14 VERY CONTROVERSIAL HUMAN PSYCHOLOGICAL EXPERIMENTS - PSYCHOLOGY - 2024

The psychological experiments have succeeded in generating very important discoveries in this field, although some have been unethical. Among them, the Asch experiment, the Migram experiment or the little Albert experiment stand out.

Psychology has had a dizzying advance in a short time. This is partly because many of the things we currently know about how our minds work come from experimentation with both humans and animals.

Currently to carry out an experiment there are clear ethical barriers that cannot be overcome. However, this has not always been the case. A few years ago, researchers were able to handle human and non-human animals at their ease to test their hypotheses.

Is it worth destroying lives or manipulating people to achieve breakthroughs in science?

The most striking psychological experiments

1- The Bobo doll experiment: are we born aggressive or do we learn to be aggressive?

During the 1960s, there was a great debate about child development: what influences more, genetics, environment or social learning?

Many tried to answer this question through various experiments. The psychologist Albert Bandura was one of those interested in the subject, he specifically wanted to know where the aggressiveness came from.

To do this, he divided a group of children into three groups: the first was exposed to adults who beat and behaved aggressively with a doll called “Bobo”.

The second group had adults at their side who quietly played with the doll, while the third group was not exposed to any of these situations (what is known as the control group).

The results showed that children who saw adults being aggressive towards the Bobo doll mimicked the observed behavior, tending more to be aggressive in general. In contrast, the other two groups did not show this aggressiveness.

What did this show? Well, it seems that many of the things we do are not due to inherited genetic factors, but to the education received. Especially what we learn by observing other people. This is called vicarious or social learning.

2- The selective attention experiment: do we have control over our perception?

Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris were very interested in knowing how we perceive the outside world and if we are aware of all its elements.

So, in 1999, they carried out an experiment that you can do yourself by watching the video below:

Did you answer correctly? !! Congratulations!!

Now try to answer this question: have you seen the man dressed as a gorilla? According to studies, most of the participants do not realize the existence of this character.

What did this show? The existence of the concept "inattentional blindness" or "blindness due to inattention". It means that an unexpected object that is completely visible can be ignored by us, as if it did not exist, when we are concentrating on another task.

This shows that we are not as aware as we think of the things that happen around us.

3- The marshmallow experiment: is controlling your impulses the key to success?

The psychologist Walter Mischel in the 70s, developed this test to see if the control of our immediate impulses had something to do with more or less success in the future.

Thus, he brought together a group of four-year-olds, committing to track them for 14 years to assess their success.

The experiment consisted of placing the children in front of a marshmallow, telling them that they could eat it whenever they wanted. But if they waited for 15 minutes without eating it they could get another marshmallow.

The children who chose not to wait and were carried away by their impulses, when evaluated after a few years, showed a lower tolerance for frustration and lower self-esteem. Instead, the group that waited was more successful academically, socially, and emotionally.

What did this show? Knowing how to handle immediate impulses and reflect on the consequences of our actions in the long term is essential for success in our lives.

4- Asch's conformity experiment: are we afraid of differentiating ourselves from the rest?

Solomon Asch, an important figure in Social Psychology, carried out this famous experiment, obtaining incredible results.

In 1951 he assembled a group of students for a vision test. Actually all the participants in the room were actors, and only one individual was the one on the test. And it was not a vision test, but the real goal was to see how well people agree when they are pressured by the group.

In this way, they were shown a series of lines and asked which one was longer or which were similar. The students had to say out loud in front of everyone what they believed to be the correct answer.

All the actors were prepared in advance to answer incorrectly (most of the time). When the real participant had to respond, she differed from the rest of the group the first two or three times, but later, she gave in to the group and indicated the same answer as them, even if it was obviously wrong.

The most curious thing of all was that this phenomenon occurred in 33% of the subjects, especially when there were more than three accomplices who gave the same answer. However, when they were alone or the group's responses were very disparate, they had no problem giving the correct answer.

What did this show? That we tend to adapt to the group because it puts great pressure on us. Even their answers or opinions, if they are uniform, could make us doubt even our own perception.

5- Milgram's experiment: to what extent are we capable of obeying authority?

After reflecting on everything that happened in the Holocaust during Nazi Germany, Stanley Milgram decided to see to what extent we can follow orders.

Surely when he published his experiment on obedience in 1963, he didn't know he was going to become so famous. And the results were chilling.

The experiment consisted of punishing a student with electric shocks when he gave incorrect answers.

In the same room were the researcher, the "teacher" who was the participant and the "student", who was an accomplice of the researcher. However, the participant was led to believe that the student was simply another volunteer who had been given that role by chance.

The student was tied to a chair, had electrodes all over his body, and was placed behind a glass wall in full view of the participant.

When the student gave an incorrect answer, the teacher had to give him electric shocks with increasing intensity. Thus, the student showed great pain, screamed and asked for the experiment to stop; but it was really all a performance and the electric shocks were not occurring. The objective really was to evaluate the behavior of the "teacher" when pressured by the authority figure, the researcher.

