PSY 200 Research Methods Part 4 of 4

welcome to the section on scientific research questionable examples from previous decades and the Bellmont report in this section we will cover few cases of questionable research in Psychology the studies that we will take brief look at include the mgrm experiment the Stanford Prison Experiment the monster study little Albert the Bobo Doll Experiment and the robbers cave experiment let's begin with the milgrim experiment which took place at Yale University Milgram recruited participants to his study by placing ads in local newspapers participants were deceived and told the study was being conducted on the effects of punishment on learning at the outset of the study mgram did not reveal to participants that the study was going to be about obedience for fear that this might change the participants's behavior some participants might Rebel and behave less Obed Med ly than they usually would if they knew already that the study was on obedience participants who responded to the newspaper ad were brought into milgram's laboratory here they were led to believe that the researchers were randomly pairing participants together and picking one person to serve as the learner and one to serve as the teacher in actuality the participant who had responded to the ad was always given the role of teacher and conf Confederate was given the role of learner Confederate in research is someone who works for the researcher but pretends not to in this set of studies the Confederate pretended to be fellow participant that was randomly assigned to the role of learner the teacher who was the actual participant was then seated in front of box they thought would deliver electric shocks to the learner the Box contained series of switches to generate progressively higher and higher levels of electric shocks the switches went all the way from 0 to 450 volts in 15v increments the switches also had text labels like mild shock or danger severe shock the teacher was informed that the learner would be memorizing list of word pairs it would then be the teacher's job to test the learner on the word pairs for each mistake the learner made the teacher was to administer an electric shock to the learner using the Box they were seated in front of with each mistake the teacher was instructed to increase the voltage of the shock that they administered remember although the teacher believed the learner was participant like them the learner was actually Confederate that was trained by the researcher the learner did not receive any shocks But the teacher or the real participant did not know this the Confederate followed script when the teacher flicked the switch to administer certain levels of shocks the learner screamed out in pain asked to stop the study pounded on the wall and stopped responding to questions altogether presumably unconscious or injured if at any point the teacher expressed hesitation or desire to end the study the experimenter pushed them to keep going informing them for example that the experiment required them to continue the experimentor who was wearing lab coat and was clearly in charge of the study represented an authority figure the participants thought they must obey before the study began Milgram explained his procedures to group of psychiatrists and asked them to predict what he would find the psychiatrists imagined that only one in 1,000 people would be willing to administer progressively higher and higher electric shocks and make their way to the highest voltage on the shock generator box which was labeled as 450 volts however in reality mgrm studies found that roughly 2third of participants or about 65% were willing to work their way through the switches on the shockbox and administer the highest voltage this is not to say that mgr's participants were all ssts it's important to note that many of the teachers in the mgrm study showed signs of distress mgm's participants did not enjoy inflicting pain on another person instead what milgrim study revealed is just how powerful the drive to obey Authority is people were willing to follow the commands of an authority figure to the point that they would cause someone else pain here is video on this experiment it is linked below now let's quickly go over the Stanford Prison Experiment the Stanford Prison Experiment was social psychology study conducted in 1971 at Stanford University that examined the effect of social expectations labeling and role playing on Behavior 24 male college students were randomly assigned to be either prisoners or guards in mock prison the students were paid $15 per day and were arrested by real police and brought to the mock prison in the basement of campus Building the guards were ordered not to be physically abusive to the prisoners but they did become cruel and sadistic the prisoners became depressed and hopeless here is video that's linked to Below on the Stanford Prison Experiment will tell you that it stopped after just six days based on it going horribly wrong feel free to click on the video link below and check it out now we will cover the monster study in 1936 Dr Wendell Johnson from the University of Iowa wanted to find out if stuttering was the result of biology or if it was learned behavior the monster study did not get its name because it involved monsters but because of the unethical methods that were used in the experiment 22 orphans were selected to participate in the study some of the orphans had stutters and some did not all the participants were split up into two groups containing both orphans that stuttered and that did not stutter one group was labeled as normal speakers and the other group got labeled as stutterers the orphans from each group were then brought in every few weeks for 5 months and were evaluated on how they spoke the normal speakers were given positive speech therapy and were praised for their ability to speak well even if they actually had problem speaking the stutterers were given negative speech therapy and were told they spoke poorly and that they should never speak unless they could do it right although the study was originally created with good intentions the results showed showed the danger of its methods the orphans that were in the normal speakers group saw minimal Improvement in their speech the orphans in the stutterers group had much worse results six of the orphans in the stutterers group did not actually have stutter and of the six five of them developed speech problems and became withdrawn or stopped speaking completely the youngest of these six orphans was only 5 years old the orphans in the stutterers group also started to do worse in school due to the unresolved psychological trauma caused to the stutterers group the results were never published and the orphan participants did not know they were part of the experiment until 60 years after it occurred some followup with this is that eventually they were given some sort of reparation from the University but it was not until so far after the experiment they the the university did acknowledge it was terrible situation and it