The Monster Study Dr Wendell Johnson

The Monster Study, conducted by Dr. Wendell Johnson, is the perfect example on how evolution can have lasting damaging effects when taught as a basis of fact. Dr. Johnson was a speech pathologist, who wanted to show that the common theories about the causes of stuttering were wrong. Throughout the 1930s it was a theory that stuttering had an “organic or genetic cause; Contrasting, greatly however, was Dr. Johnson’s theory, explained best by the founder and author of the ‘PsyBlog’ Dr. Jeremy Dean thought the labelling of children as stutterers could actually make them worse, and in some cases cause ‘normal’ children to start stuttering. To prove his point, he suggested an experiment which has since become known as the ‘Monster Study’. Twenty-two