Famous Unethical Psychological Experiments + Manifesto

What is psychology? It is the scientific study of the human mind and its functions, especially those affecting behavior in a given context.

Why psychology? My passion for this subject area has grown after taking classes Sundays and Mondays outside of school. Attending these classes has helped me further grow my knowledge and learn about what my passions are.

What I find really fascinating about psychology are the experiments that have been banned from previous years. There are some interesting experiments that I have listed, all which are banned from being replication; therefore, most of current day psychology doesn’t involve some of the sketchy behavior outlined in my selection.

#10: Monster Study – 1939 (Wendell Johnson)

This psychological experiment was set up as one of ‘talking.’ Orphans were split up and treated differently. One of the groups received positive recognition for their speech, praising them every so often, while the other group received negative output for their speech, despite their decent communication skills. This experiment was nicknamed the Monster Study because Johnson’s peers were sickened that he would experiment on orphans to test his theories. This study was hidden in World War II because of the onset of Nazi Germany. We learned from this study that instructors hold a massive amount of power on students’ self-confidence.

#9: The Aversion Project – 1970s (South African Apartheid Army)

The quick synopsis of this experiment is that the Apartheid Army of South Africa forced lesbian and homosexual soldiers to undergo sex changes and unethical torture. There was an estimated 900 people who changed genders as a fact of the Apartheid Army to weed out homosexuality from within the forces in a secretive fashion. This was done in Ward 22 of 1 Military Hospital at a city near Pretoria. Most of the victims were 16-24 year old men drafted into the army. There were negative consequences to the actions put forward by the SAAF, and their actions can never be erased.

#8: Stanford Prison Experiment – 1971 (Philip Zimbardo)

This study is my favorite psychological experiment of all time. It is about how humans forget about their real lives when they’re placed in a roleplaying scenario. It is very frightening, considering that the people who took part in this experiment were university students at Stanford University in the basement of a student building.

The setup of the experiment was this:

Two groups of students were randomly assigned to be either guards, or prisoners. These individuals were university students and they were asked to simulate the scenario, however, they weren’t expecting anything horrendously bad. They suffered most of the detrimental effects of the study by the 2nd day, where a rebellion was lead by the prisoners. The guards then implemented a system to stop solidarity between prisoners. Jail keepers were constantly paranoid about the motives of the imprisoned. The prisoners were starting to feel the effects of this system, experiencing emotional disturbances, depression and learned helplessness. These individuals also associated themselves with numbers, rather than their own names! They completely assimilated into their roles, and were confused when asked how they planned to leave the prison.

Dr. Zimbardo ended the experiment after five days, realizing the horrendous effects of it. We have since learned how quickly people can abuse their control when they’re put into the right circumstances. A real life example is Abu Ghraib, where US Navy Seals, and recruits abused their prisoners of wars, committing atrocities.

#7: Monkey Drug Trials – 1969 (Deneau et. al)

This demonstration explains why humans no longer use monkeys in our psychological experiments, as our ethics code has changed. In this set of experiments, monkeys and rats were trained to inject themselves with an assortment of drugs including morphine, alcohol, cocaine, codeine, and amphetamines. Once these animals knew how to self-inject, they were left with a large amount of each drug.

These animals lost their minds, and some even lost parts of their bodies. They tried to escape from their spaces, breaking their arms while attempting to do so. Some monkeys tore off parts of their fingers and toes as a consequence of hallucinations of taking cocaine. There were other special cases where monkeys tore off fur from their arms and stomach. If various drugs were combined, death would occur in the near future.

The final outcome of experiments were no surprise, but was it really necessary to inhumanely treat animals in such a manner? We can already observe such behavior in slummy areas.

#6: Landis Facial Expressions Experiments – 1924 (Carney Landis)

Carney Landis, a psychology graduate at the University of Minnesota created an experiment to find out whether different emotions created facial expressions specific to that emotion. There was a twist, however. The students were commanded  to complete offensive tasks. These errands included: smelling ammonia, watching explicit videos, and putting their hands into a bucket of frogs.