Thus, when the teachers refused to follow the experiment, the researcher insisted: "you must continue" or "it is necessary for the experiment to continue." If the participants still stopped, the experiment stopped.

The results were that 65% of the participants reached the end of the experiment, although they all tried to stop at some point.

What did this show? perhaps this is the proof of why we can do horrible things. When we consider that there is an authority that rules over us, we believe that he has control of the situation and knows what he is doing. All this, together with our refusal to confront a "superior", makes us capable of obeying whatever it is.

6- Little Albert: where do our fears come from?

The father of behaviorism, John Watson, caused a lot of controversy with this experiment as it had no ethical limits.

I wanted to resolve the typical debate of whether fears are innate or conditioned (learned). More specifically, their objective was to check how we can develop fear of an animal, if that fear extends to similar things, and how long that learning would last.

This is how he selected little Albert, an eight-month-old baby who was placed in front of a white rat to observe his reaction. At first he did not show fear, but later, when the appearance of the rat coincided with a great noise that caused a start, Albert wept in fear.

After several repetitions, only with the appearance of the rat without the noise, the baby began to walk away sobbing. In addition, this fear expanded to more similar things: a fur coat, a rabbit or a dog.

What did this show? That most of our fears are learned, and that we tend to generalize them very quickly to other similar or related stimuli.

7- aversion therapies for homosexuals: can you change your sexual orientation?

A few years ago, homosexuality was considered a mental illness that had to be corrected. Many psychologists began to wonder how to change the sexual orientation of homosexuals, since they thought that this was something learned or chosen (and, therefore, that it could be reversed).

In this way, in the 60s they tried a therapy that consisted of presenting exciting images for the subject simultaneously with electric shocks to the genitals, or injections that caused vomiting. They wanted the person to link the desire to people of the same sex with something negative, and thus the desire would disappear.

However, they did not obtain the desired results, rather the opposite. There was a strong psychological impact on these people, and many developed sexual dysfunctions that darkened (even more) their lives.

What did this show? These findings showed that sexual orientation is something that is not chosen and cannot be changed. It is not yet known exactly if there are genetic or environmental implications, the most important thing is to know that the sexuality of each one is something intimate where you should not try to intervene.

8- The Stanford jail experiment, or how a simple role can cause you to do horrible things

This is one of the most famous experiments in Psychology for its shocking results: it had to be canceled after a week.

Around the 1970s, Philip Zimbardo and his colleagues suspected that we are more slaves to our roles than we realize. To verify this, they created a simulation of a prison in a part of Stanford University. They chose several students who were psychologically stable, and divided them into two groups: the guards and the prisoners.

They had to behave according to the role assigned to them, in addition he controlled a series of aspects to cause differences: the guards had more privileges and uniforms chosen by themselves, while the prisoners were called by numbers and wore chains on their ankles.

The guards could do whatever they wanted, except exert physical violence. The aim was to frighten and drive the prisoners to extreme subordination.

Before long, the guards took their role so seriously that they voluntarily worked overtime and devised a thousand terrible ways to punish and subdue the inmates: they forced him to exercise, they gave him no food, and many forced them to go naked.

The most surprising thing was that something similar happened with the prisoners: being able to abandon the experiment, they did not request it. So many developed strong psychological damage, somatizations and severe trauma.

It also surprised everyone how the researchers did not cancel the experiment earlier and how quickly they became familiar with the situation. What's more, sometimes they "fanned" it to see what would happen.

What did this show? A role and a certain environment could turn us into someone we never imagined: sadistic, submissive, or, simply, a passive subject who does not see how horrible the situation is.

9- The spectator effect: do the images of lost children really work?

An Orlando news station conducted an experiment called "the missing girl." What they did was fill a shopping center with "wanted" posters of a girl named Britney Begonia, with her photo and characteristics.

Actually, the 8-year-old girl was sitting near one of the posters, and she wanted to observe how others reacted. Most of the people passed by, many did not look at the poster and others asked the girl if she was okay.

Only a few, who were asked later, realized Britney's resemblance to the girl who was sitting, but confessed that they did not want to get involved.

What did this show? This is proof of the existence of the "bystander effect", a widely proven phenomenon in Social Psychology that explains facts such as why we do not intervene in a fight in the middle of the street when no one else does.

It seems that this happens because we want to escape from uncomfortable situations, and we wait for someone else to act for us. Finally, everyone shares the same way of thinking and nobody reacts.

Although perhaps, it may happen, that we do not pay as much attention as we think to the notices we see on the streets and that is why so few people got involved.

10- The Monster experiment: what if we convince someone that they have a defect?

The American psychologist Wendell Johnson wanted to test the effects of “speech therapy” on children from an orphanage in Iowa in 1939. More specifically, whether saying positive or negative things about their speech could eliminate an existing stutter or, on the contrary, provoke her if she didn't have one.

A part of the children had speech deficits and another part did not. Thus, with children who had these difficulties, positive speech therapy was put into practice, which consisted of pretending that they did not have any deficits, encouraging them to speak and praising them for their linguistic achievements.

