TTC Video - Shocking Psychological Studies and the Lessons They Teach

We live in a time of amazing new technologies-and an unparalleled level of surveillance. Virtually every aspect of human behavior is tracked millions of times a day through the technology that we all, often without giving it a thought, use every day. The collected data has the potential of providing vital insight into the human experience, but can the scientific community explore the psychosocial experience of humanity without making victims of us all?


This is just one of the many questions tackled by Dr. Thad Polk, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, in Shocking Psychological Studies and the Lessons They Teach. In this six-lecture course, you will explore several controversial psychological experiments from the past that have nonetheless contributed significant insight into the human condition. In looking back at these past studies-what they taught us as well as the damage they caused-Dr. Polk elucidates the contemporary ethical principles now in place to protect both subjects and science. As you will see, with every new technological and scientific advancement, there also comes a new set of ethical conundrums for researchers to grapple with.
Establishing Ethical Principles
First of all, how do we assess the ethics of psychological testing and studies? One framework is based on the Belmont Report, first drafted by the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research in 1976. This report identified three ethical principles that should direct and define any and all research conducted on human beings. Specifically, these principles are:
Respect for Persons. Human subjects should at all times be treated with respect as autonomous agents possessed of free will. Persons lacking such agency, or with diminished autonomy (such as children or those with mental disabilities) should be given extra protections to ensure that they are treated without exploitation or unnecessary risk. Researchers have a responsibility to obtain the consent of research participants and those participants should always have sufficient information about the study and its purposes to make informed decisions about their participation.
Beneficence. This principle asks researchers to weigh the potential benefits of a study against its potential risks. Will the benefits of this research outweigh the risks of undertaking and reporting on it? Are the researchers generally considering the best interests of both the participants and humanity as they design and execute the study?
Justice. Is the study fair? Does it treat different groups of people equitably in terms of both risk and reward? Does the study include an appropriately broad range of ethnic and socioeconomic group participants? Is the study sensitive to issues of age, race, gender, ethnicity, culture, and socioeconomic status? What steps have the researchers taken to ensure equity across such lines? These are the questions that research teams must address as they work toward justice while adhering to the principles of the Belmont Report.
The shocking studies that Dr. Polk explores violated the Belmont Report's principles, in part because most of them were conducted before the principles were adopted in 1976. In fact, some of these studies directly influenced the creation of these principles to protect test subjects in the future. It's true that each of these studies provides important insights into human behavior-but at what cost?
Power and Human Ethical Behavior
Two of the most compelling and significant psychological studies in the 20th century were the Milgram Obedience Study and the Stanford Prison Experiment. In the early 1960s, Stanley Milgram at Yale University sought to understand why so many German soldiers and citizens were complicit in the atrocities of the Holocaust. He wanted to know if ordinary people would really follow any and all orders coming down from a higher authority, even if those orders meant doing someone else significant harm.
Approximately 10 years later, in 1971, Dr. Philip Zimbardo at Stanford University also wanted to examine the causes of unethical human behavior. He designed a study that simulated a prison environment, assigning Stanford students to roles as either guards or prisoners. As you will see in this course, what he learned about the effect these roles had on the behavior of ordinary people was truly shocking.
Dr. Polk describes each of these watershed studies in detail, explaining what was learned about human behavior, as well as what researchers later came to understand about the unethical research methods that allowed these studies to operate the way they did.
Protecting the Vulnerable
One of the key ideas behind the Belmont Report's principles applies specifically to the importance of protecting those least capable of protecting themselves. Dr. Polk provides both compelling descriptions and detailed explanations of a wide variety of studies that failed to protect the most vulnerable research subjects. He looks at studies that did not offer appropriate medical care or information to seriously ill and impoverished subjects, as well as experiments that kept children and their adoptive parents from knowing about the children's biological siblings, and others that created severe anxiety around childhood speech development, and even studies of psychoactive drugs that destroyed the lives of American soldiers.
Many of these studies have proven important to science, but each, considered by the ethical standards we insist upon for scientific research today, falls far short of the mark. They are compelling lessons in human psychology, yet also deeply concerning examples of unethical and dangerous scientific work.
Private Made Public
Ironically, some of the most vital research around private spaces has generated substantial public outrage. In his final two lectures, Dr. Polk describes studies that sought to provide a window into issues regarding sex, in the Tearoom Trade Study, and gender identity, in the John/Joan case. In the first, a graduate student studied and interviewed men who used public restrooms for anonymous sexual encounters. In the second, a "biologically normal" male child was sexually altered and raised as female. Both studies raised serious concerns about both ethics and privacy.
At the end of the course, Dr. Polk returns to the concerns about electronic privacy issues that he brought up in the very beginning-an issue that affects nearly everyone who participates in the online world that is such a huge part of modern life. Do users of social media understand the implications of the data they provide? How can researchers reasonably use that data without breaching the Belmont Report's principles? What data, and in what form, is appropriately public and what can each of us expect will be kept private? Finally, he concludes the course by explaining the protocols now in place and the ways in which even those protocols for research sometimes fall short of the three ethical principles of respect for persons, beneficence, and justice. As we consider the mistakes of the past, we can hopefully move forward into a more ethical and just future in the scientific search for answers about who we are.