Tuesday, November 9, 2010

Triplets Separated at Birth





After watching the video clip of Paula and Elise, identical twins separated at birth, and hearing of the the triplets they wrote about in their book, I decided to do a little more research on the triplets. There names are Robert, David, and Eddy and were separated by Louise Wise Services. The chief psychiatric of the agency, Viola Bernard, was the person who decided to conduct the study. They were all placed in Jewish homes, but obviously the study was abandoned, because they were never interviewed afterwards to make any observations.


Robert and Eddy met at Nassau Community College in Long Island, and soon after that David recognized the boys in the newspaper. Once the three reunited, they all shared many similarities: smoke Marlboros, enjoyed Italian food, like older women, talked alike, had similar IQ, and lost their virginity at age 12.




The three boys were separated at birth as an experiment on nature versus nurture, as were Paula and Elise. This was very unethical, because there was no consent. Although unethical, it did provide a lot of insight into the issue of nature vs. nurture. Even though the triplets did not know the others existed until they were in college, they behaved similarly and had similar personality and intelligence traits. This shows that nurture is more powerful than nature.

Together they ran a restaurant called Triplets in NY, and is now ran solo by David. In 1995, Eddy committed suicide. I am not sure about the other two men.

5 comments:

  1. I liked how additional research was done outside of class. I also found this very interesting in class and was excited to learn more about it!

    ReplyDelete
  2. I thought this was interesting also!

    ReplyDelete
  3. its so sad that they do this. i dont know how i would feel if i had a sibling my whole life that i did not know let alone a twin or triplet. it gives good incite to psychology but its unethical. i wonder why eddy committed suicide

    ReplyDelete
  4. This is quite sad, im glad that we now have review boards to ensure the safety of subjects in studies, that way nothing like this happens again.

    ReplyDelete