Photo illustration by Angelo Bautista. Original image by charlesdeluvio (CC0)
Before the era of data mining that’s now everywhere, UC-Berkeley scientists in the 1960s began a first-of-its-kind longitudinal study to find out how personalities are formed—by secretly observing and conducting experiments on a group of preschoolers. In her memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment, former test subject and journalist Susannah Breslin goes back in search of that data, in the hopes that it will reveal something about her.