Behavior of young children in a situation simulating entrapment in refrigerators | Hacker News Reader

Behavior of young children in a situation simulating entrapment in refrigerators

pediatrics.aappublications.org

110 pointsColinWright65 comments

It would be good to add (1958) to the title -- I doubt such an experiment would fly today, and this presents a fascinating look back in history both at the state of experimental ethics and the development of modern refrigerator doors.

The only experience I have with fridges so old is the one that my grandfather rotated 90 degrees and buried in his yard, to serve as a root cellar. I think the door may have had an actual lock on it, but can't recall; if so, this experiment studying door release mechanisms would make much more sense.

Edit to add: It's possible the invention of magnetic weatherstripping has saved many lives.

  > It would be good to add (1958) to the title

Won't fit in the 80 character limit.

Get rid of the word "young", perhaps?

Now too late, but even so, given the moderators' tendencies to change titles so they match exactly the article, even when the supplied title is significantly more informative, I've stopped trying to be helpful with titles.

That (informal?) policy drives me fucking nuts.

I had one submission awhile back with a fairly informative title for an article about the legal issues AirBnB was running into. The mods, in their everlasting wisdom, decided to change the title to match the article's. What was it?

"DIY B&B"

Oh, yeah, that's descriptive. I wouldn't say I have a huge flair for titles or anything, but mine was (a) not terrible and (b) definitely more useful in getting the point across. Rage.

For some reason this post by Ihavenoname is [dead], but it is an interesting anecdote.

Ihavenoname 12 minutes ago | link [dead]

There were a frightening number of children that were trapped in the old refrigerators. They often used them as hiding places and could not get out until they were redesined They had latches and even when there were interior releases it was not obvious to a child how to open it when in the dark and with limited leverage. Even knowing a study like this would save lives I would find it hard to see it getting approved by modern ethics committees. It really says a lot about how our society has changes as anything. The society is much less Unitarian in its ethics simply sounding suspect is enough to get rejected.

Ihavenoname: perhaps you accidentally double posted and deleted the wrong comment, or perhaps your comment five days ago about Google got flagged by an unhappy Google fan.

The answer is: these days you wouldn't need a study. All you'd need to do is cause a PR ruckus and it would change.

The issue with ethics in this experiment is not "the researchers might be creepy people", it's that it violates the basic idea that human experimentation on non-consenting people shouldn't cause harm (which includes negative emotions like fear, embarassment, etc). Sometimes such experimentation does get past ethics committees, but it generally has much more stringent reporting requirements and control, plus it usually has to answer a useful question and not something trivial. If kids are getting locked in fridges, this is not something that particularly needs an empirical study, just change the fridge doors.

  > ... just change the fridge doors.

That's what this research was intended to answer: change the fridge doors to what?

At the time there was no such thing as magnetic strips. To seal the fridge you had a rubber seal, and then you had to close the door with significant force. The handles were effectively levers so an ordinary person could provide enough force to open them, and fridges were advertised with elephants standing on them to show how strong they were, and, by implication, how well the door seal worked.

This research was intended to work out what kind of internal release mechanism could be provided to allow children, in the dark, to release the door quickly.

So yes, "just change the fridge doors".

Using 1958 technology - how? In what way? To what?

> Using 1958 technology - how? In what way? To what?

Have a lever on the inside too. So that people could see it, use luminescent paint. Both technologies existed in 1958.

In a fit of awesomeness, the luminescent paint used by a 50's refrigerator designer would be radioactive - now preserving your food for even longer...

Sounds great, if done without testing, it would have had only a moderate effect:

When presented with a gadget that could be grasped, some (18%) pulled, a few (9%) pushed, but 40% tried to turn it like a doorknob.

According to the linked abstract, the study considered how to change fridge doors. In other words, the question being answered was, "What style of door is easiest for children to open from the inside?"

Given that many (most? all?) fridges of 1958 had locking latches that opened only from the outside, it's not inconceivable that moving to a magnetically sealed door like modern fridges was not seen as a trivial, or the most obvious, change at the time.

You both raised good points. I guess I was more responding to the implications around ethics than the design.

I actually found it quite an interesting experience to read the article and only have the date revealed at the end. Obviously I knew it wasn't recent, but it was interesting to read about the study and have no clear frame of context.

The paper is behind a paywall, but this 2009 Scientopia post has some more interesting details: http://scientopia.org/blogs/scicurious/2009/07/17/friday-wei...

It sounds as though the ethical aspects of the experiment were considered pretty carefully, for example.

201 children from 157 families. Ages 2,3,4,5. The "enclosure" was meant to look like a playhouse; some children were lured into it, but many wandered in on their own. It was 40x18X25 in. It was outfitted with a number of recording devices: video camera, infrared, sound.

