Social psychology is defined by the American Psychological Association as the study of how individual or group behavior is influenced by factors such as social influences, social perception and social interaction. Experiments relating to this topic were especially prominent in the 1900s and these experiments have been praised over the years for their contributions to society. However, their ethicality has sparked controversy from researchers over the past century due to the effects of the studies on the emotional and mental state of the participants.
A key example of these effects is the infamous Stanley Milgram experiment, which was intended to examine the willingness of participants to obey an authority figure. In the study, an authority figure would instruct a volunteer participant to administer electric shocks, which were actually fake, to another individual, who was secretly an actor. The actor would pretend to scream in pain, plead with the participant to stop, and even play dead in response to the shocks; today, the series of experiments are widely considered to be unethical. “If you look at the Stanley Milgram experiment, people thought that they were electrocuting people and they weren’t actually doing that, and at some points, people had thought that they killed somebody. So you’re putting people through emotional stress when they necessarily didn’t need to,” AP Psychology teacher Jennifer Bauer said.
While there are hundreds of other examples of psychological experiments that observe human behavior, there are also cases of observing the behavior of animals, such as Harry Harlow’s notorious experiments that used monkeys to explore the nature of love and affection. Harlow would separate newborn monkeys from their mothers and place them in cages with two surrogate mothers, one made of metal wire and the other made of soft cloth. The wire mother had an attached baby bottle for food while the cloth mother had nothing, but it was found that the newborn monkeys would consistently choose the cloth mother over the wire mother.
Then, Harlow took more newborn baby monkeys from their mothers and isolated them for months, or even years, so that they did not have any contact with other monkeys or humans. Their failure to form attachments resulted in bizarre behavior, such as clutching their bodies and rocking compulsively, being extremely aggressive toward other monkeys when they were eventually allowed contact, being unable to communicate or socialize with other monkeys and engaging in self-mutilation. The mental and emotional damage inflicted onto the monkeys through these experiments made Harlow’s work heavily criticized, and this study is considered to be one of the most unethical experiments in modern science.
However, this raises the question: Are these experiments justified due to their impacts on society? Both the Stanley Milgram study and Harry Harlow’s experiments have clearly had positive effects on future work; The Stanley Milgram study has led to additional research on how situational factors can affect obedience to authority, and Harlow’s research has inspired other work about emotional attachments, disproved the belief that attachment is related to physical care rather than emotional care and helped social workers to understand risk factors in child neglect and abuse, such as a lack of comfort.
Despite this, it is crucial to note that these findings came at the expense of the well-being of thousands of participants, both human and animal, though the animals experienced significantly worse treatment. For example, the participants of the Stanley Milgram experiment were forced to endure severe emotional stress because they believed they were actively hurting or killing another person, but the monkeys in Harlow’s experiments had their lives destroyed by the studies; They were permanently separated from their families at birth, forced to seek comfort in a doll rather than a mother, isolated for months at a time and lost their ability to interact with other monkeys as a result of their traumatic experiences. These consequences are emphasized due to Harlow’s discovery that the effects of the experiments on the monkeys were irreversible, which means that the monkeys were forced to live with their trauma for the rest of their lives. With this in mind, it is inconceivable to think that the contributions psychological experiments can make to society outweigh the suffering of its thousands of participants.
The past mistreatment of study participants can help in improving the wellbeing of future participants in order to safely find the desired data. “The field always looks back at these early experiments and says, ‘we should never have let these take place, so then how do we move forward and study these social experiments and not put people through unnecessary stress?’” Bauer said.
