People didn't live there, but they did on surrounding islands.
government tested its new nuclear bomb on the Bikini Atoll. Mushroom clouds like these were sometimes tested within a 50 mile range of allied civilians. Even in 1939, these students felt it was ethically abhorrent. No effort was made to undue this damage and the experiment was nicknamed "The Monster Experiment" by the undergraduates who helped him conduct it. Many refused to speak at all by the end of the study and some of those that did found themselves with a permanent stutter that did not exist before. Not surprisingly, the children in the negative reinforcement group became withdrawn. He gave positive speech therapy to half of the orphans and the other half, he mentally tortured by telling them their speech skills were awful and that they were stutterers (which was completely false). Wendell Johnson decided he'd conduct a little experiment on stuttering in 1939. If you think Pavlov was the only one bold enough to experiment on orphans, you'd be wrong. This all sounds like the beginning of a bad alien abduction movie. So he strapped them down to a chair, taped their mouths open, inserted a device to measure their saliva, and proceeded to force feed them both sweets and bad tasting things. He conducted the same salivation experiment on the orphans as he did on his dogs, the only catch was orphans aren't as willing as dogs to receive food from strangers. Ideally he wanted to know how the human mind worked so he acquired himself some children from the local orphanage - you know, impressionable minds who didn't have a parent to stand up for them.
Pavlov's experimentation on dogs may have been cruel, but he wasn't just interested in dogs. Many of his experiments were not done with positive reinforcement like the aforementioned, but with negative reinforcements such as flooding the dogs' kennels and making them believe they were going to drown and conditioning them to be afraid of stairs by repeatedly pushing them down a flight or so. However, Pavlov was far from a dog lover. It was a cornerstone experiment in psychology and sounds rather benign. Most people know about Pavlov's famous dog experiment where he proved that dogs could be conditioned to anticipate food even when they couldn't see or smell the food.
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