Genie Wiley: A Study on Extreme Social Isolation

The video reveals a story about so called The Wild Child, Genie Wiley, and her involuntary 13-year isolation from socialization and any kind of interaction. Genie was subjected to living–like a prisoner–in a bedroom of her family’s home located in a suburb of Los Angeles. Her father instructed other family members not to interact or even speak with the poor girl. Over the years, such a prolonged isolation wreaked havoc on the development of the young soul. From a young age, Genie’s lack of social exposure drastically limited her cultural learning and ultimately led her to exhibit behavioral traits such as of a feral child raised in the wilderness. Upon the discovery of such a case, scientist began to study Genie and attempted to use the lack of her social development to support or disprove several hypotheses. In the meantime, the poor girl’s exposure went from one extreme to another, as her environment had shifted from a complete and total isolation to an overwhelming path of new experiences. For a while, Genie was successful at learning the language and she became more social with the people around her.

Skeels and H.B. Dye. They observed two control groups of children throughout their development. One group of infants was cared for by the women who lived in an institution for mentally retarded women, while another group was left to develop in the orphanage. After two and a half years, the children cared for by women surpassed those living in the orphanage by nearly 60 IQ points. Twenty-one years later, Skeels and Dye once again evaluated the two groups to find out that the ones who were subjected to natural development in the orphanage had only several years of education, held entry-level jobs and most were single. On the other hand, the ones cared for by the women had an average education of twelve years with some college. All of them were self-supporting and eleven had