All parents want their children to succeed, in the same way that every company wants its workers to reach their full potential. But sometimes, out of ignorance or because of seemingly established rules, we don’t go about it in the best possible way.
Many experiments have shown how we can condition anyone for success or for failure, including children, who are without doubt the most easily influenced, for better or for worse.
We have already discussed how learned helplessness can affect our lives. Today we will draw some conclusions from several psychological experiments, including the “Monster Study” and the “Pygmalion effect”. We will also see how two people showed that there are no limits, and what happens when people don’t know those limits exist.
All of this applies both to teaching children and to every other area of our lives. We can program any child and any adult for success or for failure.
1. The Monster Study
In 1939, the psychologist Wendell Johnson carried out an experiment with children at an orphanage in Iowa. It would become known as the “Monster Study” because of the terrible consequences it had for those children for the rest of their lives.
The aim of the experiment, basically, was to induce stuttering in a group of children who spoke normally and, at the same time, to cure children who stuttered using the same kind of conditioning in reverse.
The children were between 6 and 16 years old. A group of 10 of them stuttered, while a group of 12 had no speech problems at all.
Several teachers took part in the experiment. They were instructed to give positive reinforcement to the children who stuttered and negative reinforcement to the others: constantly picking them up on any slip in their reading, and telling them again and again that they would become stutterers if they kept making those mistakes. Often the “mistake” was simply repeating a syllable or word while hesitating.
The orphanage staff had instructions to keep up the positive or negative reinforcement with both groups even outside lessons.
The experiment bore fruit in just five months.
The researchers saw clearly how positive reinforcement corrected the stuttering in the children who stuttered, helping them overcome their speech problems. Johnson achieved his goal: he showed that children are not born stutterers, that the causes were psychological, and that negative reactions (other people’s laughter, negative comments from parents or anyone else) could make a child so insecure that it would end up showing in their speech and in other areas of their life.
Thanks to that experiment, psychological treatments have been developed that many people with this acquired problem benefit from today.
However, some of the children in the group that was criticised and negatively reinforced suffered permanent psychological damage that stayed with them all their lives, and some developed a stutter. Some of these participants received compensation for the harm they had suffered throughout their lives, having grown up insecure, with serious problems in their speech and abilities.
That is why the experiment earned the nickname “Monster Study”: only a monster could have ruined the lives of a group of healthy children.
Conclusion:
Children will become what you lead them to be. If you tell your child they will never amount to anything, that is exactly what they will become. If you limit them, they will grow up with limitations. If you scold them every time they fail and never encourage them, they will grow up as a failure.
And exactly the same happens with adults. We can condition anyone for better or for worse. It is only a matter of time and of knowing how.
2. The Pygmalion effect
In this case, several psychologists set out to confirm the “self-fulfilling prophecy”: if you make someone believe that they are, or will be, something, and that person believes it, that is what they will be and become.
To sum up this “experiment”, let’s say that the psychologist David C. McClelland decided to take some poor students, call in their teachers and parents, and tell them that these children had shown brilliant mental potential that nobody had known how to develop.
In other words, they were told the children were “brainboxes”. The teachers began to treat them like geniuses, so did their parents, and the children came to believe it too (even though until then they had thought of themselves as the school’s rejects).
Once they believed they were geniuses, and were treated as such, those children began to perform excellently, exceeding all expectations.
Conclusion: This kind of conditioning is probably the most basic. If someone tells you that you are “such and such”, and you believe it, you will end up being “such and such”, for better or for worse.
As the old saying goes: “Whether you believe you’re worth a lot or believe you’re worth nothing, either way you’re right.”
So at this point we should ask ourselves: what messages are our children receiving right now? What messages are we receiving as adults? Are we already victims of some kind of conditioning in the past that has shaped what came after?
Something to think about while we prepare the second part of this article, with two more cases. They are not experiments, but the personal stories of two individuals that show what happens when you decide to break through limits.
See also: How to condition yourself for success by breaking your limits
Featured image: Ctjf83, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
