Shocking Psychological Studies

and the Lessons They Teach

Thad A. Polk, Ph.D. Professor, University of
Michigan
Course No. 10000

Course Overview
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.

6 Lectures - Average 31 minutes each

1. Lessons from Tuskegee and Facebook
Today, research with human subjects is guided by a set of three ethical principles of the 1976 Belmont
Report, but that was not always the case. In the first lecture of this six-lecture course, Professor Polk
explores the famous Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment and how its ethical violations ultimately led to the
development of the Belmont Report and the ethical principles it identified.
2. Pushing Good People to Do Bad Things
Why do good people sometimes do bad things? Professor Polk encourages us to grapple with two of the
most famous psychological studies on ethics and human psychology: Milgram’s Obedience Study and the
Stanford Prison Experiment. Each study offers invaluable lessons about human behavior. Look at the ways
that these explorations into the causes of unethical human behavior were, themselves, astonishingly
unethical.
3. Experimenting on Vulnerable Children
Arguably, the most vulnerable people in any population are the children. Childhood development studies
can also provide invaluable insights into human psychology. Here, explore two studies where children were
the focus: Neubauer’s twin study and Johnson’s “Monster Study” of testing the origins of stuttering.
Discover why, according to the Belmont Report’s principles, these “subjects” might be identified more
accurately as “victims.”
4. Testing Psychochemical Weapons
Government organizations such as the CIA and military are charged with protecting the public, but in these
shocking experiments, vulnerable low-ranking soldiers and psychiatric patients were unwittingly subjected
to psychoactive drugs. Uncover the ways in which these observational studies lacked both rigorous
scientific design and adherence to any of the Belmont Report’s principles. In fact, the results of these
studies often led to hallucinations, paranoia, rage, and even death.
5. Assigning Gender and Spying on Sex
Studies of sex and sexual identity present unique ethical challenges for privacy and consent. In the next two
studies, Professor Polk takes you into the private world of sexual identity and impulse. The Tearoom Trade
Study considers the public identities and private choices of anonymous public sex participants. The
John/Joan case explores the sexual identity of a biologically male child raised as a female.
6. Current and Future Ethical Challenges
Science still grapples with the ethics of studying human subjects. Increasingly, data is available about every
aspect of human life through our uninhibited interactions with technology. The study of such data sets is
affordable, widely generalizable, and easily accessible. But is it ethical? You’ll also discover that the
conclusions presented in scientific journals, even under our more rigorous ethical guidelines, may not be as
reliable as we thought.

Professor Thad A. Polk, Ph.D.

Every aspect of our mental life is controlled by the brain. So if we ever hope
to understand the human mind, then we need to develop a better
understanding of the brain and the neural mechanisms that underlie
cognition.

Institution University of Michigan

Professor Thad A. Polk is an Arthur F. Thurnau Professor in the Department of
Psychology and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
at the University of Michigan. He received a B.A. in Mathematics from the
University of Virginia and an interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Computer Science and
Psychology from Carnegie Mellon University. He also received postdoctoral
training in cognitive neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania.
Professor Polk’s research combines functional imaging of the human brain with computational modeling and
behavioral methods to investigate the neural architecture underlying cognition. Some of his major projects have
investigated differences in the brains of smokers who quit compared with those who do not, changes in the
brain as we age, and contributions of nature versus nurture to neural organization. Professor Polk regularly
collaborates with scientists at the University of Texas at Dallas and at the Max Planck Institute for Human
Development in Berlin, where he is a frequent visiting scientist.
Professor Polk regularly teaches on topics ranging from the human mind and brain, to cognitive psychology, to
computational modeling of cognition. His teaching at the University of Michigan has been recognized by
numerous awards, and he was named to The Princeton Review’s list of the Best 300 Professors in the United
States.