Buzz
Children are often seen as innocent and unspoiled—something to be shielded. But for scientists, this purity simply makes them the perfect subjects for experiments. While many of these studies are considered essential to modern psychology, one can only imagine the shock some parents must have felt when they heard, 'You want to do what to my child?'
10. Bobo Gets A Beating
In 1961, Albert Bandura’s groundbreaking experiment demonstrated that children could learn aggressive or violent actions just by observing them. This contradicted the commonly held belief that learning only occurred through rewards or punishments.
Bandura worked with three different groups of nursery school children. The first group watched an adult aggressively interact with an inflatable clown named Bobo, kicking and hitting it. The second group saw a nonaggressive adult who ignored the clown. The third group had no exposure to either behavior. Later, the children were left alone in a room with the inflatable doll and several other toys.
Children who observed an adult behaving aggressively and violently toward Bobo were far more inclined to kick, hit, and attack the doll themselves. Simply witnessing these actions made the children more prone to mimic them—even without direct instructions or rewards from the adult.
9. Who’s That Baby In The Mirror?
In 1972, Beulah Amsterdam from the University of North Carolina initiated a series of mirror studies to examine children’s self-awareness. Researchers placed a spot of rouge on the noses of children aged six months to two years, then positioned them in front of a mirror and asked, 'Who’s that?'
Between 6 to 12 months, the children mistook the reflection for another baby and interacted with it. However, by 20 to 24 months, most children realized they were looking at themselves and pointed to the rouge on their nose.
In the middle group (around 12 to 20 months old), many of the children were uncertain and even avoided looking at the reflection. They no longer believed the baby in the mirror was a new companion, but they didn’t quite grasp that it was their own image.
8. The Science Behind Tickling
In 1933, psychologist Clarence Leuba set out to discover whether laughter was an innate reaction to being tickled or if children learned from social cues that laughter was the expected response. To answer this, he chose to tickle his newborn son only during controlled experimental sessions.
To ensure that his facial expressions wouldn’t influence his son, Leuba wore an expressionless mask throughout the tickling sessions. Despite this, his son consistently laughed when tickled. The experiment, though somewhat eerie, seemed to succeed.
At one point, Leuba’s wife allegedly 'ruined' the experiment by tickling their son after a bath, outside the approved testing. To gather more data, Leuba repeated the experiment with his second child, a daughter. This at least guaranteed that the siblings could eventually share the cost of therapy.
7. Making Babies See The Impossible
In 1985, Professor Renee Baillargeon from the University of Illinois designed an experiment to test if infants understood the concept of object permanence, which means that an object continues to exist even if it’s out of sight. For instance, we know the Eiffel Tower remains standing in Paris even if we aren’t currently looking at it.
Baillargeon showed infants aged 6 to 8 months a toy car rolling down a ramp, with part of its path hidden behind a screen. Then, a solid block was placed next to the track and covered by the screen. Finally, a block was placed across the track, blocking the car’s path, and was then obscured by the screen.
Each time, the experimenters released the car onto the ramp once again. However, they altered the final condition so that the car appeared (even though it should have been blocked behind the hidden block on the track). Baillargeon discovered that infants consistently stared longer when they witnessed an 'impossible' event, indicating that they recognized something was amiss.
6. The Marshmallow Test For Success
One of the most well-known child psychology experiments is the Marshmallow Test, conducted by Walter Mischel in the 1960s. In this experiment, an adult presented each child (ages three to five) with a reward, such as a marshmallow, and then proposed a deal to the child.
The adult explained that if the child could resist eating the marshmallow while alone in the room, they would earn two marshmallows when the researcher returned. If the child couldn’t wait, they could ring a bell, and the adult would return, allowing the child to eat the single treat. Around 30 percent of the children managed to wait for the adult (about 15 minutes) and earned the extra treat.
Years later, Mischel gathered data on the participants and discovered that those who quickly ate their treat generally scored lower on SATs and had higher body mass indexes.
