Psycho-oligy….. Definitely

Woah!!!! Today was pretty intense. In my Psychology class we disscussed two different experiments and the ethical problems they did or didn’t have in them. The first invovled 6 subjects. 5 of them were working for the researcher and one was the actual subject. In the experiment the group was asked to identify which 2 sets of lines were indentical in length. One of the choices was clearly right and the other choices were way off base. However after a few rounds of correct answers the group of five would answer a completly wrong answer and the test was to see if the six person would vote the correct answer and stand up against the group or be sucumbed to peer pressure and vote for wrong answer just because everyone else did. The first few particpants stood up against the group but round after round of continual pressure to give in they finaly gave in and started to vote wrong answers. Ironically one of the participants was interviewed before hand and he said that he considered himself to be a non conformist. However after only the second round of wrong answers he started voting with the group on clearly wrong answers. that however was not even the tip of the iceberg. In the second expiriment a subject was brought in and told he was going to administer a memory test to another subject who happened to have a heart condition. The subject was introduced to the one he was going to administer the test to. he was then told that if the test taker were to get a wrong answer he was to flip a switch and adminster a tiny shock right to the mans wrist. It was tiny at first but there were more switches that controlled higher shock values that could even kill him. What the subject did not know was that the machine was fake and he was not actually doing anything. The fact was that he thought he was doing it and he continued to do it in his case though he quit and refused to any further damage, but not before supposedily shoking a man witha heart condition 23 times. other subjects that administered the fake test actually took the test to its fatal end and they actually thought they killed the person that took the test. the expiriement was to see if the person would act against his conscince and reason just to do what he was told to do. Tragically some did. Our teacher did a quick poll of the class. He said if you were in this situation how many of you would go all the way. No one raised thier hands. then he said how many of you would quit? Almost everyone raised thier hands. He then said 95% of everybody would say they would do the right thing outside of the situation but when the rubber meets the road at least two thirds of the subjects actually killed the person they were testing hypothetically. That raises an important question if you actually think about it what would you do? This is a clip of the two expirements