I Spent My Childhood as a Guinea Pig for Science. It Was … Great?

In my earliest recollection from the story of my life as a human lab rat, I’m 7 or 8 years old. I’m sitting in an experiment room in Tolman Hall, a Brutalist building on the north side of the University of California, Berkeley, campus. In the room, there are two people: a man and me. For the past hour or so, he has been asking me questions about myself, my relationships with my family members, and who I imagine I might grow up to be.

“Do you want some candy?” he asks me. I eye the bowl of M&M’s on the table between us. In fact, I’m starving. It’s been hours since I ate my brown-bag lunch on the playground of the alternative grade school that I attend in the Berkeley flatlands alongside kids who have names like Sunshine and Storm. Sensing this is a test, I search the man’s face for the right answer, but it’s a blank slate. Unsure what the correct response is or what I’m being tested on, I hesitate.

At home, I am invisible. My parents, who are both English professors, my father at UC– Berkeley and my mother at a private college in the East Bay, are preoccupied with their careers: teaching classes, grading papers, writing books. When my older sister isn’t riding horses at an equestrian center in the Berkeley Hills, she ignores me or bullies me. Mostly left to my own devices, I retreat into my room, where I play with my dollhouse, escape into books, or arrange my stuffed animals into complex tableaux of domestic strife.

Here, I am seen. In this sparsely decorated small room, I feel special. In Tolman Hall, to which I am periodically brought for reasons that have not been revealed to me yet, I am the center of attention. When I speak, these adults listen attentively, nod encouragingly, and take notes. It feels like love.

I don’t want to say the wrong thing. If I do, I might not be able to come back again.
Playing it safe, I ignore my hunger and shake my head no.

To my relief, he changes the subject.

“Oh, I forgot there’s something I have to do,” he announces a little while later. “You can wait here while I take care of it. Is that all right, Susannah?”

As soon as the door closes behind him, I leap from my chair and dive across the table for the candy. Inadvertently, I knock over the dish. As I look on in horror, M&M’s bounce in all directions across the tabletop. Mortified I’ll get caught making a mess, I grab handfuls of candy and stuff them in my mouth.

Suddenly, I freeze. In the large mirror on the opposite wall, my hot cheeks are pink, flushed with my embarrassment. Somehow I have surmised the truth: I am not alone. Someone on the other side of the mirror is watching me.

Not long after I was born, my parents submitted an application for my enrollment in the Harold E. Jones Child Study Center, an exclusive laboratory preschool with a yearslong waiting list overseen by UC–Berkeley’s Institute of Human Development. Founded in 1927 with financial support from the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial, the preschool met two needs: faculty, researchers, and students studying early childhood development got young human subjects, and professors and staff got convenient, affordable, quality child care.

In 1960, the Child Study Center was relocated from a rambling, dark wood house on the south side of campus to a newly constructed complex a few blocks south of campus that was designed by Joseph Esherick, a UC–Berkeley architecture professor who liked to say: “The ideal kind of building is one you don’t see.” The preschool was made for spying on children. In its T-shaped building, a hidden observation gallery was tucked between mirror-twin classrooms and outdoor play yards; across a maze of walkways, in a rectangular building, testing rooms were outfitted with one-way mirrors and eavesdropping devices.

When I arrived at the Child Study Center for the first day of preschool in the fall of 1972, I became one of a cohort of over 100 Berkeley children whose parents had enrolled us in a groundbreaking, 30-year longitudinal study of personality that would attempt to answer a simple question: If you study a child, can you predict who that child will grow up to be? Formally, the study is named Block and Block Longitudinal Study, 1969–1999. Colloquially, it’s referred to as the Block Study. Those of us who comprised its cohort knew it as the Block Project. The study was the brainchild of married UC–Berkeley personality researchers Jack and Jeanne Block, who set out to demonstrate that, as the poet William Wordsworth wrote: “The Child is father of the Man.”

