The skepticism came to a head in 2007 when New York psychologists Alison Nash and Giordana Grossi dissected the experiment in forensic detail and catalogued a string of problems, big and small. For one thing, the paper’s grand claim that the experiment’s conclusions were “beyond reasonable doubt” seemed an uncomfortable stretch when, in fact, not even half the boys in the study preferred to stare at the mobile and an even smaller percentage of the girls preferred to stare at the face.
