10 unethical psychological experiments from the history of science
For the sake of discoveries or developments, scientists go to the most amazing experiments: for example, they try to determine the genre of a film by the composition of the air in a movie theater or invent bacterial batteries. But there is little that can be compared in complexity to even the most seemingly unsophisticated psychological experiment. The behavior of the human psyche is difficult to predict, it is important to take into account the maximum risk, to consider the consequences in the long term and, of course, strictly observe confidentiality.
Modern ethical postulates, which the authors of studies with human participation are oriented to, began to take shape long ago - starting with ten points of the Nuremberg Code, adopted in 1947 as a response to the monstrous medical experiments of Josef Mengele in concentration camps. Then came the Helsinki Declaration, the report of Belmont, the leadership of the Council of International Organizations of Medical Sciences (CIOMS) of 1993 and other declarations and resolutions. We talked about psychological experiments separately later - and now the whole world is focused on annually updated recommendations of the American Psychological Association. We talk about the most controversial (and simply inhuman) experiments with the human psyche and animals, which today are unlikely to pass an ethics committee.
Everything happened in 1920 at Johns Hopkins University, where Professor John Watson and his graduate student Rosalie Reiner, inspired by the success of the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov on the formation of conditioned reflexes in dogs, wanted to see if this was possible in humans. They conducted a study of classical condition (creating a conditioned reflex), trying to develop a person's reaction to an object that was previously neutral. A nine-month-old child became a participant in the research, which appears in the documents as “Albert B.”.
Checking the boy's reactions to objects and animals, Watson noticed that the baby felt a special sympathy for the white rat. After several neutral shows, the demonstration of the white rat was accompanied by a metal hammer blow - as a result, any subsequent demonstration of the white rat and other furry animals was accompanied by Albert with panic fear and a clearly negative reaction, even when there was no sound.
It’s hard to imagine what kind of mental manipulation could turn out for a child - but we don’t know about it: Albert was supposed to have died from a non-experimentally related disease at the age of six. In 2010, the American Psychological Association was able to establish the identity of "Albert B." - It turned out to be Douglas Merritt, the son of a local nurse, who received just a dollar for his participation in the study. Although there is a version that it could be a certain Albert Barger.
This experiment in 1968 was conducted by John Darley and Bibb Lathane, showing an interest in witnesses to crimes who did nothing to help the victim. The authors were particularly interested in the murder of 28-year-old Kitty Genovese, who was beaten to death in front of many people who did not try to prevent the criminal. A few reservations about this crime: first, it is important to keep in mind that the information about the "38 witnesses" that The Times wrote about was not confirmed in court. Secondly, most of the witnesses, no matter how many of them, did not see the murder, but only heard incoherent screams and were convinced that this was a “usual quarrel between acquaintances”.
Darley and Lathane conducted an experiment in the auditorium of Columbia University, where each participant was asked to fill out a simple questionnaire, and after a while smoke began to seep into the room. It turned out that if the participant was alone in the room, he would report smoke more quickly than if there was someone else nearby. So the authors have confirmed the existence of a "witness effect", which implies that "not I should act, but others." Gradually, the experiments became less ethical - and from the smoke as a verification factor, Darley and Lathane switched to using the recording with the voice of a person who needs urgent medical care. Of course, without informing the experiment participants that a heart attack was imitated by an actor.
The author of this experiment, Stanley Milgram, told me that he wanted to understand what made the respectable citizens of the Third Reich participate in cruel acts of the Holocaust. And how could the Gestapo officer Adolf Eichmann, who was responsible for the mass extermination of the Jews, declare at the trial that he had not done anything special, but “just kept order”.
