Course Overview

Brace yourself for some shocking psychological studies—not all of them ethical—that shape what we know of human behavior. Overview Course No. 10000.

We live in a time of amazing new technologies—and an unparalleled level of surveillance. Virtually every aspect of human behavior is tracked millions of times a day through the technology that we all, often without giving it a thought, use every day. The collected data has the potential of providing vital insight into the human experience, but can the scientific community explore the psychosocial experience of humanity without making victims of us all?

Professor Thad Polk, of the University of Michigan, invites you to join him for Shocking Psychological Studies and the Lessons They Teach, a six-lecture course exploring a range of shocking psychological experiments from the past that have nonetheless contributed significant insight into the human condition. Dr. Polk elucidates the contemporary ethical principles now in place to protect both subjects and science, but admits that with every new technological and scientific advancement, there also comes a new set of ethical conundrums for researchers to grapple with.

Psychological research today adheres to the Belmont Report’s principles, a set of three ethical principles established in 1976 following the aftermath of research studies that critically failed to protect the rights of the research subjects. Through a look at a series of influential, but flawed, studies, ranging from syphilis to stuttering to psychoactive drugs, Professor Polk explores these ethical principles and how they, in retrospect, might have been applied. As he concludes Shocking Psychological Studies and the Lessons They Teach, Professor Polk acknowledges that as science still grapples with the ethics of studying human subjects, past mistakes have helped us to create a safer and more enlightened field of scientific research, adhering to ethical research principles.

Course Lectures

01: Lessons from Tuskegee and Facebook

Today, research with human subjects is guided by a set of three ethical principles of the 1976 Belmont Report, but that was not always the case. In the first lecture of this six-lecture course, Professor Polk explores the famous Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment and how its ethical violations ultimately led to the development of the Belmont Report and the ethical principles it identified.

Duration: 32 min

02: Pushing Good People to Do Bad Things

Why do good people sometimes do bad things? Professor Polk encourages us to grapple with two of the most famous psychological studies on ethics and human psychology: Milgram’s Obedience Study and the Stanford Prison Experiment. Each study offers invaluable lessons about human behavior. Look at the ways that these explorations into the causes of unethical human behavior were, themselves, astonishingly unethical.

Duration: 31 min

03: Experimenting on Vulnerable Children

Arguably, the most vulnerable people in any population are the children. Childhood development studies can also provide invaluable insights into human psychology. Here, explore two studies where children were the focus: Neubauer’s twin study and Johnson’s “Monster Study” of testing the origins of stuttering. Discover why, according to the Belmont Report’s principles, these “subjects” might be identified more accurately as “victims.”

Duration: 29 min

04: Testing Psychochemical Weapons

Government organizations such as the CIA and military are charged with protecting the public, but in these shocking experiments, vulnerable low-ranking soldiers and psychiatric patients were unwittingly subjected to psychoactive drugs. Uncover the ways in which these observational studies lacked both rigorous scientific design and adherence to any of the Belmont Report’s principles. In fact, the results of these studies often led to hallucinations, paranoia, rage, and even death.

Duration: 29 min

05: Assigning Gender and Spying on Sex

Studies of sex and sexual identity present unique ethical challenges for privacy and consent. In the next two studies, Professor Polk takes you into the private world of sexual identity and impulse. The Tearoom Trade Study considers the public identities and private choices of anonymous public sex participants. The John/Joan case explores the sexual identity of a biologically male child raised as a female.

Duration: 30 min

06: Current and Future Ethical Challenges

Science still grapples with the ethics of studying human subjects. Increasingly, data is available about every aspect of human life through our uninhibited interactions with technology. The study of such data sets is affordable, widely generalizable, and easily accessible. But is it ethical? You’ll also discover that the conclusions presented in scientific journals, even under our more rigorous ethical guidelines, may not be as reliable as we thought.

Duration: 32 min