Most psychiatrists in the earlier years went so far with their own experiments. They primarily intended to learn more about the thought process of humans. However, many of them had crossed the ethics standards and codes. In fact, there are already many unethical psychological experiments recorded in the history. However, some have even argumentation that even if they are very unethical experiments, they still gave opportunity to induct the present ethical experimental standards. And, it has been stated that it must be viewed as a positive concept.
If you want to learn more about these unethical experiments in psychology, continue reading and take note of the given information. For sure, you will be enlightened more about these types of experiments and you will have a better perception about it.
What is Unethical Experiment in Psychology?
Unethical psychological experiments refer to those experiments which are performed for some purposes that have not been required by patients. They have been usually malicious while they are serving the gain or studies of psychologist. For the past years, there were many different studies that were considered as unethical experiment in science.
Little Albert (1920)
The father of behaviorism, John Watson, has been the psychologist who had been apt with utilizing orphans in most of his experiments. Little Albert has been a nickname which was given to the 9-month old infant. That infant had been chosen by Watson from the hospital. The child has been exposed to white rat, cotton wool, masks without and with hair, white rabbit, a monkey, burning newspaper, and the miscellanea of things for about 2 moths with no conditioning.
Stanford Prison Experiment (1971)
This has been the psychological human responses study to captivity as well as the behavioral effects when it comes to inmates and authorities inside the prison. It was conducted by a researchers’ team which was led by Philip Zimbardo at Stanford University Undergraduate. The guards and prisoners had rapidly adapted into the roles. They stepped beyond limitations of was predicted. As a result, it led to psychologically damaging and dangerous situations. Some of the guards have been judged to obtain such genuine sadistic tendencies exhibited. On the other hand, most prisoners became emotionally traumatized. Two of them have to be eliminated from that experiment earlier.
The Monster Study
This study has been one of the most stuttering experiments conducted on 22 orphan kids in Iowa in 1939. It has been performed by Wendell Johnson at University of Iowa. Here, Johnson had chosen Mary Tudor, one of the graduate students, to do the experimentation. Tudor had given speech therapy that is positive to half number of those children. She praised their speech fluency. The speech therapy that is negative has been given to the rest. These kids had been belittled for each speech imperfection. Most kids who received this negative therapy had suffered from negative effects in psychology while some obtained speech problems throughout their lives.
These are only a few of the unethical psychological experiments which were recorded. These experiments had brought negative impressions to the people especially to those persons involved in the experiment.