5. The Broken Toy Experiment
What causes a person to recognize and care about how their actions affect others? Grazyna Kochanska and her team at the University of Iowa believe that a child’s sense of guilt plays a significant role.
To test this theory, an adult researcher showed a child a toy and explained how important it was to them. The child was then left alone with the cherished toy, which was designed to fall apart as soon as the child interacted with it. When the adult returned to find the toy broken, researchers noted the children's reactions—from avoiding eye contact to hiding their faces behind their hands.
Eventually, the researchers gave the children a break. The adult came back with a fully intact version of the toy, claiming it had been repaired. While the children most susceptible to guilt may have felt worse initially, Kochanska noted they experienced fewer behavioral problems in the following five years.
4. Little Albert’s Fear Of Fluffy Things
In 1920, John B. Watson and Rosalie Rayner conditioned a nine-month-old child, known as 'Little Albert,' to develop a fear of soft, furry animals.
When Albert was first introduced to a white rat, he showed no fear. However, when the researchers brought the rat back and paired it with a loud, disturbing noise by striking a steel bar with a hammer, the sound startled and frightened Albert, causing him to have an emotional outburst.
After several repetitions, just the sight of the white rat alone was enough to make Albert cry and pull away from the animal. By associating the harmless rat with the unpleasant, frightening noise, Watson and Rayner instilled a fear in Albert, which he then generalized to rabbits and other fuzzy creatures.
3. Growing Up Chimp
In 1931, Winthrop Niles Kellogg decided to take an animal from the wild and raise it like a human. This decision led to his infant son, Donald, having a chimpanzee as a ‘sister’—at least for nine months.
Kellogg brought a seven-month-old chimp named Gua into their home when Donald was just 10 months old. Both Kellogg and his wife treated Gua the same way they did their human child, evaluating both in various areas such as attention span, problem-solving skills, and memory.
At first, Gua kept up with, and at times even surpassed, Donald in certain tasks. However, her innate limitations eventually prevented her from acquiring language and other cognitive skills. While the reasons for ending the experiment remain unclear, the negative impact it had on Donald was likely a key factor. He was slow to learn new words and even began mimicking the barking sounds Gua made to signal hunger.
2. Will Your Baby Crawl Off A Cliff?
Luckily, the possibility of a baby crawling off a cliff is an extremely rare occurrence. However, in 1959, researchers Eleanor J. Gibson and Richard D. Walk from Cornell University devised an experiment to explore whether such a risk could ever arise.
Their goal was to determine whether babies could visually recognize a drop, like a cliff, and whether they would hesitate to cross it. To safely conduct the experiment, Gibson and Walk built a ‘visual cliff’—a thick sheet of glass placed over a patterned base that gave the illusion of a drop, tricking the infant into thinking they might fall.
On the side of the structure that appeared to be a dangerous drop, the baby’s mother called out to encourage the child to crawl toward her. Despite this, infants as young as six months were able to both perceive and avoid the visual cliff. It remains uncertain whether the mothers urging their babies to crawl toward the edge may have created trust issues with the subjects.
1. Training Children To Stutter
In 1938, Wendell Johnson, a University of Iowa professor and psychologist who had struggled with stuttering since childhood, along with graduate student Mary Tudor, designed an experiment to test his theory that stuttering is a learned behavior, rather than something innate.
With the cooperation of a nearby orphanage, they selected 22 children aged 5 to 15 for the experiment. Ten of the children already stuttered, while 12 did not. These 12 non-stuttering children were divided into two groups. One group was reassured that their speech was perfectly normal, while the other group was told their speech was abnormal and needed correction. Researchers also criticized this second group when they made mistakes while speaking.
The experiment was a complete failure. Of the six children in this group, only two showed a decrease in their fluency when speaking. Unfortunately, although these children did not develop a stutter, they became more reserved and self-conscious, speaking less than before.