HN article title should probably have (1958) appended to it.

Incidentally, see http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2586/is-it-impossib... for a bit more on the subject.

Interesting, that article claims that magnetic seals were invented well before 1958 but not adopted until 1958 when it was mandated by legislation.

"It was also influenced by the educational level of the parents, a higher rate of success being associated with fewer years of education attained by mother and father combined."

This seems counterintuitive to me. A LOWER educational level of the parents correlated to a HIGHER rate of success of escape, it seems.

Let it change your intuition. It will make you look at people differently.

It's interesting how science works like that, right?

I wonder how that statement is influenced by investigator bias - in the 1950's where "street smarts" (working class parents, working class background) somehow viewed socially as superior in these situations when compared with educated families?

This was the section of the article that caught my attention as well.

My guess is when a child is use to being rescued or cared for after a very very short time, they learn quickly to do (or try) things themselves and not rely on parents, care givers, or others.

I struggle with this notion in raising my own child. I want her to learn - be self sufficient and resourceful, but I don't want her to suffer for it, or not trust people.

It's also possible that some of the lower income children had already been stuck in a refrigerator while playing outside, and had practice at the task. Ten seconds to escape is pretty impressive!

Since it was in the 50's we really have no idea just how statistically accurate this study is. For example, they may not have had a equal spread of income levels. Most of the participants may have been poor and there may have been only one or two high income families involved. Such a small sample would not give reliable results. However if the study did have an accurate cross sample of incomes, then perhaps the results indicate that some sort of education program is in order for children in well to do families.

> "Since it was in the 50's"

Plenty of first-class science and engineering was done in the 1950s and before. The 50s produced hydrogen bombs, supersonic aircraft, and great advances in chemotherapy and computer science, for example. They were quite capable of doing an empirical study to a standard we would recognize.

  a higher rate of success being associated with fewer years of education attained by mother and father combined.

Tell me more - is that statistically significant? Causes? Related to Reading age?

The bit that worries me is the percentage of children who locked in the fridge just waited and cried.

If they cry loud enough, it may not be the worst strategy.

Aren't fridges pretty airtight though? Isn't that the whole point here? If so, then crying loud and long is at best a hell of a bet.

I'd be willing to bet that fridges are pretty good sound insulators. The inside is sort of suspended IIRC.

Airtight does not imply soundproof. Well-insulated is better correlated, and fridges do tend to be that as well.

I was thinking more along the lines of screaming being a great way to use up all your oxygen. That too is an assumption though...

Not soundproof, but certainly sound-dampening. Quality speakers have an airhole to allow movement of air in and out of the box, for example.

Though this is straying a bit from the topic at hand, I must point out that quality speakers employ a range of designs, from simple sealed designs, to the ported designs you mention, on up to folded or full-scale (built with cinder block walls[0]) subwoofer horns.

The purpose of the port in ported designs is not just to allow movement of air, but to control the resonant frequency and Q-factor of the speaker. The individual dimensions, size, shape, and materials of quality speaker enclosures are all tuned to control resonance.

To sum up, there's a lot more to it than "an airhole to allow movement of air."

[0] I can't find the actual system I recall, but here is an older system with a similar design: http://www.burwenaudio.com/images/20000_WATT_HOME_HI-FI_0476...

Put a microphone inside and outside the fridge. If the noise coming from inside the fridge is louder than the noise from outside the fridge, pop the hatch automatically.

Not a viable solution for 1958x but today we are talking about a few dollars in electronics and an electromagnet.

I know the upvote is for this, but can I just say that that's a brilliant idea!

You could probably use a single mic and a volume threshold, rather than a volume comparison with the outside, unless enough sound from the outside of the fridge gets to the internal microphone to set it off (e.g. during an earthquake or extremely loud party).

Not a viable solution today: the problem is not fridges in active use in houses, it's fridges in people's backyards/dumps/barns/whatever where they are no longer plugged into anything.

More information on the problem:

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2586/is-it-impossib...

A battery could presumably power it long after being unplugged. But you're right - That article basically states that the problem was solved in 1958, by replacing the mechanical latch with a magnetic door. Coincidentally this research was from 1958, so I assume there is a connection there. Thanks for posting that - It puts thing into perspective.

Crying loud is a pretty good mammal trick for most situations other than an imminent predator-grabbing - being trapped in an airtight refrigerator is definitely an evolutionary edge case.

Agreed. Although one option would be to require all two year old children to escape a refrigerator or die trying, in order to evolve out of this problem.

Pure speculation: could be that poor kids were more likely to have dealt with similar problems or even just to have dealt with similar levels of suffering, and therefore respond with a little more short-term resilience.

Not like anyone can do follow-ups on this research any more.

