Experimental Psychology: Advances and Ethical Concerns

Some of the most cited studies in psychology’s history would never make it past an ethics committee today. Picture a baby taught to burst into tears at the sight of a white rat, or a volunteer’s hand shaking as he keeps pressing a shock button because a stranger in a lab coat told him to continue. That’s not a knock on the field; it’s a measure of how far it has traveled. Experimental psychology grew up fast in the twentieth century, chasing questions about obedience, attachment, and human nature with a boldness that produced genuine insight and, in several well-known cases, real harm. The story of how the field learned to balance discovery against the well-being of its subjects, human and animal, is really the story of modern research ethics itself. 

Read More: Experimental Psychology: History, Features and Method

A Fear Conditioned Into a Baby 

Long before Milgram, there was Little Albert. In 1920, John Watson and Rosalie Rayner set out to test whether fear could be learned rather than born into a person. They used an 11-month-old infant as their subject. They repeatedly paired a white rat with a loud, frightening noise until the baby began crying at the mere sight of the rat, and the fear soon spread to other furry, white objects too (Watson & Rayner, 1920). The study is remembered as a landmark demonstration of classical conditioning. It’s also remembered as a warning, because the fear was never removed before the study ended, and an infant obviously had no way to consent to any of it. Four decades before ethics boards existed to stop something like this, this study was already showing why they’d eventually need to. 

Read More: Little Albert Experiment: What It Taught Us About Fear, Conditioning and Research Ethics

The shock that changed the field 

One of the most startling experiments that forced psychology to face reality was Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiment. Participants believed that they were administering painful shocks to subjects simply because a man in a lab coat told them to continue. The shocks they administered continued to rise toward what they thought was a fatal voltage (Milgram, 1963). Although the study’s findings were impressive from a scientific standpoint, it was distressing to observe because some of the participants were clearly trembling, stuttering, and perspiring throughout the test. This experiment was strongly criticised.

In the year following the publication of this experiment, psychologist Diana Baumrind published a sharp rebuttal. She said that Milgram made people experience mental pain without proper protection, and this breaks the trust between the person doing the experiment and the person taking part. It has moral problems that the study didn’t pay attention to (Baumrind, 1964). That debate didn’t just embarrass one researcher. It pushed the American Psychological Association to begin formally revising its ethical standards for human research. 

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Deception’s Rise and Its Slow Retreat 

Milgram wasn’t the only person who used deception to get an honest answer out of people. For decades, participants were misled about the true purpose of an experiment. It was a standard practice in social psychology. A comprehensive review of journal articles between 1921 and 1994 found that deception use climbed steadily through the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. It was driven by the popularity of realistic, high-impact experimental designs.

This trend of deception decreased sharply after 1980 as ethical standards and federal oversight tightened (Nicks et al., 1997). That decline wasn’t accidental. It tracked almost exactly with the growth of institutional review boards and stricter informed consent rules, showing how much a field’s methods can shift once its ethical guardrails actually have teeth. 

The Monkeys in the Cage 

In the early years, humans were not the only ones facing ethical issues like this; animals were as well. Harry Harlow conducted experiments on baby rhesus monkeys by separating them from their mothers. The infants were raised with wire or cloth surrogates. This experiment gave an understanding of attachment. It showed that comfort and touch were more important for a baby to bond than food alone (Harlow, 1958). These results changed the way psychologists looked at love and the way babies grow in the stages of life. The study also caused distress to young animal infants by deliberately isolating them in ways that later generations found ethically troubling. The details of this experiment were disturbing for later-generation researchers and Harlow’s own students.

Read More: Comparative Psychology: Exploring the Behaviour Across all Species

Building a More Humane Lab 

Concerns like this resulted in the production of a new framework. In 1959, scientists William Russell and Rex Burch proposed three R’s: replacement, reduction, and refinement. They replace animals with non-animal methods wherever possible, limit the number of animals needed for valid results to a minimum, and refine procedures to cut down on pain and distress for the animal that remains part of a study (Russell & Burch, 1959). Today, these three Rs are still being used worldwide as a part of animal research ethics. 

Consent That Actually Means Something 

On the human side, the biggest structural shift was the idea that consent has to be informed, not just given. In earlier studies, participants’ presence in the lab was often treated as the only agreement needed to make them subjects. Then, in 1979, the U.S. National Commission issued the Belmont Report for the protection of Human Subjects. This report laid out some ground principles that are still being used as part of research ethics.

