Top Ten Most Unethical Psychological Experiments [Blog #2]

We talked about ethical ways to conduct an experiment, so I decided to look for a few examples of unethical experiments. On the cite linked below, I found ten severely unethical psychological experiments. All experiments on this list are relatively well-known. For example, the 'Monster Study' (where some orphans participate in positive speech therapy and others are in negative therapy) and the facial expression experiment conducted by Carney Landis (where participants had to view pornography, smell ammonia, put their hand in a bucket of frogs, and even behead a rat; if they chose not to behead the rat, Landis did it for them).

David Reimer

The number one most unethical experiment in my opinion was the one by John Money. A boy was circumcised at eight months, but the doctor used the wrong tool and burned his penis off. His parents went to John Money for guidance. John saw this as a good opportunity to prove his theory that environment, and not biology, determined gender identity (but did not tell the parents about this theory). So he suggested that their child have gender reassignment surgery.
His name was changed to Brenda and his parents decided not to tell him about the surgery. As she got older, Brenda acted like a stereotypical boy, but had a lot of questions because she didn't understand why she thought and acted the way she did. On top of these frustrations, her brother was severely depressed, her mother suicidal, and her father an alcoholic.

When Brenda was 14, her parents told her about the surgery, and she decided to go through gender reassignment again and go back to being David. John Money observed David from the first surgery and after the second, but was insistent that his theory was right and David had no psychological damage from this experiment. David committed suicide in 2004 (when he was 38). Many say this is because of the sugeries and serious struggle with gender identity. In other words, if John Money would not have deceived David's parents or would have helped David with his gender identity rather than just insisting that his theory was correct, David would probably never have died.

http://listverse.com/2008/09/07/top-10-unethical-psychological-experiments/

Also on Youtube is a TLC documentary where David tells his side of the story. I'm pretty sure there are four parts (I watched them all), and they're really interesting. Here is a link to the first part:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GhbVFjIaN0