Introduction
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Throughout history, this
question has always, consistently and inevitably, been present. The
division between righteous and deluded. A shining hero and a destructive
fanatic. A genius and a madman. Often, the outcome of a
controversial action determines which category an individual belongs to.
Regardless, this concept of "man" or "monster" can be applied to psychological experiments as well,
specifically whether or not they are ethical. Do the risks of the experiment outweigh the benefits? Does saving hundreds of people justify hurting one? This is up for debate. Though, thankfully, whether or not an experiment is ethical isn't, and some
confusion can be avoided due to the APA experiment guidelines. Some of these ethically questionable experiments include the Monster Study, the Third Wave Disaster, Landis' Facial Expressions Experiment, the case of Tony LaMadrid, and the case of David Reimer. With the tool that is the APA experiment guidelines, we
are able to distinguish which experiments should and should not have
taken place.
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The Monster Study
Overview
Wendell Johnson, a prominent stutterer himself, wished to find the causes of his impediment. were people born with it, or did they develop it as a learned behavior? To find out, he and his assistant Mary Tudor facilitated an experiment at the Stuttering Research Program at the University of Iowa (11), in which he tried to induce a stutter in normally fluently speaking children, and remove the stutter of normal children, through reinforcement. They convinced one group of children that they had a stutter that they desperately needed to eliminated and to not "even speak unless [they] can do it right (11)." They would, on the other hand, compliment another group of normally stuttering children on the fluency of their speech and attempt to boost their confidence this way. The results were as follows: The normally stuttering children did not become stutterers, though they displayed significant deteriorations in their confidence levels and eagerness to speak, and would typically act like stutterers even though they were not. Some children who previously had no qualms about speaking, after the experiment, would hardly speak at all (12). One woman who partook in this experiment as a child, Mary Nixon, revealed that the experiment ruined her life, and refused to speak about it any farther (12). While Johnson discovered that stuttering can improve or get worse through conditioning, but as the findings of his experiment proved, stuttering could not be introduced to non-stutterers through conditioning (12).
Criticisms
This experiment, by today's standards, would be considered quite unethical. For example, in the APA Ethical Principals of Psychologists and Code of Conduct, this experiment violates standard 3.04, which states that psychologists must take reasonable caution to avoid causing harm to their patients. However, the objective of this experiment was, in fact, to cause harm to his patients by trying to cause them to stutter, which generally causes much anxiety and stress to the people inflicted with it. This experiment also violates standard 3.10, which involves "informed consent." The children involved in the study were not informed that they partook in an experiment at all; in fact, they were told that they were receiving speech therapy and therefore could not logically consent to it.
Wendell Johnson, a prominent stutterer himself, wished to find the causes of his impediment. were people born with it, or did they develop it as a learned behavior? To find out, he and his assistant Mary Tudor facilitated an experiment at the Stuttering Research Program at the University of Iowa (11), in which he tried to induce a stutter in normally fluently speaking children, and remove the stutter of normal children, through reinforcement. They convinced one group of children that they had a stutter that they desperately needed to eliminated and to not "even speak unless [they] can do it right (11)." They would, on the other hand, compliment another group of normally stuttering children on the fluency of their speech and attempt to boost their confidence this way. The results were as follows: The normally stuttering children did not become stutterers, though they displayed significant deteriorations in their confidence levels and eagerness to speak, and would typically act like stutterers even though they were not. Some children who previously had no qualms about speaking, after the experiment, would hardly speak at all (12). One woman who partook in this experiment as a child, Mary Nixon, revealed that the experiment ruined her life, and refused to speak about it any farther (12). While Johnson discovered that stuttering can improve or get worse through conditioning, but as the findings of his experiment proved, stuttering could not be introduced to non-stutterers through conditioning (12).
Criticisms
This experiment, by today's standards, would be considered quite unethical. For example, in the APA Ethical Principals of Psychologists and Code of Conduct, this experiment violates standard 3.04, which states that psychologists must take reasonable caution to avoid causing harm to their patients. However, the objective of this experiment was, in fact, to cause harm to his patients by trying to cause them to stutter, which generally causes much anxiety and stress to the people inflicted with it. This experiment also violates standard 3.10, which involves "informed consent." The children involved in the study were not informed that they partook in an experiment at all; in fact, they were told that they were receiving speech therapy and therefore could not logically consent to it.
Explanation and example of stuttering (17).