Each test involved a couple of "student" and "teacher." Although Milgram talked about the random distribution of roles, in reality the research participant always acted as a “teacher”, and the “hired” actor was a “student”. They were placed in adjacent rooms, and the "teachers" were asked to press a button that sends a small current discharge to the "student" each time he gives the wrong answer. The “teacher” knew that with each successive pressure the discharge increased, as evidenced by the moans and cries from the next room. In fact, there was no current, and the screams and pleas were only a successful acting game - Milgram wanted to see how far a man with absolute power was ready to go. As a result, the scientist concluded that if the current discharges were real, most "teachers" would have killed their "students."
Despite the controversial ethical component, the Milgram experiment was recently repeated by Polish scientists led by psychologist Tomash Grzib. As in the original version, there was no current here, and the moderator continued to insist on continuing the experiment, using the phrases "you have no choice" and "have to continue." As a result, 90% of the participants continued to press the button, despite the cries of the person in the next room. True, if a woman turned out to be a “student”, the “teachers” refused to continue three times more often than if there was a man in her place.
In the 1950s, Harry Harlow of the University of Wisconsin studied infant addiction using the rhesus monkeys as an example. They were weaned from their mother, replacing it with two fake monkeys - from cloth and wire. At the same time, the "mother" of a soft towel had no additional function, and the wire fed the monkey from a bottle. The kid, however, spent most of the day with a soft "mother" and only about an hour a day next to the "mother" of the wire.
Harlow also used bullying to prove that the monkey was singling out the “mother” from the fabric. He deliberately frightened the monkeys, watching which model they ran to. In addition, he conducted experiments to isolate small monkeys from society in order to prove that those who did not learn to be part of a group in infancy will not be able to assimilate and mate when they get older. Harlow's experiments were discontinued due to the APA rules aimed at stopping the abuse of both humans and animals.
A primary teacher from Iowa, Jane Elliott, conducted a study in 1968 to demonstrate that any discrimination is unfair. Trying the next day after the murder of Martin Luther King to explain to students what discrimination is, she offered them an exercise, which was included in psychology textbooks like "Blue eyes - brown eyes".
Dividing the class into groups, Elliott cited fake research that claimed that one group outnumbered the other. For example, she could say that people with blue eyes were smarter and more intelligent - and it soon became apparent that the group, whose superiority was stated at the beginning of the lesson, coped better with the tasks and was more active than usual. The other group became more closed and seemed to lose its sense of security. The ethics of this study is questioned (if only because people should be informed about their participation in the experiment), but some of the participants report that it has changed their lives for the better, allowing themselves to experience what discrimination is doing to a person.
In the late 1930s, Wendell Johnson, a speech researcher, thought that the reason for his stuttering might have been a teacher, who once said that he was stuttering. The assumption seemed strange and illogical, but Johnson decided to check whether value judgments could be the cause of speech problems. Taking Mary Taylor as a graduate student as an assistant, Johnson selected two dozen children from a local orphanage — they were ideally suited for the experiment due to the lack of reputable parent figures.
The children were randomly divided into two groups: the first was told that their speech was beautiful, and the second that they had deviations and could not avoid stuttering. Despite the working hypothesis, not a single person from the group began to stutter in the final of the study - but the children had serious problems with self-esteem, anxiety, and even some signs of stuttering (which, however, disappeared in a few days). Now experts agree that this kind of suggestion can increase stuttering, which has already begun - but the roots of the problem should still be sought in neurological processes and genetic predisposition, and not in the rudeness of teachers or parents.
In 1971, Philip Zimbardo of Stanford University conducted a famous prison experiment to study group behavior and the influence of a role on personality traits. Zimbardo and his team gathered a group of 24 students who were considered physically and psychologically healthy and signed up to participate in a "psychological study of prison life" for $ 15 a day. Half of them, as is well known from the German film “Experiment” in 2001 and its 2010 American remake, became “prisoners”, and the other half became “overseers”.
The experiment itself took place in the basement of the psychology department at Stanford, where the Zimbardo team created an improvised prison. The participants were given a standard introduction to prison life, including recommendations for "warders": to avoid cruelty, but to keep order in any way. Already on the second day, the "prisoners" rebelled, barricaded themselves in their cells and ignored the "guards" - and the latter responded with violence. They began to divide the "prisoners" into "good" and "bad" and came up with sophisticated punishments for them, including solitary confinement and public humiliation.
