Monster Study Code Of Ethics

Ethics is a means of distinguishing between right and wrong, it focuses on ways to help people in general. Ethical standards can be defined in one way as researchers following the standards identified in the APA Ethics Code to protect the rights and welfare of research participants. As stated in the article, many psychologists during that time preformed highly unethical research experiments that went too far and violated both the code of ethics and standards. However, due to that we now have our most current ethical standards.

The Monster Study was a stuttering experiment on 22 orphans from Iowa. The experiment was kept hidden for fear that their name would be ruined. Johnson's violated ethics in his lack of regard for the potential harm to

the children who participated and in their selection of institutionalized children simply because they were easily available. The deception and the apparent lack of debriefing were also not justifiable. The study learned that although none of the children became stutterers, some became self-conscious and reluctant to speak, and some even suffering lifelong psychological and emotional scars caused by the six months of torment during the experiment.
The Aversion Project was an attempt to force people out of homosexuality from its armed forces, South Africa's apartheid army performed "sex change" operations.

The hypothesis was that if homosexual people were exposed to aversion therapy then they would most likely become heterosexual or straight. This experiment left the patients with psychological damage and low self-esteem. Some were able to recover while. Others suffered permanent damage to their personality. This experiment is considered unethical because it harms homosexuals. It gives them no freedom to choose their own gender identity that every human being should be allowed to do. Also, it is very unethical to harm others psychologically because they can get other illnesses from this, such as depression, post-traumatic stress

disorder.
The Stanford Prison Experiment of 1971 looked at the psychological effects of ordinary people when randomly assigned the role of either a ‘prisoner’ or a ‘guard’. During the study the guards imposed their authority using psychological tactics such as sleep deprivation, stripping the prisoners naked, putting bags over their heads and forcing them to do press-ups or other exercise. The behavior of the guards became increasingly cruel throughout the experiment; so much so that the experiment was terminated early after just six days rather than the intended two weeks. Two ‘prisoners’ had to be removed early from the experiment and several were emotionally traumatized. The unethical behavior to continued, until a third party not directly involved with the experiment made it aware of the cruelty that was occurring.
The Monkey Drug trials of 1969 looked at the effects of self-administration of drugs by the monkey. In other words, whether a monkey would become addicted to drugs and as a result self-administer itself in order to maintain the drug abuse. The experiment found that the biological traits were similar to that of humans, and results suggested that one of the key motivations for drug abuse was the psychological dependence. As this kind of experiment cannot be done on humans, the only option for the researchers was to use monkeys. However, animals and humans are different and therefore findings on non-humans should be cautious when suggesting a similar trait can be found in humans. The Monkey Drug trials were highly unethical as the subjects suffered pain, withdrawal symptoms and in some cases died from an overdose. This was the start of ethical guidance for non-human subjects; the welfare of animals used for research must be respected.
The Landis Facial Expression experiment was an experiment to study if emotions evoke universal facial expressions. The hypothesis was that the subjects will react in the same way to different stimuli. Landis made the participants watch pornography films, smell ammonia gas, and place their hands into a bucket of frogs. During each test, he would take photographs of the subjects’ faces and record the position of the face lines. Participants were shown a live rat and were instructed by Landis to decapitate it. Most of the participants refused to decapitate the rat, but eventually two thirds of the participants obeyed Landis’ request. For the one third that refused to kill the rat, Landis would pick up a knife and cut the head of the rat in front of his subjects. This experiment was extremely unethical, also causing emotional harm.
The Little Albert experiment demonstrated that classical conditioning principles could be applied to condition the emotional response of fear. According to today's ethical standards, the nature of the study itself would be considered unethical, as it did not protect Albert from psychological harm, because its sole purpose was to induce a state of fear. Little Albert was never desensitized to his fear; he left the hospital before Watson could do so.
The independent variable in the Learned Helplessness Experiment of 1965 was the administration of the electric shocks.

The dependent variable in the Experiment of 1965 was the reaction of the dogs. The Learned Helplessness experiment conducted by psychologist Martin Seligman is considered unethical. This experiment was unethical because it was cruel and afflicted painful testing on animals. In an ethical research experiment the test subjects have the right to be protected from harm or discomfort, inform consent, and also have the right to refuse participation. This is the boundary Seligman crossed. Animals are unable to verbally refuse to participate and cannot inform consent since they are unaware of intentions of humans. Therefore he was conducting an experiment where he tortured them and liberality ignored the subjects discomfort for his own research

benefits.
The first ethical dilemma with Milgram's experiment is deception. The experimenter deceived the participants, who were made to believe that they were truly inflicting pain on the learners and were purposely put in a position of high stress. Some teachers even believed they had badly hurt, or even killed the learner, causing a lot of distress While it was truly to measure obedience, he told his participants that he was studying the effects of punishment on learning. Although the participants were debriefed after the experiment was over, many believe that it wasn't enough because it didn't prevent the subsequent psychological damage that could have affected the participants.
At the time of the Well of Despair experiment it was believed that holding infants and giving them attention caused them to grow up being dependent, and for boys it was rumored that they could even become gay. Harlow's experiments on rhesus monkeys proved these theories to be wrong. This experiment was definitely unethical. He mentally scarred the baby monkeys. He isolated them in stainless steel cages just to see the effect it would have. These monkeys were psychologically tortured for several years. Of course, this is animal abuse. It's not right to treat a living creature this way.
Many scientists at the time believed Harlow's work was simply common knowledge, deeming his work unnecessary and giving him the name of 'sadist.'
David Reimer was born as Bruce Reimer in 1965. Bruce and his twin Brian went for a routine circumcision. However, Bruce’s penis was accidently destroyed during his operation. John Money was a well-known psychologist and a sexologist at the time. Money suggested that Bruce should have a sex change, as plastic surgery was not advanced enough. He had been working on a theory, that any boy could be raised as a girl. He believed that Nurture was more important than Nature when it came to gender roles. This study breaks many ethical codes of conduct. Firstly, the Reimer twins’ parents were deceived by Money. They were never told of his intentions to use their son as part of an experiment, and were led to believe that a sex change was the only option for baby Bruce. Bruce never gave his consent to have the sex change, or to be involved in Money’s experiment. Although he was only a baby, his whole life was affected by the decisions of other people.
As time has gone on our code of ethics has become increasingly greater. During each one of these experiments there was something morally wrong that happened. Although many of these kinds of experiments give us vital information, it should not be done at the risk of harming the participant physically and emotional.