should have never happened in the first place other information that came out included that the caretakers at the orphanage were not aware of exactly what was going on they thought the kids were just going to participate in some sort of study they didn't know what it entailed that being said people who were participants in this study had had longlasting psychological effects some talked about how throughout their whole lives they were less likely to talk than their peers and they had trouble communicating because of anxiety or just an inability to kind of adapt to conversational situations based on the imprinting that happened when they were children here is video of the monster experiment not the actual experiment but an explanation of it that is pretty good put it linked in the description below next we'll talk about the baby Albert study which was originally sorted out or created so that researchers could try to determine if people were susceptible to classical conditioning methods little Albert was 9-month-old participant in researcher John Watson's experiment that showed that classical conditioning is possible in humans in the study Watson and graduate student called Rosalie rer exposed the 9-month-old who they called Albert to white rat and other furry objects which the baby really enjoyed playing with later as Albert played with the white rat Watson would make loud sound behind the baby's head after number of conditioning trials Watson and rer reintroduced the animals and furry items without the scary noise through the conditioning the animals and objects that were once source of joy and curiosity had become trigger of fear here is video of the little Albert experiment would caution you that it's little disturbing did link it below in case you're interested in watching it the next example is the Bobo Doll Experiment in this experiment researchers vandora Ross and Ross in 1961 tested 36 boys and 36 girls from the Stanford University Nursery School aged between 3 to 6 years old the researchers pre-tested the children for how aggressive they were by observing the children in the nursery and judging their aggressive behavior on four fiveo rating scales the idea of this experiment was to see if children could learn through observational learning an adult was given the task of acting out violent acts on this doll which is what they call the Bobo doll and to demonstrate these in front of children so children watched the adult demonstrate violent acts against this doll and that was it they didn't get any instruction they just saw visually an adult acting very violent to this doll then the children were given the opportunity to play in the room where the doll was some of the children not only reenacted the violent actions that the adult showed but they escalated some of them picked up additional kind of weapons or items in the room and use those items on the doll in addition to what the adult had originally shown really interesting to watch also really disturbing the video is linked below if you would like to take look the last example of unethical research in the past is Robbers Cave the robbers cave experiment was psychology study that looked how conflict developed between groups the researchers divided boys at summer camp into two groups and then studied how conflict developed between them they also investigated what did and didn't work to reduce group conflict here is video that is linked below that talks about this experiment some important points would be that the boys were given conflict situations where they were competing against one another and they very quickly formed alliances with one another based on their group affiliation and later in the experiment they talk about how when the boys were given Collective task to solve together they did pretty well at one point they had to pull bus out of muddy road at another point they had to fix the water supply to the camp which was staged event but the boys didn't know that so they were able to work together in some instances although they were vicious rivals in others one important point about this study is that fights happened between the boys and they weren't always deescalate as quickly as you might think they should have been the video that talks about this doesn't go over that in super great detail but do think it's important to point out that interviews were done with these people years later and they said that there was often times lack of intervention when there probably should have been by the counselors and other times there was instigation where it really wasn't necessary so this is why this makes it to my list of unethical examples of previous research now that we're aware of just selection of some awful things that happened in past decades with psychological research let's talk about what we're doing differently now what are we doing differently now let's talk about the Belmont report what is it its principles and application and little bit about irbs although we did discuss them earlier we'll connect them to our current discussion the Belmont report was created in 1978 by the US Department of Health to establish some basic ethical principles to be considered when people participate in research the three principles of this report were respect for person beneficent and Justice and the applications of this include informed consent assessments of risks and benefits and how we select subject respect for persons includes having respect for for individuals and their autonomy and obtaining informed consent in every instance respect for persons in application person has the right to make choices hold views and take actions according to their own beliefs if person does not have the capacity to make their own choice they must be protected from harm person must enter into research voluntarily and must be informed in an adequate manner to truly respect person's autonomy they must be able to give genuinely informed consent with full knowledge of both risk and benefits of the study beneficence stresses doing good by minimizing all potential harms and maximizing all potential benefits to the subject as well as potential benefits to society in application this principle means that there is an obligation to minimize the harms or risk to the greatest extent possible maximize the potential benefits and ensure the rights and well-being of the patient take precedence over the needs of science Justice be fair in the distribution of the benefits and in bearing the burden of the research the application of Justice the benefits and burdens of research should be justly distributed we should guard against using vulnerable populations we should ensure Fair selection of research participants and we should guard against coercion and undue influence also we should avoid potential Financial or other conflicts of interest institutional review boards the IRB is the group of people that are responsible for enacting the Belmont principles and protecting the safety rights and Welfare of humans participating in research thank you for listening and I'll see you soon for the next topic