In 2007, George W. Bush praised Baby Einstein in his State of the Union address. The little educational-video company, started by a stay-at-home mom in 1996, had grown to become a multimillion-dollar behemoth, with an estimated one-third of all American babies plopped down in front of its videos. Baby Einstein was riding high.
But later that same year, a study published in The Journal of Pediatrics found that children between 8 and 16 months who watched those and similar shows scored lower on a measure of language development. Turns out, not only did Baby Einstein fail to transform kids into diaper-clad geniuses; it might actually hold them back. “Baby Einsteins: Not So Smart After All,” read a headline in Time magazine.
Bring on the lawsuits and accusations. Disney, which had bought out the company, offered refunds to dismayed parents. The founders of Baby Einstein sued the University of Washington for refusing to turn over the data used in the study (the university eventually did release the data and coughed up $175,000 in a 2011 settlement). It was messy.
And it’s not over. A new analysis argues that the data in the original paper were selectively, and perhaps sloppily, interpreted to arrive at the conclusion that videos might harm kids. The authors of the new paper, Christopher Ferguson and Brent Donnellan, write that the same data indicate that children not exposed to media actually had lower language scores.
“The current data might be used to support a recommendation that children should be exposed to media, although we are cautious about any such recommendation,” they write in Developmental Psychology.
At the very least, according to Mr. Ferguson, an associate professor of psychology at Stetson University, and Mr. Donnellan, an associate professor of psychology at Michigan State University, there’s no justification for the finding that watching videos affects young children negatively.
“When your data is correlational, inconsistent, and weak, it’s not a good idea to put out a press release to say that this product is harmful,” Mr. Ferguson said in an interview. (To be fair, the 2007 press release in question didn’t say exactly that. What it said was “the overuse of such products actually may slow down infants eight to 16 months of age when it comes to acquiring vocabulary.”)
‘Junk Science’
Mr. Ferguson sees the original paper as a prime example of social scientists’ overreaching in an effort to make a high-profile impact. “Researchers sometimes say, ‘Here’s a big social problem, and guess who’s going to ride the rescue? Us,’” he said. “It’s easier to get a grant saying something is a big problem rather than not a problem at all.”
The American Academy of Pediatrics cited the original study as part of the reason for recommending that children under 2 not be allowed to watch television. Mr. Ferguson thinks the AAP should revisit its recommendations “since they were never based on much data to begin with.”
One author of the original study, Frederick J. Zimmerman, a professor of health policy and management at the University of California at Los Angeles, called Mr. Ferguson’s reanalysis of his data “junk science.” He appears to be on a mission, Mr. Zimmerman contended, to debunk studies that show that video games and television are harmful. It is true that Mr. Ferguson has published multiple articles making the case that violent video games might not cause aggression and could even have upsides.
“They’ve started with their opinion that the results of the original study were somehow not valid,” Mr. Zimmerman said. “Then they search for a methodology that will validate their opinion. That’s not how we do science.”
Mr. Zimmerman felt strongly enough about the new paper that he asked that the journal that published it, Developmental Psychology, pull it off the journal’s Web site until his response had been submitted and published alongside it. The paper so far remains up, and Mr. Zimmerman’s response has yet to be published.
Mr. Ferguson accuses Mr. Zimmerman of going beyond what the data could support, of essentially overselling the idea that the videos might be harmful. And that certainly was how the message was widely received.
‘Warning Fatigue’
But Mr. Zimmerman was pretty measured in his public pronouncements. “The jury is still out on whether they are harmful,” he told The Denver Post in 2007. “But they are not beneficial. We found absolutely no evidence to support that.”
So here’s where the situation stands: Mr. Ferguson more or less accuses Mr. Zimmerman of skewing the data to make his case, while Mr. Zimmerman accuses Mr. Ferguson of pushing an agenda to prove that television and video games aren’t so bad after all. Neither seems to have much respect for the other as a researcher. And neither thinks we know for sure what effect, if any, television has on malleable minds.
But here’s the key difference. Mr. Zimmerman thinks the evidence suggests there might be a downside, and, operating on the better-safe-than-sorry principle, feels strongly that the pediatric academy’s recommendation should stand: Babies and TV don’t mix.
“We don’t know to what degree they are harmful or not,” he said. “We can’t say anything definitive. As a parent, I want to do the thing that’s going to be safe for my kid.”
Mr. Ferguson, no surprise, disagrees, and puts it in the broader context of psychology’s well-publicized missteps in recent years. “We have to be careful about warning people over and over about things because it does damage to our field,” he said. “You can get ‘warning fatigue.’ The concern is that there is a real warning out there, and it is replicated, and people are going to ignore it.”