The Third Wave Disaster
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Overview
There are many theories about how the Nazis gained so much support during World World II. How did the founders of the Nazis manage to commit the atrocities that they did with so many people? In attempts to shed some light on the mentality of the members and radicals of the group, one teacher Ron Jones, conducted an experiment in which he convinced his students to support a totalitarian ideology through a series of reinforcing and unifying exercises. He said that there was a new political party called the Wave that thousands of schools were following. He created a salute and a mantra “Strength through discipline, strength through community, through action, through unity and finally through pride (6)." People made banners, ostracised anyone who did not follow the Wave to the point of beating them up, recruited members not even in the class, and cut class to attend his. However, when Jones revealed that this was an experiment and that this demonstrated that the students were no better/worse than the Germans, they felt betrayed and became emotional, afterwards explaining that the experiment caused them significant damage in their later lives (6). The teacher was fired two years later for the experiment, and his experience was turned into a movie called "Lesson Plan." Criticisms The main concern for this experiment was the fact that the students did not consent to being part of the experiment, nor were they informed that they were part of an experiment at all, which violates standard 3.10, and Jones took no steps to minimize damage caused by this experiment, which violates 3.04. |
Trailer for the movie created depicting the experiment
Landis' Facial Expression Experiment
Pictures taken during the experiment.
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Overview
It began as a seemingly innocent experiment. Carney Landis simply wanted to see whether or not there is one universal expression for every emotion. And so, he collected a handful of subjects, drew lines across their faces so he could more easily see the individual muscles involved with different emotions, and gave his subjects a variety of tasks to complete. Landis told them to smell ammonia, look at pornographic images, and put their hands into buckets of frogs. These tasks were not particularly problematic. However, it was the final task that seriously challenged the ethical standards of acceptable experimentation. The subjects were told to decapitate a live rat. Though most people were averse to completing this task, approximately 2/3 complied with the order. For those that did not, Landis would cut the rat's head off for them. His experiment, ultimately, did not turn out successful - people had a wide variety of expressions to convey specific emotions after all. What Landis' experiment did reveal, however, was how shockingly obedient people could be to authority figures, despite the fact that they were vehemently opposed to what was being asked of them (4). Criticisms The main violation of the APA ethics guidelines is the last portion of the experiment regarding the decapitation of the rat. This could be considered a very stressful and painful experience to undergo, physically decapitating a rat, and Landis would essentially coerce his subjects into doing this. Therefore, this violates standard 3.04, regarding avoiding harm of the subjects in an experiment. |
Tony LaMadrid
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Overview
Tony LaMadrid was a man with schizophrenia who was a participant/patient in an experiment conducted by the University of California (13). This experiment involved taking schizophrenic patients off of medications, in order to gain "information about the medication, its effects on [the patients], on others and on the way the brain works" (14). The experiment did vaguely list the potential negative side affects of the removal of medication, saying that the patient's condition may "improve, worsen or remain unchanged," though the exact nature of a potential relapse was unspecified (14). The results were quite disastrous and 90% of patients experienced very severe relapses over the course of the study (13). As many patients resented having to be on medication, often lied about how the experiment was affecting them to doctors. And so, experimenters never reinstated the medication, though did not delve slightly deeper into the lives of the victims to find out what was truly happening (14). Finally, after 6 years of the experiment, the patient Tony LaMadrid committed suicide by jumping off of a building due to this experiment (13). Criticisms This experiment violated two elements of the APA Ethical Principals of Psychologists and Code of conduct, mainly regarding article 3.04 "Avoiding Harm" and 3.10 "Informed Consent." The patients undergoing the treatment and consequent experiment responded very negatively to the experiment, 90% of the participants undergoing violent relapses, and the experimenters were too willing to accept their patient's insistence that they did not need medication. Tony LaMadrid even committed suicide as a direct result of the experiments, and so very clearly, article 3.04 was violated. However, for article 3.10 of "Informed Consent," the line between being informed and being misguided was crossed. The experimentors did not reveal the full extent of symptoms that could arise from the experiment, instead briefly adding a warning that symptoms may "worsen" - they were never told how much. Therefore, without this informations, the patients could not truly consent to the conduction of the experiment, thus violating article 3.10. |
Study of David Reimer
David Reimer |
Overview
