This is the Jaco Underground Podcast. It's number 26. You got echo Charles here for his commentary.

The Henry Jaco Willink. I come across things from time to time and I know for a little bit while

whenever we dipped into some psychological experiments and whatnot, little bits, good to understand,

show you some stuff about human nature. There's usually a little more, more to the story than you would initially think.

There was one that kind of caught my eye. I was doing some reading the other day and this one was called the monster study.

That's what it's called now. It wasn't called that at the time.

A person named Wendell Johnson, I guess the psychologist named Wendell Johnson.

1939 Davenport Iowa conducts this experiment. The experiment was actually ran by a graduate student. Her name was Mary Tudor.

They took 22 kids that had some kind of speech impediment, actually specific stutter. It took them from an orphanage.

And they tried to see if they could help stuttering kids by giving them positive feedback.

How bad it hurt them if they gave them negative feedback and if they took normal kids, what it would do to normal kids if they told them they had a speech impediment.

Look, I'm not going to detail the whole experiment, but basically you had two groups.

And then there was two subgroups in those groups. So you had group 1A and group B. Group 1A and group 1B. These were kids that actually stuttered.

And in group 1A, they told the kids like, hey, don't worry, you'll outgrow the stuttering. You'll be able to speak even much better than you're speaking now.

Don't worry about what other people say. It's going to yield grout of it. No big deal. That's how they treated those kids.

Then in group B, they would tell the kids that stuttered, it's going to get worse, this kind of stuff. Just evil.

I mean, right? It kind of just evil. Even when you hear it now, that's why they call it the monster study.

So that's where the kids that actually stuttered. Then they had some kids that had normal speech.

And one group of the kids that had normal speech, they said, hey, you're really eloquent, you're very articulate.

Just that kind of stuff. Just treated them, gave them praise.

The other group, they told them that, and I have a little quote here, they told them that, the staff has come to the conclusion that you have a great deal of trouble with your speech.

You have many of the symptoms of a child who's beginning to stutter. You must try to stop yourself immediately. Use your willpower.

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