Ethical Issues

    Many psychology experiments are faced with the problem of ethics.  Many experiments are ethical and positive, but there are others that are known for their immoral tests and negative consequences.
    In an experiment known as the Monster Study done in Davenport, Iowa in 1939, Wendell Johnson from the University of Iowa conducted a stuttering test on 22 orphan children.  Johnson picked one of his graduate students, Mary Tudor, to perform the test while he watched and supervised her work.  In this experiment, Johnson placed the children in control groups and Tudor praised one group of children on their speech.  She gave them positive reinforcement and approval of fluency in their speech.  However, Tudor gave the other group of orphans negative speech therapy, criticizing every flaw they had in speech and also telling them that they were stutterers.  Many of the children who could speak normally but received negative therapy suffered from negative psychological outcomes, and some even acquired speech problems that they kept for the rest of their lives.  Many of Johnson's associates were appalled by Johnson's experiment and the fact that he would use orphans solely to prove a point.  Even so, the experiment was kept hidden for fear of ruining Johnson's reputation.  The University of Iowa later publicly apologized in 2001 for the Monster Study.
    The Monster Study was an extremely unethical experiment for different reasons.  Foremost, because Johnson lied and told children that they had speech problems that they didn't really have, he caused many of them to have a lifelong problem with their speech.  In other words, none of the orphans would've gotten a speech problem if Johnson didn't try to forcibly induce the problem on them.  Secondly, there was no possible way for Johnson to get any permission from the children to perform the experiment with them knowing it.  The children were likely too young to give consent anyway, but it was a very immoral decision to bring about a negative consequence to the orphans, or any children at all.
    The Monster Study experiment might not have been considered unethical by the standards in 1939, but by today's standards, it is incredibly immoral.  I think that the test was horrible, especially for the children who had to deal with a speech complication for the rest of his or her life.  If it weren't for Johnson's experiment that virtually pushed a speech problem on a child, many of the complications wouldn't have existed for the orphans.  Furthermore, Johnson only performed this experiment to prove a theory, ruining the speech of innocent children in the process.  There would never be a good reason to test an experiment like this one, but Johnson virtually hurt many people's lives just to see what would happen if he used negative speech therapy compared to positive speech therapy.  Unethical experiments are bad for every reason, and should be stopped.  Moral and ethical experiments are good when they are used to prove something positive and to help increase the good things in everyday life.


Sources:
Top 10 Unethical Psychological Experiments