There’s an even worse part to this experiment. Participants were given a live rat and were told to kill it. All the students were disturbed by the idea, but a solid ⅓ had completed the task. Many of the mice were killed in an inhumane manner and experienced great suffering. For those who didn’t perform this operation, Landis would kill the animal himself in front of the participant.

This study tells us that people are willing to do almost anything when asked for in a situation. Also, we learned from the results that humans don’t share a common set of unique facial expressions.

#5: Little Albert – 1920 (John Watson)

John Watson was a psychologist who loved using orphans in his experiments. He wanted to test whether fear was innate or conditioned, a theory of behaviorism, which he coined. Watson used a nine-month old as a test subject, which he named Little Albert. He placed Albert in a hospital, where he exposed him to a rabbit, rat, monkey, various masks, wool, burning newspapers, and other items for two months without any conditioning. Conditioning is when a stimulus becomes more and more constant and frequent in a given environment.

Albert was placed on a mattress in the centre of the room. A white lab rat was also place alongside him. At first, he wasn’t afraid of the rat at all. Now, Watson would make a loud noise behind Albert’s back by striking a metal object with a hammer whenever Albert made contact with the rat. After this had been completed several times, Albert associated the white rat with the loud noise, and was now afraid of white, furry objects. Unfortunately, Albert was never desensitized to his fear, and lived with it for the rest of his life.

#4: Learned Helplessness – 1965 (Seligman and Maier)

Seligman and Maier had three groups of dogs that were fastened by harnesses. Group One dogs were released after a short amount of time with no harm done. This was the control group. Group Two dogs were paired up and leashed together, while one from each pair of dogs were given electric shocks, which could be prevented by pressing a lever. Group Three dogs were also paired up and leashed together, one of whom received shocks, but these shocks never ended, even when the lever was pressed. The shocks came randomly and were ‘inevitable,’ which gave the dogs the concept of ‘learned helplessness,’ where they assumed that nothing could be done about the shocks. Group Three dogs had symptoms of clinical depression at the end. Later on, for additional testing, group three dogs were placed in a box by themselves. These animals were shocked but could avoid it by jumping out of the box. They simply gave up, having displayed the concept of learned helplessness.

#3: Milgram Study – 1974 (Stanley Milgram)

I find that this study is extremely fascinating because of its setup. This psychologist, Stanley Milgram, at Yale University wanted to test subjects’ yielding to authority. This test was set up so that participants were teachers, and the learner was an actor. Both the teacher and learner are then told that the study was about memory and learning, when it was truly about administering shocks of increasing intensity to the student, when the student actually wasn’t getting hurt at all! The shrieks and shouts were pre-recorded. After a certain number of shocks, there was no sound emerging from the room, giving the impression that they had died.

Milgram wanted to know whether individuals are capable of harming a stranger, and he got a pretty definitive answer. The vast majority of his test subjects would use the maximum voltage on the student.

#2: The Well of Despair – 1960 (Harry Harlow)

Harlow is notoriously known for his rhesus monkey experiments concerning social isolation. He placed infant monkeys which had bonded with their mothers into devices with no contact with their mothers for periods of up to one year. The majority of these monkeys never recovered. He concluded from his trials that even a normal childhood can still result in depression later on in life. The animal liberation movement was started shortly after Harlow’s experiments as a direct result. He had no respect for animals, or humans in fact, leaving his legacy in psychology books.

#1: David Reimer – (Dr. Money) 1956-2004

This study is extremely disturbing. Dr. Money circumcised an 8-month old boy. While in the procedure, Dr. Money burned off the ‘subject’s’ entire male genitalia. The doctor had intentionally used the wrong tool for this outcome. After this fact, the doctor made up an intricate excuse to lie about the procedure, and suggestion his ‘best’ solution. A sex change. His parents were originally very opposed to the idea but they accepted it later on. The story behind Dr. Money was that he wanted to say that nurture, not nature determined gender identity.