Instead, healthy children were told that they were stutterers and they belittled and maximized any mistakes they made. Finally, in this last group stuttering did not develop, but they did manage to refuse to speak and develop negative psychological and emotional effects.

The study was never published, and it was compared to human experiments conducted by the Nazis in World War II. Still, it came to light over the years, and the University of Iowa had to publicly apologize for the damage.

In addition, in 2007, the state of Iowa had to pay compensation to six victims who had suffered psychological repercussions for their entire lives for participating in the experiment.

What did this show? What we tell children about their abilities and potential is critical to their building self-esteem and achievement. If we convince a child that he is useless, even if it is false, he will believe it and will inhibit his attempts to do it. That is why it is so important to educate children properly, paying attention to the way we speak to them.

11- Lost in the mall or how can we implant false memories

Elizabeth Loftus found that memories can be malleable, and that, if certain clues or clues are given when the person is remembering an event, it is very possible that they store new false data about the event.

It seems that our own memories can be distorted depending on how we ask about them or what subsequent data we give.

Thus, Loftus and his colleagues tried to implant a memory in a group of subjects: getting lost in a shopping center at age 5. They first asked the families to tell them real childhood experiences of the related subjects. They were later mixed with the false memory of being lost and presented to the participants.

The results were that one in four subjects stored this false data, thinking it was a real memory. Loftus also found in related experiments that, in people who score higher on intelligence tests, it is more difficult to implant false memories.

What did this show? We do not remember in a totally objective way the details of the past, but it is something that is constructed subjectively, many factors coming into play, such as the mood of the moment.

In addition, there seems to be a mechanism that reviews and shapes (if necessary) our memories when we retrieve them, in order to save them already transformed.

12- The case of David Reimer: can we change sexual identity?

When David Reimer was operated on for phimosis at eight months of age, his genitalia were accidentally burned.

His parents, worried about the future of their son, went to the consultation of the well-known psychologist John Money. He defended the idea that gender identity was something that was learned during childhood, and that, if children were educated in a certain way, they could easily adopt a male or female gender.

Money said the best option was to operate on David, remove his testicles and raise him as a girl. Secretly, Money was profiting from the situation, using it as an experiment to validate her theory.

David was renamed "Brenda" and received counseling for ten years. Apparently the experiment was working and David was behaving like a girl, but he was not really getting the desired success: the little boy felt like a boy, tended to reject female dress, and developed depression at age 13. Even the female hormones he was receiving weren't working as well as they should.

When Money tried to persuade the parents to have her vagina implanted by surgery, they stopped going to therapy. At age 14, David learned the truth and lived the rest of his life as a boy.

In 2004, he could not bear several dramatic events, such as the death of his brother and the separation from his wife, and he committed suicide.

What did this show? Sexual identity is something much more complex than we imagine. Feeling a man or a woman is not determined by our genitals, or by receiving certain hormones, or by how they educate us. It is a set of factors that science is still trying to determine exactly.

The truth is that we cannot choose whether we want to feel like men or women, and therefore, we cannot change it either.

13- Harlow's experiment

Experiments in which psychologist Harry Harlow demonstrated the importance of maternal contact in young primates. Young rhesus monkeys were separated from their mothers and cared for in a laboratory setting. The pups that were socially isolated suffered from behavioral disorders and self-harm.

In addition, when they were reintroduced with the group of rhesus monkeys, they did not know how to interact, isolating themselves and even dying some. The most significant experiment, however, was the one in which Harlow gave rag mothers to the baby monkeys, showing that those that were comforting had a positive effect on the babies.

14- The helplessness learned from Martin Seligman

Dog experiments started in 1967 in which Martin Selingman explained the behavior of learned helplessness.

After being exposed to multiple aversive stimuli and not being able to avoid them, the animals developed a sense of lack of control and stopped trying to escape the acersive stimuli, as they had learned that there was nothing they could do to avoid them.

15- The Thieves' Cave Experiment, by Muzafer Sherif

An experiment in which the psychologist Muzafer Sherif demonstrated how intragroup attachments, norms and an own culture are created in groups of children. However, they also showed negative intergroup behaviors; When groups of children competed for scarce resources, an atmosphere of hostility was created.

References

1. 25 Mind Blowing Psychology Experiments… You Won't Believe What's Inside Your Head. (June 5, 2012). Obtained from List25.
2. Behavioral Experiment: Watson and Little Albert (in Spanish). (March 18, 2009). Obtained from Youtube.
3. Inattentional blindness. (sf). Retrieved on September 23, 2016, from Scholarpedia.
4. Missing Child Experiment. (May 6, 2008). Obtained from Hoaxes.
5. Monster Study. (sf). Retrieved on September 23, 2016, from Wikipedia.
6. Parras Montero, V. (May 7, 2012). Impulse control in children. Marshmallow Test. Obtained from ILD Psychology.
7. The 10 Most Controversial Psychology Studies Ever Published. (September 19, 2014). Obtained from The British Psychological Society.
8. Top 10 Unethical Psychological Experiments. (September 7, 2008). Obtained from Listverse.