Sentinel Digital Desk
"The Monster Study" is a specific example of an unethical psychological experiment. It refers to a study conducted by Wendell Johnson and Mary Tudor in 1939, where they conducted stuttering therapy on orphaned children to induce speech disorders and examine the effects of negative reinforcement. The experiment is widely criticized for its unethical nature and the harm it caused to the participants.
From 1953 to 1973, the United States government conducted a series of unethical experiments meant to figure out the best ways to manipulate the mental states of citizens, and then to “develop chemical materials capable of employment in clandestine operations.” Collectively, the experiments were called Project MKUltra and were officially sponsored by the CIA. Each experiment involved subjecting unknowing Americans to things like mind-altering drugs, sensory deprivation, verbal and sexual abuse, extreme isolation, hypnosis, and other forms of torture.
The Stanford Prison Experiment, perhaps one of the most famous forms of human experimentation ever conducted, took place in August of 1971. The purpose of the Stanford Prison Experiment was to study the causes of conflict between prisoners and those who guard them. Twenty-four male students were randomly assigned the role of either guard or prisoner, and then set up according to their role in a specifically designed model prison located in the basement of the psychology building on Stanford’s campus. It soon became apparent that those who had been given the role of guard were taking their job very seriously. They began to enforce harsh measures and subjected their “prisoners” to various degrees of psychological torture.
After the horrors of the Second World War, psychological researchers like Stanley Milgram wondered what made average citizens act like those in Germany who had committed atrocities. Milgram wanted to determine how far people would go carrying out actions that might be detrimental to others if they were ordered or encouraged to do so by an authority figure. The Milgram experiment showed the tension between that obedience to the orders of the authority figure and personal conscience.
When David Reimer was eighth months old, his penis was seriously damaged during a failed circumcision. His parents contacted John Money, a professor of psychology and pediatrics at Johns Hopkins, who was a researcher in the development of gender. As David had an identical twin brother, Money viewed the situation as a rare opportunity to conduct his own experiment into the nature of gender, by advising Reimer’s parents to have the David sexually reassigned as a female.
In 1924, at the University of Minnesota, Carney Landis created an experiment on humans to investigate the similarity of different people’s’ facial expressions. He wanted to determine if people displayed similar or different facial expressions while experiencing common emotions.
During the apartheid years in South Africa, doctors in the South African military tried to “cure” homosexuality in conscripts by forcing them to undergo electroshock therapy and chemical castration. The military also forced gay conscripts to undergo sex-change operations. This happened as one segment of a secret military program headed by Dr. Aubrey Levin that sought to study and eliminate homosexuality in the military as recently as 1989.
The Monkey Drug Trials experiment was ostensibly meant to test the effects of illicit drugs on monkeys. Given that monkeys and humans have similar reactions to drugs, and that animals have long been part of medical experiments, the face of this experiment might not look too bad. It’s actually horrific. Monkeys and rats learned to self-administer a range of drugs, from cocaine, amphetamines, codeine, morphine and alcohol.