It would be good to add (1958) to the title -- I doubt such an experiment would fly today, and this presents a fascinating look back in history both at the state of experimental ethics and the development of modern refrigerator doors.
The only experience I have with fridges so old is the one that my grandfather rotated 90 degrees and buried in his yard, to serve as a root cellar. I think the door may have had an actual lock on it, but can't recall; if so, this experiment studying door release mechanisms would make much more sense.
Edit to add: It's possible the invention of magnetic weatherstripping has saved many lives.
For some reason this post by Ihavenoname is [dead], but it is an interesting anecdote.
Ihavenoname 12 minutes ago | link [dead]
There were a frightening number of children that were trapped in the old refrigerators. They often used them as hiding places and could not get out until they were redesined They had latches and even when there were interior releases it was not obvious to a child how to open it when in the dark and with limited leverage. Even knowing a study like this would save lives I would find it hard to see it getting approved by modern ethics committees. It really says a lot about how our society has changes as anything. The society is much less Unitarian in its ethics simply sounding suspect is enough to get rejected.
Ihavenoname: perhaps you accidentally double posted and deleted the wrong comment, or perhaps your comment five days ago about Google got flagged by an unhappy Google fan.
The answer is: these days you wouldn't need a study. All you'd need to do is cause a PR ruckus and it would change.
The issue with ethics in this experiment is not "the researchers might be creepy people", it's that it violates the basic idea that human experimentation on non-consenting people shouldn't cause harm (which includes negative emotions like fear, embarassment, etc). Sometimes such experimentation does get past ethics committees, but it generally has much more stringent reporting requirements and control, plus it usually has to answer a useful question and not something trivial. If kids are getting locked in fridges, this is not something that particularly needs an empirical study, just change the fridge doors.
That's what this research was intended to answer: change the fridge doors to what?
At the time there was no such thing as magnetic strips. To seal the fridge you had a rubber seal, and then you had to close the door with significant force. The handles were effectively levers so an ordinary person could provide enough force to open them, and fridges were advertised with elephants standing on them to show how strong they were, and, by implication, how well the door seal worked.
This research was intended to work out what kind of internal release mechanism could be provided to allow children, in the dark, to release the door quickly.
So yes, "just change the fridge doors".
Using 1958 technology - how? In what way? To what?
According to the linked abstract, the study considered how to change fridge doors. In other words, the question being answered was, "What style of door is easiest for children to open from the inside?"
Given that many (most? all?) fridges of 1958 had locking latches that opened only from the outside, it's not inconceivable that moving to a magnetically sealed door like modern fridges was not seen as a trivial, or the most obvious, change at the time.
Now too late, but even so, given the moderators' tendencies to change titles so they match exactly the article, even when the supplied title is significantly more informative, I've stopped trying to be helpful with titles.
I had one submission awhile back with a fairly informative title for an article about the legal issues AirBnB was running into. The mods, in their everlasting wisdom, decided to change the title to match the article's. What was it?
"DIY B&B"
Oh, yeah, that's descriptive. I wouldn't say I have a huge flair for titles or anything, but mine was (a) not terrible and (b) definitely more useful in getting the point across. Rage.
I actually found it quite an interesting experience to read the article and only have the date revealed at the end. Obviously I knew it wasn't recent, but it was interesting to read about the study and have no clear frame of context.
The only experience I have with fridges so old is the one that my grandfather rotated 90 degrees and buried in his yard, to serve as a root cellar. I think the door may have had an actual lock on it, but can't recall; if so, this experiment studying door release mechanisms would make much more sense.
Edit to add: It's possible the invention of magnetic weatherstripping has saved many lives.