10 Unbelievably Cruel Studies (Done In The Name Of Science)

8. Anything With Orphans

Just as you shouldn't trust the depiction of scientists in our popular fiction, you should also question how well off orphans seem to have it in movies, novels and comic books. Bruce Wayne's parents got killed but he was still rich and grew up to be Batman, and little orphan Annie seemed to have a pretty good time of it without a mum or dad, but in real life, being an orphan is pretty tough. They deserve your sympathy, and they absolutely do not deserve to be drafted into a scientific study without their prior knowledge or consent. Try telling that to these researcher types, though, and in it's in one ear out the other. There's been a handful of psychological and medicinal experiments that were all about studying orphans, but the cruellest of the bunch - and that's saying something - has to go to Wendell Johnson during his time at the University of Iowa. Way back in 1939 Johnson recruited his top student, Mary Tudor, to oversee an experiment of his own design. They would be working with two groups of orphans, one of which would be given proper speech therapy, and the other would involve a teacher that kept shouting at all the children, picking up every flaw in their speech and insisting they were stutterers. Guess what - the first group all gained perfect diction, and the second group all ended up with stutters, despite most having no trace of one beforehand. It was Johnson's peers that nicknamed this the "Monster Study", rightly appalled that he would conduct research on children - especially orphans - and anxious not to be seen to be doing similar things to the barbaric experiments the Nazis had been using concentration camp prisoners for not long before, it was covered up. The University of Iowa publicly officially apologized for the Monster Study in 2001.