Dr. Money then constructed female genatalia into the subject, who was now Brenda. (This is a frightening thought). Dr. Money then reported this experiment as a success, even though there were many negative effects listed by Brenda. Brenda acted much like a regular boy, and had conflicted feelings about life. Worst of all, she was never informed of the sex change. Her mother was suicidal, her father was an alcoholic, and her brother was severely depressed. She was finally told that she was born a male at age 14! Brenda then stopped taking hormonal supplements, and committed suicide at age 38.

This is a tragic end to a depressing case.

What do we learn from these studies? Well, despite what we think, we may be badly attributing students with characteristics in the high school system.

I am currently in the process of producing a Manifesto about my program at school (Hamber Challenge/Academy), where I will vent my thoughts and write my aspirations about the future.

I Found a Typo in Your New Book.. wait, what?!

Recently, I encountered a YouTube video about Gaiman’s Laws. Well, the video wasn’t explicitly about Gaiman and his theories, but rather, John Green was discussing his book, ‘The Fault in Our Stars.’ I did some further reading, and ventured into Twitter about this phenomenon.

Amidst Neil Gaiman’s posts, I found his laws:

Gaiman’s First Law:  Picking up your first copy of a book you wrote, if there’s one typo, it will be on the page that your new book falls open to the first time you pick it up

Gaiman’s Second Law: All scientifically possible technology and social change predicted in science fiction will come to pass, but none of it will work properly

Gaiman’s Law of Superhero Movies: The closer the film is to the look and feel of what people like about the comic, the more successful it is

Gaiman’s Law of Hotel Rooms: The nicer a room you have been given, the less time you’ll spend there, and you’ll always be there alone.

I can completely relate with Gaiman’s First Law. Whenever I write something lengthy, I find that after I post or submit the piece, I find an embarrassing typo, even with spell check on and set as strict. What you tend to think about, often doesn’t equate to what you write out, as I eventually learned in my 16 years of existence.

For me, Gaiman’s second law is something of significant value. We can see something similar In the film, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep/Blade Runner.” The transportation system that is established in the film has not yet been implemented in the world today, however, more and more Science Fair projects are about hovercrafts.

Here’s a fascinating quote I found on the interwebz regarding the above law.

“It’s amazing that we have mobile phones with which we can send photographs of *********-ing walruses to our friends on the other side of the world, but less fabulous that you lose signal in a five-yard patch on the Hackney Road just as someone is telling you something important.” – Anon

I’m fairly sure you can fill in the blank yourselves, if not, search the quote up on Google. 😉

I, personally, am not a fan of Superhero movies, but I do see Gaiman’s Law about Superhero Movies to be relatively accurate for my ‘geekier’ friends. Three of them have given this rule the thumbs up.

Gaiman’s Law of Hotel Rooms can’t be more true. I attended 8 hotel conferences in 2012, and I was in very, very, classy rooms, believe me… yet, I barely spent any time there. I was single-rooming in two conferences, I did NOT want to be in a confined space. Earlier this month, I went to Kelowna for a VEX Robotics competition, and we stayed at a less than satisfactory hotel, but, out of the 14 hours total I could’ve spent in the room, 11 were spent camping inside of it. Luckily, my two friends were in the room alongside me, so I was barely ever bored (not to mention prank calling my classmates). Gaiman’s law of hotel rooms is very accurate, and props to Mr. Neil Gaiman for ‘coining’ it, prior to me, of course! Haha, I kid.

Hope y’all enjoyed this selection. Back to studying.. and being distracted by the internet, woot!

Good news! Accepted to Shad Valley 🙂
Which campus should I go to? Let me know in the comments below! Thanks for reading.

