5. Monster experiment
Can you imagine being in an experiment that affects you for the rest of your life, and not being told that it ever happened? In 1939 22-orphaned children were recruited into a study on stammering. Spilt into two groups named good speaking and bad, that contained and equal mix of stammers and non-
Childrens feet. source: pixabay.com
stammers. The group that was labeled good speaking was given positive reinforcement for speaking, but the bad speaking group was verbally abused for small slip-ups, such as ‘don’t talk unless you get it right.’ By doing this they induced anxiety in the children causing many to refuse to speak. Their schoolwork fell and one even ran away from the orphanage. The physiologists realised that what they were doing was going to have impacts on the children for the rest of their lives, but the children were never told about the experiment until 2005.
4. Milgram Experiment
Would you kill someone? Turns out you most likely would if a person in a lab coat tells you to keep going. The experiment set up was simple; a volunteer was in one room and an actor in the other. The actor would have to answer a question; if incorrect the volunteer would give them an electric shock. The actor never received it, but would pretend to. For every incorrect answer the intensity of the shock was increased. After a number of shocks the actor began to bang on the walls and complain. At some point many volunteers indicted their desire to stop and question the point to of the experiment, but were told by the supervisor ‘please continue’, if that failed the supervisor would increase the persuasion of the statement up to the command ‘you have no other choice, you must go on’ If they still wished to stop after this, the experiment was stopped. The results showed that 65% of the volunteers administered the final ‘deadly’ shock. This experiment shows how people will follow commands from a person deemed in control. That could have been you, killing someone.
3. Stanford prison experiment
Would you give in to power? Would you abuse and just torture people because you could? Science has proven there is evil in us all. In August 1971 Professor Philip Zimbardo set out to discover the psychological effects of becoming either a prisoner or a guard by using 24 male university students assigned the roles. The
Phillip Zimbardo. source: stanford.edu
experiment was meant to run for 14 days; little did the team know it would quickly be shut down. The guards immediately set up methods to reward and punish for behaviour. After 36 hours one prisoner went ‘crazy’ and had to be released, but they continued on with the experiment anyway. Guards forced prisoners to chant their assigned numbers. Sanitary conditions declined and the guards became violent. Prisoners were forced to sleep without mattresses, forced to strip and forced into solitude. The experiment was shut down after six days as 12 normal university students had been turned into power hungry sadists. This experiment showed we are all capable of terrible things.
2. Project MK-ultra
Do you believe in mind control? You probably should. In the early 1950s the CIA started a human experiment trying to gain mind control. They used various methods; drugs, torture, sexual abuse and isolation. It was a massive project with over 80 institutes. Although many of the experiments used volunteers, the CIA exploited mental patients and prisoners. Some of the most disturbing experiments in this project involved the hypnosis of young women, who where then instructed to shoot at a dummy, who once out of the hypnotic state denied having shot the gun. Another was inducing multiple personality disorder by torture and drugs. Worst of all, due to the secretive nature of this project, we will never know the true extent of the torture that occurred. But it does raise the questions, is this still happening? Is our government experimenting with new technologies to gain mind control? In this day and age it is most likely achievable.
1. Nazis Experiments
Everyone knows that the Nazis killed millions and millions of people. But this was also a time when science took a dark turn. There were experiments on twins, transplantation experiments, head injury experiments, freezing people to death,
Flag of the Nazi party. source: wikipedia.org
injecting them with Malaria, poisons administrated and so many more. It must have looked like a horror movie. Twins were sown together, no anaesthesia was used in transplants, young children continuously hit in the head with hammers, frozen to death in near freezing water and blood clotting experiments. Can you imagine it? Blood everywhere, ear piecing screams and people tortured to death in the name of science. Never has there been such a time where so little was discovered and so much life lost.
