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The Most Dangerous Psychological Experiments of the Past

By Jesse Bering / Source: Scientific American

When most people think about research ethics in psychology, they take the perspective of the participants (subjects) of the study. And, usually, what comes to mind is some outrageous battery of experimental procedures involving electric shocks, brain vivisections, or some sort of unauthorized subliminal incursion into one’s private thoughts. The boring truth is that the vast majority of studies are about as scary as cheese and crackers.

But there’s another ethical issue that you may not be so familiar with, and that has to do with protecting the research assistants running the study, many of whom are undergraduate students. In the field of social psychology, this is often a very real issue indeed. Sometimes there are dangers involved that the scientists themselves, I suspect, have not thought through entirely.

For example, in one study from the mid-1980s, investigators staged a rape scene on a college campus in which a male research assistant appeared to be sexually assaulting a struggling female research assistant. The man leaped out from behind some bushes and grabbed the female roughly, one hand around her waist and the other over her mouth. The female screamed, “Help! Help! Please help me! You bastard! Rape! Rape!” The investigators wanted to know whether passersby—random people who had the bad fortune of stumbling across this troubling event—would heroically intervene and save the girl.

The short answer is people were more likely to help when they were in a group than alone. Not too surprising. But the findings aside, the study raises many interesting ethical questions. Among them, what if the witness was more heroic than the researchers anticipated and physically harmed the “rapist?” I imagine it would be difficult for the actors to outpace a speeding bullet in explaining the purpose of the study to a shoot-first-ask-questions-later type of character.

In an even earlier study in which research assistants were potentially placed in harm’s way, investigators in 1972 wanted to know how people on the street responded to being stared at. Perhaps “glared at” is a better way to describe the methods used in this particular study. In one version of the experiment, the research assistant pulled up in his motor scooter next to a car waiting at a red light and stared expressionlessly at the driver until the light turned green. In another version, the research assistant stood on the street corner, turned to face an approaching pedestrian, and again stared expressionlessly at this person’s face for an uncomfortable length of time.

As predicted, being stared at prompted people to ‘flee’ measurably faster than not being stared at. In the case of the motor scooter, car drivers who were in the staring condition stepped on the gas pedal harder when the light turned green than those in the control condition, as measured by the length of time it took them to cross the intersection. Likewise, pedestrians who were stared at also picked up their step.

Now, I happen to be a coward and would sheepishly avert my gaze if I thought an eight-year-old girl were giving me the evil eye. But there are plenty of people out there who do not take kindly to a stranger’s agonistic stares and the research assistants in these studies could have found themselves in a serious confrontation.

The fact that most people simply looked away and fiddled with their radios may have something to with the study being done in Kansas rather than, say, downtown L.A., but still it could have easily escalated to conflict.

In a final example of a study in which research assistants took their lives into their own hands, one very brave investigator set up shop in the toilet stall of a busy university restroom with a stopwatch and a periscope and used the latter to observe men at the urinals. “This provided a view,” the authors explained in the 1976 paper, “of the user's lower torso and made possible direct visual sightings of the stream of urine.”

If you processed that last sentence, you’re probably asking yourself why anyone would want such a good view of a stranger’s micturating penis. In fact, the researchers were trying to gain a better understanding of paruresis, otherwise known as “shy bladder syndrome” (or “pee-shy,” “bashful bladder” and a variety of other monikers). In extreme cases, someone with a shy bladder cannot urinate in public facilities such as airports, restaurants, or their place of employment.

The idea behind this study was that invasion of personal space underlies paruresis—the closer another person is in proximity, the more trouble the pee-shy individual will have urinating. The restroom was therefore rigged so that, in addition to the observer in the toilet stall, another research assistant (called a “confederate” in social psychological parlance) stationed himself either at the urinal next to the unwitting participant or used the urinal farthest away from the participant. As predicted, when the participants were relieving themselves next to the confederate, their urination delay was significantly greater (8.4 sec) than when they were separated from the confederate by one urinal (6.2 sec) or when the confederate was absent (4.9 sec). The duration of urine flow also supported the hypotheses, with participants urinating, on average, for a briefer period in the close condition (17.4 sec) than in either the far (23.4 sec) or alone condition (24.8 sec).

Again, data aside, there are a number of ethical questions raised in this last study. One of these concerns should have been the wellbeing of the research assistant in the toilet stall. Had a particularly hostile participant noticed the glint of a periscope lens on the floor next to his foot, the research assistant could have found himself laid up in a hospital bed for the next six months. The lengths some scientists will go to for a data point!

A final note. It is unlikely that the studies reported here could be done today. In psychological science terms, they are already ancient and most contemporary research ethics committees would see these projects as too high risk for a variety of reasons (including liability concerns for the investigator’s university employer). Frankly, I’m not sure today’s tighter restrictions are a good thing or a bad thing. For example, although they were certainly dangerous in their own ways, each of the studies mentioned above answered legitimate research questions and provided important insights into human social behavior. The realism they afforded by their naturalistic methods would be difficult – if not impossible – to replicate in a laboratory using more innocuous approaches. Once people know they are in an experiment (particularly, when they know the purpose of the study) they tend to behave artificially.

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