At the preschool, researchers studied and assessed us, and our teachers shared their insights about us. Across three decades, we were assessed at nine key developmental stages: the ages of 3, 4, 5, 7, 11, 14, 18, 23, and 32. Over the years, the Blocks collected “L.O.T.S.” of data on us: L-data, our life history, demographic information, and schooling; O-data, the observations of the study’s examiners, our parents, and our teachers; T-data, the results of the many tests we were given (IQ tests, personality tests, galvanic skin response, and more); and S-data, our self-reported data (what we disclosed in interviews). Our report cards were considered. Psychologists analyzed us. At 6, we were studied at home. We were assessed one-on-one, with one parent, or with both parents. Our parents were asked about their child-rearing strategies, their marriages and divorces, and our relationships with our siblings, if we had any. Our personality traits and characteristics were quantified and cataloged; among them were our ability to delay gratification, our distractibility, our capacity for curiosity, our interest in risk-taking, our creative expression, our level of ambition, our “moral development,” and our egocentrism.

“As an observation, not a boast,” Jack observed of us, their scientific progeny, sounding like a proud father, “it is likely that there is not another sample in psychology so extensively, intensively, protractedly assessed.”

From the first chapter, my life has been an open book. In the beginning, my parents consented for me to be studied. As I got older, I consented for myself. Somewhere along the way—I can no longer remember the who, or the how, or the when—I had learned that I was a research subject in an important study of personality. The Block Project gave me a higher purpose. My life was part of something that was bigger than I was. I was enlightening humanity.

In time, our data informed over 100 books and scientific papers. Our lives proved that, among other things, you can foresee, to some degree, who a child will grow up to be; that teens who experiment with drugs are better adjusted than teens who abstain from drugs altogether and teens who abuse drugs heavily; and that, perhaps most controversially, “self-reliant, energetic, somewhat dominating, relatively under-controlled, and resilient” preschoolers are more likely to become politically liberal adults, while “indecisive, fearful, rigid, inhibited, and relatively over-controlled and vulnerable” preschoolers are more likely to become politically conservative adults.

But in 1999, when I was in my early 30s, the Block Project ended, and our assessments stopped. After that, I didn’t think about the study or my experiences in it too often. That I had grown up under a microscope had seemed perfectly normal to me; it was all I had ever known. I had no memory of a time in my life when I wasn’t in the study. Then, in early 2010, I was reading the New York Times online when a headline caught my eye: “Jack Block, Who Studied Young Children Into Adulthood, Dies at 85.” I was one of those young children, I thought. In 1981, I knew, Jeanne had died at 58 of pancreatic cancer, midway through their project. Now Jack was gone too, due to complications related to a spinal cord injury suffered a decade prior. It appeared the final chapter of the Block Project had been written.

Two years later, I found myself hooked up to a beeping IV stand and sitting in a blue armchair in a private room on a cancer ward in a hospital. At 43, I had been diagnosed with a rare and aggressive form of breast cancer. My oncologist had recommended a rigorous treatment protocol: a lumpectomy, 12 rounds of chemotherapy, infusions of a gene-targeting drug, 30 rounds of radiation. Moments before, another oncologist who worked on the same ward had knocked on the door, stuck in his head, and asked if he and a group of medical residents could come in and discuss my case. Now they stood in a half-circle around me, studying me. I experienced déjà vu. I was a human lab rat again.

Over the days, weeks, and months that followed, I thought of the Block Project with increasing frequency. Surely, the Blocks hadn’t foreseen this part of my life, but what had they foreseen? Had they predicted I would become the person I was? What if there was someone else I was supposed to be? And who was she? The Blocks had maintained a file on me, filled with decades of my data.

All I had to do was find it.

“If one casts a line only into the shallow waters of a nearby pond, only little fish will be caught,” Jack writes in “Venturing a 30-Year Longitudinal Study,” a 2006 essay about the Block Project that appeared in American Psychologist. “To catch the big fish, it is necessary to venture out into deep water.”

Initially, I worried what I might find if I started digging around in my past. What if I dug up something I didn’t like? I couldn’t rebury it and pretend I had never discovered it. As an investigative journalist, I had written stories in which I had exposed other people; the prospect of exposing myself filled me with dread. What I didn’t know was that unearthing my curious history would change everything. As I recovered from breast cancer, as my marriage imploded, as I moved from one side of the country to the other, as I returned to Berkeley to live in an in-law apartment less than a mile from the house in which I was raised, as I went through archives, tracked down files, and interviewed researchers, I began to understand how the Block Project itself had shaped my identity.

