wendell Johnson. Johnson wanted to prove his hypothesis that stammering is a learned behaviour rather than the effect of a psychological defect. Performed on 22 orphan children from Davenport, this experiment would later be labelled as the Monster Study, for being one of the most highly unethical studies in history. This paper will outline the details of how the Monster Study was conducted, the ethical issues concerning the experiment and the possible disadvantages and benefits that arose from conducting it. Description of the study Mary Tudor collected 22 orphan children between the age of 5-15 years old, including 10 children who were identified as stutterers and 12 who had no problem with their speech.

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