More idle speculation: self-reliance and/or initiative are inversely correlated with social class/socioeconomic status/whatever.

>>Not like anyone can do follow-ups on this research any more.

A modest proposal:

Places like Syria seems to not only torture dissidents but also their children -- and the regime need cash because of all the sanctions.

The Syrian Bath party was even inspired by the nazis, so there is precedent for getting experimental data.

(Sorry about this, sometimes my humor disgusts me too.)

The generalization of statistics is relatively recent development in science. AFAIK, it happened during the 50's and 60's, probably at a different pace in different disciplines.

Yeah, that was the big thing that made me wonder WTF. Really wish there was more data on that part of it.

Wonder if any of the original experiment data or executors are still around.. :)

Somebody here must be able to get us the pdf...

Or at least have a look at it and give us the lowdown.

I am very surprised nobody has picked up this line for discussion: " Success in escaping [..] was also influenced by the educational level of the parents, a higher rate of success being associated with fewer years of education attained by mother and father combined. "

There's no attempt at explanation for this in the article itself..

Would it be safe to deduce that the more educated "you" are, the more passive (or "inactive") you are in the face of danger?

Quick FYI, if it matters: this is from 1958.

As someone who has lived in Fukushima Prefecture, I am going to dare and ask, can nuclear energy, fertilizer, and reverse osmosis save our souls? Shutting down computer, opening window, sitting outside.

Pretty disgusting, maybe we should drown them and burn them also to see how they react.

Someone was trying to solve a real problem in 1958. In fact, children still die in refrigerators. I imagine in 54 years, people will look back at some of the stuff we do as primitive and barbaric.

> Instead, the scientists designed a very small, rather dense, playhouse. It looked just like a normal kid's playhouse, except that it was the exact dimensions of the average home fridge. Not only that, the house was equipped with an infrared camera on the top, which took videos of the kid while they were inside, while at the same time keeping it dark, like it would be in a fridge with the door shut. It should also be noted that the scientists teamed up with a psychiatrist, a child psychologist, and the parents to agree on the length of time the child would be allowed to cry before they helped it out. Three minutes. [1]

Hmm, three minutes of discomfort in a dark playhouse doesn't seem quite as bad as drowning or being burned alive. Especially when you consider the deaths that might be avoided as a result of the research.

[1] http://scientopia.org/blogs/scicurious/2009/07/17/friday-wei...

Replace "discomfort" with "trauma", especially once they find out that their parents heard them crying but decided not to come.

Not quite the Tuskegee Experiment.

This isn't the worst thing ever, therefore it's not bad? Apt handle, pessimizer.

No, it's not bad because it's not bad. Granted, it's not a detailed argument - but I'm not very concerned about a 3 year old feeling helpless and alone for up to 3 minutes.

Please. As if no emotionally healthy kid ever spent more than three minutes alone in the dark, after waking from a nightmare for instance. And why the hell would they find out? A post-study review in which they are told "mommy and daddy hate your guts"?

It's not 3 minutes, it's 3 minutes after they're so emotionally worked up they're crying. Finding out that your parents heard you but just ignored you is going to make you trust them less. (How do you define "emotionally healthy"? I grew up in a really nice home but my brother and I still have some problems.)

Do you have children? Children cry as an expression of many things, because they can't express themselves in other ways yet. You make it sound like once children get to a state of crying, they must have endured a lot already, which is not true. Allowing children to cry for several minutes at a time before going to check up on them is a pedagogically sound and normal technique for teaching children to go to sleep by themselves, for example.

Sure, I'm not saying parents have to come running every time or anything. The point is that letting a kid cry until he goes back to sleep is consistent. Locking your kid in a box to see what happens is not. How will the kid know next time he gets stuck, that it's not just another test? And since the kids are still learning how to communicate, adding a continuing doubt that maybe their parents understand them fine but have chosen to ignore them isn't going to help.

(two girls) Being upset in your familiar comfortable bed is a very different thing than accidentally trapping yourself in a tiny strange dark box and physically struggling to get out. Very different chemical things happening in your brain in those two situations.

Three minutes of screaming in a confined space for a claustrophobic person is an eternity. This would never fly today.

I don't see why it wouldn't, if the parents are fully informed and consent.

The children were not in any physical danger and were not harmed. I'm not aware of any research that shows that 3 minutes of panic for a 5 year old causes lasting psychological damage. Toddlers experience transient sobbing panic on a fairly regular basis for a variety of reasons. If they are comforted by supportive parents they are fine.

Since this study occurred in 1958, one could presumably find these kids today and see how they are doing. I'd wager that they are no worse-adjusted than would be expected of an average child of that era.

Anyone who can flag this submission, should.

For what?

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