In a couple of the previous episodes, we talked about some fascinating facts and Information about human mind. Today we're going to focus on a very different side of the field of psychology.

Living in a time of unprecedented scientific development, we naturally focus on progress. However, humanity often pays a high price for progress and understanding. And that seems to be the case in the field of psychology as well. Psychological experiments are carried out in order to understand more about human minds and behaviors. While some famous experiments in psychology have left test subjects temporarily distressed, others have caused lifelong psychological issues.

In many scientific fields, one question is frequently being asked: what's ethical when it comes to science? When we're talking about whether something is ethical or not, we're talking about whether it is the right thing to do. Especially when some of the psychological experiments, when they involve children, animals, or test subjects that just don't know they're being experimented on.

In an attempt to gain better understanding of the human mind and behavior. How far is too far? So in today's episode, let's take a look at some of these psychological experiments that came to be known as controversial, unethical, or just downright horrifying.

Number one on the list, the Monster Study. In 1939, a speech pathologist doctor Wendell Johnson. He wanted to understand the cause of stuttering. He was trying to prove that stuttering was not an inborn trait, but rather a learned behavior. So you don't get it at birth, but rather, you develop it. What makes his experiments unethical is the fact that he carried out the experiment on a group of children at an orphanage.

The children were separated into two groups, members of one group received positive speech therapy. So they were constantly praised and complemented for their speech fluency. But the other group received very, very negative comments. They are constantly being criticized and belittled for any speech mistakes they happen to make. In the end, children in the second group who spoke normally before the experiment started to develop speech problems. Some of these problems they were unable to get rid of for the rest of their lives.

Because it was so unethical and widely criticized, Johnson never published the results of their study. If anything, this experiment really shows how much damage negative reinforcement can do to someone's language development.

And the Monster Study is not the only controversial psychological experiments involving children. The second on the list is an experiment called Bobo Doll experiment. The goal of this controversial experiment was to show that violent behavior can be learned through observation at a young age.

It was conducted in the 1960s by Albert Bandura at Stanford university on 72 young children aged three to six. So very, very young children. The reason why it is called Bobo Doll experiment is because it includes a large inflatable doll named Bobo.

So Bandura first had a percentage of his young test subjects watch an adult violently abuse Bobo both physically and verbally. Then he left each child alone in a room with the doll. And perhaps not surprisingly, a large number of children began to also abuse Bobo, many quite violently. It was incredibly disturbing to see that amount of violence since the children were so young. Bandura repeated his experiments twice and received the same results each time. Nevertheless, it was a disturbing and controversial experiment.

Number three on the list, perhaps the most famous in the list, or most notorious, an experiment that also took place at Stanford university. This is the Stanford prison experiment.

So the Stanford prison experiment took place in 1971, organized by psychologist Phillip Zimbardo. The experiment aimed to study the causes of conflict between prisoners and those who guard them. For this experiment, Zimbardo created a fake prison in the psychology building at Stanford university and made 24 volunteers role play either the guards or prisoners in this fake prison. 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.

If that's surprising, perhaps it is even more surprising that many of the prisoners in this experiment simply accepted the abuses. The measures adopted by the guards became so extreme that the experiment was abruptly stopped after just six days. And the experiment was later severely criticized for ethical reasons.

If the first three experiments are just small-scale projects conducted by psychologists for research reasons, number four on the list has a much larger scale. This is the outrageous experiment, often known as the South African aversion project.

This was during the south African apartheid era. That was a difficult time to live in for homosexuals. With strict anti homosexual laws, because being gay was considered to be a mental illness. The aversion therapies and techniques were applied in South Africa to cure them of this illness. The aversion project mainly consisted of drugging lesbians and gay men and subjecting them to electroconvulsive behavior therapy. During that therapy, they were shown pictures of the same sex and getting electric shock at the same time. The technique obviously did not work. The victims were then subjected to even more extreme therapies. In grave contrast with a lot of the rights movement that we see now among the LGBTQ community. It's hard to imagine the horrifying damage that this aversion project has done in the past.

Number five on the list is the tragic case of David Peter Reimer. When David was seven months old, he got badly hurt in his genital area during a medical procedure. It was tragic enough, but then the psychologist convinced his parents that the boy was more likely to successfully reach sexual maturity if he underwent a sexual reassignment surgery, a sexual reassignment surgery, meaning to change a biological man into a woman, or vice versa.

Obviously, they did not have David's consent. Because David was very young, he did not get the say in this. So his parents, convinced by the doctor, went along with the procedure. During his entire childhood. David was incredibly depressed because he was cruelly ostracized and teased by his peers. And he also insisted that never once had he identified himself as a female. Imagine having your life decided for you like that. Ultimately, he committed suicide at the age of 38.

The last dark psychological experiment that we're gonna talk about today is the Milgram experiments.

Psychologist Stanley Milgram from Yale University wanted to do some obedience studies to analyze the conflict between personal conscience and obedience to authority. Milgram wanted to find out if that is the case.

During the experiment, each participant was then paired with another participant. A was the learner, and B was the teacher. But what B did know was A was actually working with Milgram. So A and B were put into two rooms. B, the teacher, has an electric shock generator as well as a roll of switches that ranged from 15 volts to 450 volts, or at least this is what they have been told.

And the aim of the experiment was to research exactly how far people were willing to go in order to obey an instruction, If that meant harming another person. So during this experiment, B, the teacher, was given instructions to hurt A with various electric shocks. Even though it was all fake, but B did not know it and they thought everything was real. And Milgram was very interested in understanding how ordinary people could so easily be influenced into carrying out atrocities on other people. Despite the noble reason behind this, the entire experiment was highly unethical as the participants were given Incomplete Information to lure them into the study. And I can only imagine the extreme psychological stress and trauma they must have experienced during the process.

And that ends today's list of unethical and controversial psychological experiments. Like I mentioned in the very beginning of the show today, humanity often pays a high price for progress and understanding. But there's always going to be a point when we start asking ourselves: how far is too far? And what's ethical when it comes to human progress? If you have any comments on these psychological experiments, share with us in the common section. I'll see you next time. Bye.

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