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Comment by dminor14 | Hacker News Reader

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

> 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.

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.

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