Susannah Breslin, DATA BABY: My Life in a Psychological Experiment

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Zibby Owens

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4.4 • 602 Ratings

🗓️ 26 January 2024

⏱️ 24 minutes

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Summary

Zibby welcomes journalist Susannah Breslin to discuss DATA BABY, a provocative and poignant memoir about her experiences as a “lab rat” in a lifelong psychological study and her pursuit to reclaim autonomy as an adult. Susannah describes the preschool experiment her parents enrolled her in, which followed over 120 kids for thirty years, aiming to predict their future based on early childhood observations. She reflects on her awareness of the study and her views on the stability of personality traits. She also talks about her whirlwind marriage, battle with breast cancer, the impact of the experiment on her identity, and the emotional challenge of putting it all into words.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books with Zivie. I'm the host, Zivie Owens. I am an author. My latest is blank,
0:12.0	pub date March 1st, a novel. I'm also a podcaster, obviously, a publisher, a bookstore owner,
0:17.8	and so much more. If you love books, you're in the right place. In fact, we call it the Zivieverse, or really, the L.A. Times called it the Zivieverse, and we're going with it. Go to Zivie Owens.com to learn more and follow me on Instagram at Zivie Owens. Susanna Breslin is the author of Data Baby, My Life in a Psychological Experiment.
0:38.9	Susanna is a freelance journal, Anna Forbes.com, senior contributor.
0:42.4	From 2018 to 19, she was the Lawrence Gromman Jr.
0:46.0	Postgraduate Fellow at UC Berkeley's Investigative Reporting Program.
0:49.8	Her reporting and essays have appeared in the Atlantic, Slate, Harper's Bazaar,
0:53.3	The Daily Beast, Salon, Newsweek, The Guardian, and Variety, among other media outlets.
0:58.1	She holds a BA in English from UC Berkeley and an MA from the program for writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
1:04.7	She lives in Los Angeles, California.
1:06.6	Welcome, Susanna. Thank you so much for coming on moms. Don't have time to read books to discuss your book, Data Baby, My Life, and a Psychological Experiment.
1:15.1	Thanks so much for having me, Zippy. It's great to be here. My pleasure. Please tell listeners about your book, about the experiment, about your parents ending up, just the whole thing.
1:26.7	So Data Baby is a memoir,
1:28.1	and I grew up in Berkeley, and my father was an English professor at UC Berkeley, and the university
1:36.4	ran a preschool where the kids who went there were also studied by professors and researchers
1:42.6	at the university studying early childhood development.
1:45.7	So it just so happened that when I started preschool there, I became one of over 128 kids
1:51.9	who were followed for 30 years. And basically the researchers who were studying us were
1:56.9	trying to figure out, if you study a child, can you predict who that child will grow up to be?
2:02.2	At the time, there was this crisis in psychology about whether or not personality traits were real.
2:09.2	Do people actually have a distinct personality, or are they just responding to the circumstances in which they find themselves?
2:16.4	And the only way to sort of identify that and find out if personality remained relatively stable
	...

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