First, people should never be forced to take part in anything. Second, researchers need to think about what good the study might do compared to any harm it could cause. They must be sure that their choices are kind and fair to the people involved. Third, the burden that research puts on people should not fall unfairly on groups that are easy to pressure or convenient to use, such as prisoners or the people with low-income, while everyone else receives the benefits. Under this standard, consent isn’t just showing up to a lab. It means the person actually understands what they’re agreeing to before anything begins. 

Proving It Can Be Done Differently 

Good science and ethical science aren’t actually opposites. In the 1970s, Philip Zimbardo carried out the Stanford Prison Experiment, in which college students took up positions of either “guards” or “prisoners” in a simulated prison setting. The experiment was made notorious by the fact that Zimbardo let the experiment go on for several days before stopping it, resulting in guards turning violent and the prisoners suffering real pain. Decades later, two scholars, Stephen Reicher and Alex Haslam, repeated a similar experiment known as the BBC Prison Study. This time they did it correctly.

They kept a close eye on participants the entire time, and clearly set out the rules on what the “guards” could and could not do. The freedom to depart at any time was granted to the participants. Reicher and Haslam (2006) argue that the study yielded more accurate and insightful results than the original in terms of how individuals react to authority and group identity. What this shows is simple: researchers don’t have to choose between doing good science and treating people well. You can build a study that does both from the very start. 

The Debate Didn’t Stay in the Past 

It would be convenient to think of all this as history, something the field has already fixed. In 2014, Facebook proved otherwise. Researchers there secretly changed the news feeds of 700,000 users for a week. Some people saw positive posts while others saw more negative ones. The goal was to see if emotions could spread through a network the same way they spread in real life (Kramer, Guillory, & Hancock, 2014).

The participants did not know about their involvement in any experiments. Facebook’s justification was that the users had already given consent to participate in the study by accepting the terms and conditions of the website years ago. The backlash was quick, and the journal that published the experiment, PNAS, issued a rare statement expressing concern over the manner in which consent was acquired. It served to remind us that the issues brought up by Milgram and Watson were never put to rest; they merely shifted from the laboratory experiments conducted in universities to everyday consumer goods. 

Read More: 10 Great Experiments in the field of Psychology

Conclusion 

In the history of experimental psychology, there has been a real conflict between two issues that are equally important to the field: understanding the mind and safeguarding the humans and animals who enable that understanding. The field didn’t resolve that tension by accident.

It came through an ethical reckoning brought on by extreme shock experiments, a study of maternal deprivation that was unsettling even to the scientist who conducted it, and years of debate among researchers about where the line should be drawn. What remains today is a set of guidelines for good research practice, guidelines that only exist because something went wrong first. That’s not a flaw in psychology’s story. It’s the reason the field can still be trusted to keep asking hard questions. 

References +

• Baumrind, D. (1964). Some thoughts on ethics of research: After reading Milgram’s “Behavioural study of obedience.” American Psychologist, 19(6), 421-423. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0040128
• Harlow, H. F. (1958). The nature of love. American Psychologist, 13(12), 673-685. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0047884 
• Kramer, A. D. I., Guillory, J. E., & Hancock, J. T. (2014). Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(24), 8788-8790. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1320040111 
• Milgram, S. (1963). Behavioural study of obedience. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 67(4), 371-378. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0040525 
• National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioural Research. (1979). The Belmont Report: Ethical principles and guidelines for the protection of human subjects of research. U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. https://www.hhs.gov/ohrp/regulations-and-policy/belmont-report/index.html 
• Nicks, S. D., Korn, J. H., & Mainieri, T. (1997). The rise and fall of deception in social psychology and personality research, 1921 to 1994. Ethics & Behaviour, 7(1), 69-77. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327019eb0701_6 
• Reicher, S. D., & Haslam, S. A. (2006). Rethinking the psychology of tyranny: The BBC prison study. British Journal of Social Psychology, 45(1), 1-40. https://doi.org/10.1348/014466605X48998
• Russell, W. M. S., & Burch, R. L. (1959). The principles of humane experimental technique. Methuen & Co.
• Watson, J. B., & Rayner, R. (1920). Conditioned emotional reactions. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 3(1), 1-14. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0069608