According to pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, a child doesn’t need a perfect mother, but a “good-enough mother,” who “is neither good nor bad nor the product of illusion, but is a separate and independent entity.” My mother was cool and detached, neither touchy nor feely; a feminist who graduated from Mount Holyoke College and claimed to have read Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique while pushing a vacuum cleaner; a woman who might never have had children had she been born decades later. For my mother, motherhood was a tax being levied upon her. “I don’t want to be a mother anymore,” she would say, oblivious to or disinterested in how I, who wanted a mother, would take this proclamation or what I was to do with it.

For me, the Block Project was a good-enough mother. In my mind, it was always there, watching over me, keeping an eye on me. It made sure I was alive, thriving, and surviving. The study was deeply invested in my outcome, as it dedicated itself to constructing a nuanced portrait of who I was, who I wanted to be, who I would become. After my parents’ divorce, I was despondent, having been left with an unhappy mother and longing for my absent father. In my teens, I experimented with drugs, ran away from home, got drunk and disappeared into frat-row rooms with young men who were unaware I was underage and who, for all I knew, were my father’s students. My researchers knew me better than I knew myself, were my intimate companions with whom I shared my secrets, were father confessor and deliverer of absolution in contrast to my parents’ devout atheism. Even when I was in a dangerous place, I could feel a connection between the study and me, like a gossamer thread spun from inside of it and wrapped around me.

Recently, as I was scrolling through Threads, Meta’s “Twitter-killer” social media app, I came across a post by a parent who was a writer: “Can’t wait for my kid to discover my social media accounts and find an unbroken series of complaints about being their parent, observations framed as humor, all shared plausibly in service of ‘normalizing honest dialogue about parenthood,’ but truthfully in service of getting stupid little dopamine hits from strangers online.”

When I read posts like this one, or watch a video on Instagram in which a child weeps at the sight of the stump where his amputated foot used to be as someone (it’s unclear who) films the scene, or see that the hashtag #touchedout, which is used by mothers who want their kids to stop touching them, is trending on TikTok, I think about my experiences as a research subject. In the 21^st century, we are all research subjects in a global psychological experiment, one in which a child’s life is digitized, downloaded, and distributed online without his or her consent. My researchers were benevolent, pioneers who aspired to solve the mystery of why we turn out as we do, true believers for whom understanding others was their life’s work. Today, the collectors of our digital data are multibillionaires with murky agendas and opaque ethics, whose interests aren’t in predicting future behavior but in steering it with algorithms designed to make our choices for us, founders and CEOs who, like Logan Roy on HBO’s Succession, view people as “economic units” to be manipulated for the purposes of maximizing profits and increasing shareholder value. In our brave new world, in which parents abdicate parenting to digital devices, technology is not a good-enough mother.

“An economic order founded on the secret massive-scale extraction of human data assumes the destruction of privacy as a nonnegotiable condition of its business operations,” Shoshana Zuboff, a Harvard Business School professor emeritus, asserts in “You Are the Object of a Secret Extraction Operation.” Privacy and data go hand in hand. Robbing adults of the right to privacy in the pursuit of surveillance capitalism profits is one thing. Robbing children of the right to privacy in the pursuit of those same profits is another. In fact, children around the world have a right to privacy, regardless of what parents, CEOs, and shareholders believe. According to Article 16 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child: “No child shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with his or her privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to unlawful attacks on his or her honour and reputation.” With time, we may discover that with the loss of privacy, a child loses a piece of themself.

Once upon a time, I was a canary in the coal mine of our modern-day surveillance society. In my case, a psychological experiment saved my life. (Having talked to others in my cohort, I know I’m not alone in this regard.) Ultimately, as I began to write about my experiences as a research subject, I became my own observer effect, the phenomenon by which the act of observation changes that which is being observed. And, in doing so, I became the author of the story of my life.

Susannah Breslin is the author of Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment, published in November 2023 by Legacy Lit, an imprint of Grand Central Publishing, a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc.