Most Dangerous Psychology Experiments
Scariest Psychology Experiments You ever heard of them.
Psychology moving more dangerous because of the below
experiments. In the earlier 20th century psychology gained popularity and all
the psychiatrists started experiments with their study without having any
permission from the government and form
those experiments we gathered top 10 evil experiments done in early 20th century
and these experiments has unauthorized standards so, please don’t try to do on
other people.
10: Experiment on 22 Orphans (1939)
This experiment
done on the 22 orphans which is known as Monster Study was a stuttering
experiment on 22 orphan children in Davenport, Iowa, in 1939 conducted by
Wendell Johnson at the University of Iowa. Johnson chose one of his graduate
students, Mary Tudor, to conduct the experiment and he supervised her research.
After placing the children in control and experimental groups, Tudor gave
positive speech therapy to half of the children, praising the fluency of their
speech, and negative speech therapy to the other half, belittling the children
for every speech imperfection and telling them they were stutterers. Many of the
normal speaking orphan children who received negative therapy in the experiment
suffered negative psychological effects and some retained speech problems
during the course of their life. Dubbed “The Monster Study” by some of
Johnson’s peers who were horrified that he would experiment on orphan children
to prove a theory, the experiment was kept hidden for fear Johnson’s reputation
would be tarnished in the wake of human experiments conducted by the Nazis
during World War II. The University of Iowa publicly apologized for the Monster
Study in 2001.
9:The
Sex-Change Project(1970s and 1980s)
In South Africa’s apartheid army forced white lesbian and
gay soldiers to undergo ‘sex-change’ operations in the 1970′s
and the 1980′s,
and submitted many to chemical castration, electric shock, and other unethical
medical experiments. Although the exact number is not known, former apartheid
army surgeons estimate that as many as 900 forced ‘sexual reassignment’
operations may have been performed between 1971 and 1989 at military hospitals,
as part of a top-secret program to root out homosexuality from the service.
Army psychiatrists aided by chaplains aggressively
ferreted out suspected homosexuals from the armed forces, sending them
discretely to military psychiatric units, chiefly ward 22 of 1 Military
Hospital at Voortrekkerhoogte, near Pretoria. Those who could not be ‘cured’
with drugs, aversion shock therapy, hormone treatment, and other radical
‘psychiatric’ means were chemically castrated or given sex-change operations.
Although several cases of lesbian soldiers abused have
been documented so far—including one botched sex-change operation—most of the
victims appear to have been young, 16 to 24-year-old white males drafted into
the apartheid army.
Dr. Aubrey Levin (the head of the study) is now Clinical
Professor in the Department of Psychiatry (Forensic Division) at the University
of Calgary’s Medical School. He is also in private practice, as a member in
good standing of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta.
8:
Experiments on Prisoners (1971)
This study was not
necessarily unethical, but the results were disastrous, and its sheer infamy
puts it on this list. Famed psychologist Philip Zimbardo led this experiment to
examine that behaviour of individuals when placed into roles of either prisoner
or guard and the norms these individuals were expected to display.
Prisoners were put into a situation purposely meant to
cause disorientation, degradation, and depersonalization. Guards were not given
any specific directions or training on how to carry out their roles. Though at
first, the students were unsure of how to carry out their roles, eventually
they had no problem. The second day of the experiment invited a rebellion by
the prisoners, which brought a severe response from the guards. Things only
went downhill from there.
Guards implemented a privilege system meant to break
solidarity between prisoners and create distrust between them. The guards
became paranoid about the prisoners, believing they were out to get them. This
caused the privilege system to be controlled in every aspect, even in the
prisoners’ bodily functions. Prisoners began to experience emotional
disturbances, depression, and learned helplessness. During this time, prisoners
were visited by a prison chaplain. They identified themselves as numbers rather
than their names, and when asked how they planned to leave the prison,
prisoners were confused. They had completely assimilated into their roles.
Dr. Zimbardo ended the experiment after five days, when
he realized just how real the prison had become to the subjects. Though the
experiment lasted only a short time, the results are very telling. How quickly
someone can abuse their control when put into the right circumstances. The
scandal at Abu Ghraib that shocked the U.S. in 2004 is prime example of
Zimbardo’s experiment findings.
7:
Drunken monkeys (1969)
While animal
experimentation can be incredibly helpful in understanding man, and developing
life saving drugs, there have been experiments which go well beyond the realms
of ethics. The monkey drug trials of 1969 were one such case. In this
experiment, a large group of monkeys and rats were trained to inject themselves
with an assortment of drugs, including morphine, alcohol, codeine, cocaine, and
amphetamines. Once the animals were capable of self-injecting, they were left
to their own devices with a large supply of each drug.
The animals were so disturbed (as one would expect) that
some tried so hard to escape that they broke their arms in the process. The
monkeys taking cocaine suffered convulsions and in some cases tore off their
own fingers (possible as a consequence of hallucinations), one monkey taking
amphetamines tore all of the fur from his arm and abdomen, and in the case of
cocaine and morphine combined, death would occur within 2 weeks.
The point of the experiment was simply to understand the
effects of addiction and drug use; a point which, I think, most rational and
ethical people would know did not require such horrendous treatment of animals.
6:
Facial Expressions Experiment (1924)
In 1924, Carney
Landis, a psychology graduate at the University of Minnesota developed an
experiment to determine whether different emotions create facial expressions
specific to that emotion. The aim of this experiment was to see if all people
have a common expression when feeling disgust, shock, joy, and so on.
Most of the participants in the experiment were students.
They were taken to a lab and their faces were painted with black lines, in
order to study the movements of their facial muscles. They were then exposed to
a variety of stimuli designed to create a strong reaction. As each person
reacted, they were photographed by Landis. The subjects were made to smell
ammonia, to look at pornography, and to put their hands into a bucket of frogs.
But the controversy around this study was the final part of the test.
Participants were shown a live rat and given instructions
to behead it. While all the participants were repelled by the idea, fully one
third did it. The situation was made worse by the fact that most of the
students had no idea how to perform this operation in a humane manner and the
animals were forced to experience great suffering. For the one third who
refused to perform the decapitation, Landis would pick up the knife and cut the
animals head off for them.
The consequences of the study were actually more
important for their evidence that people are willing to do almost anything when
asked in a situation like this. The study did not prove that humans have a
common set of unique facial expressions.
5:
The Orphan (1920)
John Watson,
father of behaviourism, was a psychologist who was apt to using orphans in his
experiments. Watson wanted to test the idea of whether fear was innate or a
conditioned response. Little Albert, the nickname given to the nine month old
infant that Watson chose from a hospital, was exposed to a white rabbit, a
white rat, a monkey, masks with and without hair, cotton wool, burning
newspaper, and a miscellanea of other things for two months without any sort of
conditioning. Then experiment began by placing Albert on a mattress in the
middle of a room. A white laboratory rat was placed near Albert and he was
allowed to play with it. At this point, the child showed no fear of the rat.
Then Watson would make a loud sound behind Albert’s back
by striking a suspended steel bar with a hammer when the baby touched the rat.
In these occasions, Little Albert cried and showed fear as he heard the noise.
After this was done several times, Albert became very distressed when the rat
was displayed. Albert had associated the white rat with the loud noise and was
producing the fearful or emotional response of crying.
Little Albert started to generalize his fear response to
anything fluffy or white (or both). The most unfortunate part of this
experiment is that Little Albert was not desensitized to his fear. He left the
hospital before Watson
could do so.
4:
The Dog Experiment (1965)
In 1965, psychologists Mark Seligman and Steve Maier
conducted an experiment in which three groups of dogs were placed in harnesses.
Dogs from group one were released after a certain amount of time, with no harm
done. Dogs from group two were paired up and leashed together, and one from
each pair was given electrical shocks that could be ended by pressing a lever.
Dogs from group three were also paired up and leashed together, one receiving
shocks, but the shocks didn’t end when the lever was pressed. Shocks came
randomly and seemed inevitable, which caused “learned helplessness,” the dogs
assuming that nothing could be done about the shocks. The dogs in group three
ended up displaying symptoms of clinical depression.
Later, group three dogs were placed in a box with by
themselves. They were again shocked, but they could easily end the shocks by
jumping out of the box. These dogs simply “gave up,” again displaying learned
helplessness. The image above is a healthy pet dog in a science lab, not an
animal used in experimentation.
3:
Study with electric Shock (1974)
The notorious
Milgrim Study is one of the most well known of psychology experiments. Stanley
Milgram, a social psychologist at Yale University, wanted to test obedience to
authority. He set up an experiment with “teachers” who were the actual
participants, and a “learner,” who was an actor. Both the teacher and the
learner were told that the study was about memory and learning.