Due to an incorrectly administered surgery on a boy named Bruce Reimer a few months after his birth, his genitalia was completely destroyed. The parents of this boy desperately sought out guidance from doctors on how they could allow Bruce to lead a normal life. They finally met with John Money of John Hopkin's University, a physician involved with sex change to people born with incomplete or ambiguous genitalia. The boy, unfortunately, was a perfect subject for John Money to test his theory, which was the idea that gender identity (a term he coined) is not inborn, but learned. He believed that humans were sexually neutral at birth, and society conditioned people to adopt a gender identity. And so, Money recommended that since Bruce Reimer did not have his male genitalia, he should be given female hormones and raised as a girl. The parents followed through with this decision, allowing Bruce to undergo further surgery to become Brenda. Brenda was treated as a girl would be. He was given dolls and dresses and taught to behave like one. However, he was never told of his initial gender as a boy. While Money insisted that the procedure was successful and published many papers boasting its success, Brenda rejected his imposed gender identity as a girl, ripping off his dresses and preferring toy cars and guns over Barbie dolls and sewing machines (2). Her brother, Brian Reimer, supported this concept. "I recognized Brenda as my sister," he said. "But she never, ever acted the part (2)." Brenda began to refuse treatments from Money and after years of harassment from children and suicide attempts, his father finally told Brenda what had happened to him at birth. Brenda recalled feeling relieved, and then promptly underwent treatments to reinstate his male gender and changed his name to David. However, despite being able to live as a man, have a wife, and be the stepfather of three children, the psychological damage inflicted upon him never faded. He lived in perpetual fury of what was done to him, and he had a history of severe depression due to the whole process. Unfortunately, he committed suicide in 2004, and his mother believed that it could have been avoided if the experiments had never occurred. Criticisms This is a clear example of the dangers of psychological experimentation. John Money tried desperately to prove his theory, to the point where he clearly demonstrated a disregard for human life. He violated many principals of ethical experimentation, as described in the APA Ethical Principals of Psychologists and Code of Conduct, including standard 3.04 which describes that a researcher must take reasonable measures to avoid the harm of their client/patients. As he completely ignored Brenda's obvious rejection of his forced female identity, Money engaged in sometimes disturbing processes to try to force this gender on him, and some sources (3) say that he even forced he and his brother to engage in borderline sexual activity, which violates standard 3.02 regarding sexual harassment. Money never informed David Reimer that this experiment was taking place when he was old enough to understand, and therefore Reimer could not consent to the continuation of the experiment, which violates standard 3.10, regarding the necessity of informed consent. |
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Documentary about the life of David Reimer (15)
CONCLUSION...
One of two important elements of experimentation are the constant struggle between the concept of "nature" vs "nurture". Most experiments were involved with the controversial "nature vs. nurture" argument, and many involved proving one of the two theories over the other. The Monster Study was a very clear example of an attempt at proving the "nurture" aspect of a behavior, namely of stuttering, despite the fact that the experiment failed and the result proved that stuttering was, in fact, a product of "nature." The Third Wave Disaster, though not deliberately debating one side over the other, did explore the idea that "nurturing" any individual to display a certain behavior could produce it, turning normal students, for example, into radicals reminiscent of Nazis. Landis' Facial Expressions experiment, while also not specifically debating a nature or nurture issue either, did attempt to seek out to what extent human's facial expressions could be attributed to nature - how universal they were, specifically. The case of Tony LaMadrid explored the idea that schizophrenia patients did not need medication, and that they were "nurtured" into benefiting from it, even though the result proved otherwise. The case of David Reimer, however, was deeply involved with the concept of nature vs. nurture. The conductor of the experiment was desperate to prove that gender was a product of nurture, though the experiment actually proved that gender was, in fact, a consequence of nature, at the price of Reimer's suicide.
Approaching experiments and results through a multitude of approaches, or one approach encompassing many elements, the biopsychosocial perspective, is an important tool in assessing results. For example, the causes of Reimer's suicide may be deduced through this method. Biologically, Reimer may have been genetically predisposed to depression and subsequent suicide - he may have had relatives who had depression. Psychologically, Reimer may have been caught up in a flurry of negative thoughts and could have been unable to dispel them. Socially, the experimentation and so-called "therapy" that he was forced to go through may have caused his downward spiral into depression and consequent suicide.
It is important to explore experiments through different lenses, meaning through different topics and through different mentalities. Analysing the processes and results of experiments is of vital importance, given that a correct assessment of a procedure that did not end well could result in a safer procedure in the future. However, it is very clear from the negative results that the aforementioned experiments produced, that they under no circumstances should have taken place. The desire to understand had blinded the experimenters to the suffering that they had caused, and they could not comprehend that the ends of the experiments did not justify the means.
Approaching experiments and results through a multitude of approaches, or one approach encompassing many elements, the biopsychosocial perspective, is an important tool in assessing results. For example, the causes of Reimer's suicide may be deduced through this method. Biologically, Reimer may have been genetically predisposed to depression and subsequent suicide - he may have had relatives who had depression. Psychologically, Reimer may have been caught up in a flurry of negative thoughts and could have been unable to dispel them. Socially, the experimentation and so-called "therapy" that he was forced to go through may have caused his downward spiral into depression and consequent suicide.
It is important to explore experiments through different lenses, meaning through different topics and through different mentalities. Analysing the processes and results of experiments is of vital importance, given that a correct assessment of a procedure that did not end well could result in a safer procedure in the future. However, it is very clear from the negative results that the aforementioned experiments produced, that they under no circumstances should have taken place. The desire to understand had blinded the experimenters to the suffering that they had caused, and they could not comprehend that the ends of the experiments did not justify the means.