Psychology Class

Recently, I enrolled in an AP Psychology class. Here, we discuss many aspects of Psychology. We explored the most popular psychologists and their theories to the effects of recreational drugs. This course load has been endless and extremely enlightening. Despite the hassle, I still love Psychology. My main goal of taking this course is to learn how to read people. We haven’t covered this portion in class quite yet, however, I do practice this skill in my free time. I’m able to read many people like I read books, which is pretty special.

Just because I take Psychology, doesn’t necessarily mean I can give you a psychological reading (for free, anyways). People around me also think I can predict future events. That isn’t the case, however. I do have a special gift though. I have ‘near’-perfect timing. Everything happens on the dot. I almost got hit by a bus this summer, but it missed me by 2 inches. I almost got hit in the face by a baseball in 8th Grade, but again, it missed by a little over 2 inches. I finished a presentation in English, and on the last syllable, my phone went off. Either that, or I’m in the right place, at the right time (another pretty neat gift).

My next goal is to investigate why I can avoid these catastrophic accidents. Maybe it’s worth a shot.

This is all I have to post for today, however, I will have many more adventures to tell next day.

Yay, English Provincial rewrites on Tuesday…

Keep the Internet Open

Signatories at 11:34pm, December 2nd, 2013.

Sign this petition if you want the internet to stay the way it is: free and open.

Very soon, delegations from across the world will meet in Dubai to discuss possible new Internet regulations at a United Nations conference. The UN’s International Telecommunications Union wants to reach a consensus to revise their internet codes, untouched since 1988.

All 193 nations taking part in this conference can propose regulatory changes. Several human rights groups and governments fear that countries such as China and Russia will want tighter restrictions and monitoring on the internet, contradicting how Western nations’ belief system.

Again, sign this petition. I urge you. The signatories are going up by the thousands in mere seconds, please join the cause.

Be heard, make a statement, stand your ground for what you believe in.. not to mention interactive bubbles on the webpage, and Google.

Social Networks, Trolls, Model UN, and a (Small) Touch of Science

While I was at a Model United Nations conference this weekend, I decided to catch up on some webcomics during one of the caucuses. In simple terms, I wasn’t supposed to be on xkcd, or looking at classy Cyanide and Happiness cartoons. Since when was I such a risk-taker?

While I was browsing through sites, I found one of these fascinating images. The creator of this image has ingeniously modified and designed a smart map of what consisted of the internet in the year 2010.

As we look at this image, we can notice Facebook and QQ (a Chinese social network) being dominant, consisting of both the larger land masses on this map. The seas and oceans seem to be filled with random internet terms that consist of Dopamine, memes, trolls, etc. Now, I truly understand why adults don’t want us on the internet.

There’s a whole island dealing with gaming, such as IGN, Maple Story and even Runescape! I can’t believe that Runescape occupied such a land mass. If this map was updated for 2012, they’d virtually be wiped out.

Fortunately, there is some representation on behalf the blogosphere. It seems like the whole map is extremely well laid out, as Randall Munroe, the creator of xkcd, has literally ‘mapped’ the whole internet out. He also claims to have created a 20,000 cell spreadsheet for this map, which seems like a sizable amount of work.

If Mr. Munroe were to remap the internet, it should have evolved greatly since 2010. Corporations, such as MySpace, FarmVille, and Happy Farm will hav decreased in size. Various companies that were virtually non-existent in 2010, like Instagram, have claimed, and taken over large masses of land and water.

I could end this post with my estimate on what the internet will look like in 10 years, however, that’s the question I put upon you. Every site you visit, every link you click, every song you listen to, will contribute to smaller websites gaining more popularity, or staying within their previous ‘hipster’ state. All your actions online play a huge effect on this ‘map.’ This is the interwebz, everybody!

This map is available for ordering (ie. full poster form!), if you are so obliged: http://store.xkcd.com/xkcd/#OnlineCommunitiesMap2010

North Korean Travel

The founder of Vice, Shane Smith, decides to venture into North Korea. This is Part 1 of 3 in the mini-series. This is what it’s like being in a land filled with propaganda.

Definitely worth checking out!