Both the learner and the teacher received slips that they
were told were given to them randomly, when in fact, both had been given slips
that read “teacher.” The actor claimed to receive a “learner” slip, so the
teacher was deceived. Both were separated into separate rooms and could only
hear each other. The teacher read a pair of words, following by four possible
answers to the question. If the learner was incorrect with his answer, the
teacher was to administer a shock with voltage that increased with every wrong
answer. If correct, there would be no shock, and the teacher would advance to
the next question.
In reality, no one was being shocked. A tape recorder
with pre-recorded screams was hooked up to play each time the teacher
administered a shock. When the shocks got to a higher voltage, the
actor/learner would bang on the wall and ask the teacher to stop. Eventually
all screams and banging would stop and silence would ensue. This was the point
when many of the teachers exhibited extreme distress and would ask to stop the
experiment. Some questioned the experiment, but many were encouraged to go on
and told they would not be responsible for any results.
If at any time the subject indicated his desire to halt
the experiment, he was told by the experimenter, Please continue. The
experiment requires that you continue. It is absolutely essential that you
continue. You have no other choice, you must go on. If after all four orders
the teacher still wished to stop the experiment, it was ended. Only 14 out of
40 teachers halted the experiment before administering a 450 volt shock, though
every participant questioned the experiment, and no teacher firmly refused to
stop the shocks before 300 volts.
In 1981, Tom Peters and Robert H. Waterman Jr. wrote that
the Milgram Experiment and the later Stanford prison experiment were
frightening in their implications about the danger lurking in human nature’s
dark side.
2:
Monkey Experiment (1960)
Dr. Harry Harlow was an unsympathetic person, using terms
like the “rape rack” and “iron maiden” in his experiments. He is most
well-known for the experiments he conducted on rhesus monkeys concerning social
isolation. Dr. Harlow took infant rhesus monkeys who had already bonded with their
mothers and placed them in a stainless steel vertical chamber device alone with
no contact in order to sever those bonds. They were kept in the chambers for up
to one year. Many of these monkeys came out of the chamber psychotic, and many
did not recover. Dr. Harlow concluded that even a happy, normal childhood was
no defence against depression, while science writer Deborah Blum called these,
“common sense results.”
Gene Sackett of the University of Washington in Seattle,
one of Harlow’s doctoral students, stated he believes the animal liberation
movement in the U.S. was born as a result of Harlow’s experiments. William
Mason, one of Harlow’s students, said that Harlow “kept this going to the point
where it was clear to many people that the work was really violating ordinary
sensibilities, that anybody with respect for life or people would find this
offensive. It’s as if he sat down and said, ‘I’m only going to be around
another ten years. What I’d like to do, then, is leave a great big mess
behind.’ If that was his aim, he did a perfect job.”
1:
Sex change (1965 – 2004)
In 1965, a baby
boy was born in Canada named David Reimer. At eight months old, he was brought
in for a standard procedure: circumcision. Unfortunately, during the process
his penis was burned off. This was due to the physicians using an
electrocautery needle instead of a standard scalpel. When the parents visited
psychologist John Money, he suggested a simple solution to a very complicated
problem: a sex change. His parents were distraught about the situation, but
they eventually agreed to the procedure. They didn’t know that the doctor’s
true intentions were to prove that nurture, not nature, determined gender
identity. For his own selfish gain, he decided to use David as his own private
case study.
David, now Brenda, had a constructed vagina and was given
hormonal supplements. Dr. Money called the experiment a success, neglecting to
report the negative effects of Brenda’s surgery. She acted very much like a
stereotypical boy and had conflicting and confusing feelings about an array of
topics. Worst of all, her parents did not inform her of the horrific accident
as an infant. This caused a devastating tremor through the family. Brenda’s
mother was suicidal, her father was alcoholic, and her brother was severely
depressed.
Finally, Brenda’s parents gave her the news of her true
gender when she was fourteen years old. Brenda decided to become David again,
stopped taking estrogen, and had a penis reconstructed. Dr. Money reported no
further results beyond insisting that the experiment had been a success,
leaving out many details of David’s obvious struggle with gender identity. At
the age of 38, David committed suicide.
Image source: http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1379511
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