Science Gone Bad

          In 1939, Doctor Wendell Johnson decided to conduct an experiment on 22 orphans - ten of whom stuttered when they talked, and the rest with no speech impairments.  He divided up the ones that stuttered into two groups - one group that got negative reinforcement, and the other got positive reinforcement.  He also divided the children that spoke normally into two groups - one that was told they had good speech, and another that was told that they stuttered and that they needed to look out for errors all the time.  He wanted to make the group of stutterers with positive reinforcement stop stuttering and the group of children who were told they stuttered to stutter.  The children who were told that they had speech problems immediately began to think that they could not speak well, and many stopped talking completely.  After the experiment, they were told three times that they had no speech problems, but it did not work.  Even when they had grown up, although none of the children who had been experimented on stuttered, many had speech impairments and were reluctant to talk. 
          I think that this experiment was inhumane and that the doctor never should have gone through with it.

Resources:  http://www.neatorama.com/2011/03/23/5-science-experiments-gone-wrong/