The experiment was supposed to last two weeks, but Zimbardo’s future wife, psychologist Christina Maslach, said on the fifth day: “I think what you are doing with these boys is terrible,” so the experiment was stopped. Zimbardo received wide acclaim and recognition - in 2012, he won the next award, the gold medal of the American Psychological Fund. And everything would be fine if it were not for one thing but in the form of a recent publication, which questioned the conclusions of this, and therefore thousands of other studies based on the Stanford experiment. Audio recordings remained from the experiment, and after a thorough analysis of them, suspicions appeared that the situation got out of control not spontaneously, but at the request of the experimenters.
Manipulating people is not so difficult if you do it gradually and relying on authority. This is evidenced by the experiment "The Third Wave", conducted in April 1967 in a California school with the participation of tenth-graders. The author was a school history teacher, Ron Jones, who wanted to answer the students' question about how people could follow Hitler, knowing what he was doing.
On Monday, he announced to the students that he planned to create a school youth group, and then he told a long time how important discipline and obedience are in this matter. On Tuesday, he told about the strength of unity, on Wednesday - about the strength of action (on the third day several people from other classes joined the “movement”). On Thursday, when the teacher talked about the power of pride, 80 schoolchildren gathered in the audience, and on Friday almost 200 people listened to a lecture on the “nationwide youth program for the good of the people”.
The teacher declared that there was really no movement, and all this was invented to show how easy it is to get carried away with the wrong idea, if it is served correctly; schoolchildren left the room very depressed, and some - with tears in their eyes. The fact that a spontaneous school experiment was conducted in general, it became known only in the late 70s, when Ron Jones told about it in one of his pedagogical works. And in 2011 in the United States came the documentary "Lesson Plan" - it shows interviews with participants in this experiment.
Nowadays people regularly talk about gender identification and the fact that everyone has the right to solve this issue himself. What will happen if the substitution is realized without the knowledge of the person, for example in childhood? One case, which was not thought of as an experiment, but became one, demonstrates that our sense of self is difficult to deceive - and clearly shows how monstrous the consequences can be when people are not allowed to live in harmony with their own gender.
Twins were born in a Canadian family, and one of them, Bruce, was seven months old because of problems with urination, he was circumcised. The operation was complicated, the penis was badly damaged and had to be removed. After that, confused parents saw on television a speech by Professor John Mani, who was talking about transgender and intersex people. Among other things, he said that the development of children who had “corrective” operations at an early age proceeds normally and they adapt well to the new gender. The Reimers turned to Mani personally and heard the same thing: the psychologist advised them to perform an operation to remove the sex glands and raise a child like a girl named Brenda.
The problem was that Brenda didn’t want to feel like a girl: he wasn’t comfortable sitting while urinating, and his figure retained masculine features, which, unfortunately, was mocked by peers. Despite this, John Mani continued to publish articles in scientific journals (of course, without naming names), who claimed that everything was in order with the child. In adolescence, Brenda was to undergo a new operation — this time to create an artificial vagina to complete the “transition.” However, the teenager flatly refused to do it - and his parents finally told him what had happened. By the way, the strongest emotional stress that people experienced during Brenda's growing up affected all family members: the mother suffered from depression, the father began to drink more and more often, and his brother became isolated in himself.
Brands's life was unhappy: three attempts of suicide, a change of name to David, building self-identification anew, several reconstructive operations. David married and adopted three children of his partner, and this story became famous in 2000 after the release of the book by John Kolapinto, "Nature made him like this: a boy who grew up like a girl." Stories with a happy ending still did not work: David’s psychological difficulties did not disappear, and after an overdose of his brother, he did not leave suicidal washing. He quit his job and left his wife, in May 2004 he committed suicide.
Cover: Jezper - stock.adobe.com