controversial research studies

• 20 Most Unethical Experiments in Psychology

Humanity often pays a high price for progress and understanding — at least, that seems to be the case in many famous psychological experiments. Human experimentation is a very interesting topic in the world of human psychology. While some famous experiments in psychology have left test subjects temporarily distressed, others have left their participants with life-long psychological issues . In either case, it’s easy to ask the question: “What’s ethical when it comes to science?” Then there are the experiments that involve children, animals, and test subjects who are unaware they’re being experimented on. How far is too far, if the result means a better understanding of the human mind and behavior ? We think we’ve found 20 answers to that question with our list of the most unethical experiments in psychology .

Emma Eckstein

Electroshock Therapy on Children

Operation Midnight Climax

The Monster Study

Project MKUltra

The Aversion Project

Unnecessary Sexual Reassignment

Stanford Prison Experiment

Milgram Experiment

The Monkey Drug Trials

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Facial expressions experiment.

Little Albert

Bobo Doll Experiment

The Pit of Despair

The Bystander Effect

Learned Helplessness Experiment

Racism Among Elementary School Students

UCLA Schizophrenia Experiments

The Good Samaritan Experiment

Robbers Cave Experiment

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Controversial and Unethical Psychology Experiments

Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

Shereen Lehman, MS, is a healthcare journalist and fact checker. She has co-authored two books for the popular Dummies Series (as Shereen Jegtvig).

There have been a number of famous psychology experiments that are considered controversial, inhumane, unethical, and even downright cruel—here are five examples. Thanks to ethical codes and institutional review boards, most of these experiments could never be performed today.

At a Glance

Some of the most controversial and unethical experiments in psychology include Harlow's monkey experiments, Milgram's obedience experiments, Zimbardo's prison experiment, Watson's Little Albert experiment, and Seligman's learned helplessness experiment.

These and other controversial experiments led to the formation of rules and guidelines for performing ethical and humane research studies.

Harlow's Pit of Despair

Psychologist Harry Harlow performed a series of experiments in the 1960s designed to explore the powerful effects that love and attachment have on normal development. In these experiments, Harlow isolated young rhesus monkeys, depriving them of their mothers and keeping them from interacting with other monkeys.

The experiments were often shockingly cruel, and the results were just as devastating.

The Experiment

The infant monkeys in some experiments were separated from their real mothers and then raised by "wire" mothers. One of the surrogate mothers was made purely of wire.

While it provided food, it offered no softness or comfort. The other surrogate mother was made of wire and cloth, offering some degree of comfort to the infant monkeys.

Harlow found that while the monkeys would go to the wire mother for nourishment, they preferred the soft, cloth mother for comfort.

Some of Harlow's experiments involved isolating the young monkey in what he termed a "pit of despair." This was essentially an isolation chamber. Young monkeys were placed in the isolation chambers for as long as 10 weeks.

Other monkeys were isolated for as long as a year. Within just a few days, the infant monkeys would begin huddling in the corner of the chamber, remaining motionless.

The Results

Harlow's distressing research resulted in monkeys with severe emotional and social disturbances. They lacked social skills and were unable to play with other monkeys.

They were also incapable of normal sexual behavior, so Harlow devised yet another horrifying device, which he referred to as a "rape rack." The isolated monkeys were tied down in a mating position to be bred.

Not surprisingly, the isolated monkeys also ended up being incapable of taking care of their offspring, neglecting and abusing their young.

Harlow's experiments were finally halted in 1985 when the American Psychological Association passed rules regarding treating people and animals in research.

Milgram's Shocking Obedience Experiments

Isabelle Adam/Flickr/CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

If someone told you to deliver a painful, possibly fatal shock to another human being, would you do it? The vast majority of us would say that we absolutely would never do such a thing, but one controversial psychology experiment challenged this basic assumption.

Social psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted a series of experiments to explore the nature of obedience . Milgram's premise was that people would often go to great, sometimes dangerous, or even immoral, lengths to obey an authority figure.

The Experiments

In Milgram's experiment, subjects were ordered to deliver increasingly strong electrical shocks to another person. While the person in question was simply an actor who was pretending, the subjects themselves fully believed that the other person was actually being shocked.

The voltage levels started out at 30 volts and increased in 15-volt increments up to a maximum of 450 volts. The switches were also labeled with phrases including "slight shock," "medium shock," and "danger: severe shock." The maximum shock level was simply labeled with an ominous "XXX."​

The results of the experiment were nothing short of astonishing. Many participants were willing to deliver the maximum level of shock, even when the person pretending to be shocked was begging to be released or complaining of a heart condition.

Milgram's experiment revealed stunning information about the lengths that people are willing to go in order to obey, but it also caused considerable distress for the participants involved.

Zimbardo's Simulated Prison Experiment

 Darrin Klimek / Getty Images

Psychologist Philip Zimbardo went to high school with Stanley Milgram and had an interest in how situational variables contribute to social behavior.

In his famous and controversial experiment, he set up a mock prison in the basement of the psychology department at Stanford University. Participants were then randomly assigned to be either prisoners or guards. Zimbardo himself served as the prison warden.

The researchers attempted to make a realistic situation, even "arresting" the prisoners and bringing them into the mock prison. Prisoners were placed in uniforms, while the guards were told that they needed to maintain control of the prison without resorting to force or violence.

When the prisoners began to ignore orders, the guards began to utilize tactics that included humiliation and solitary confinement to punish and control the prisoners.

While the experiment was originally scheduled to last two full weeks it had to be halted after just six days. Why? Because the prison guards had started abusing their authority and were treating the prisoners cruelly. The prisoners, on the other hand, started to display signs of anxiety and emotional distress.

It wasn't until a graduate student (and Zimbardo's future wife) Christina Maslach visited the mock prison that it became clear that the situation was out of control and had gone too far. Maslach was appalled at what was going on and voiced her distress. Zimbardo then decided to call off the experiment.

Zimbardo later suggested that "although we ended the study a week earlier than planned, we did not end it soon enough."

Watson and Rayner's Little Albert Experiment

If you have ever taken an Introduction to Psychology class, then you are probably at least a little familiar with Little Albert.

Behaviorist John Watson  and his assistant Rosalie Rayner conditioned a boy to fear a white rat, and this fear even generalized to other white objects including stuffed toys and Watson's own beard.

Obviously, this type of experiment is considered very controversial today. Frightening an infant and purposely conditioning the child to be afraid is clearly unethical.

As the story goes, the boy and his mother moved away before Watson and Rayner could decondition the child, so many people have wondered if there might be a man out there with a mysterious phobia of furry white objects.

Controversy

Some researchers have suggested that the boy at the center of the study was actually a cognitively impaired boy who ended up dying of hydrocephalus when he was just six years old. If this is true, it makes Watson's study even more disturbing and controversial.

However, more recent evidence suggests that the real Little Albert was actually a boy named William Albert Barger.

Seligman's Look Into Learned Helplessness

During the late 1960s, psychologists Martin Seligman and Steven F. Maier conducted experiments that involved conditioning dogs to expect an electrical shock after hearing a tone. Seligman and Maier observed some unexpected results.

When initially placed in a shuttle box in which one side was electrified, the dogs would quickly jump over a low barrier to escape the shocks. Next, the dogs were strapped into a harness where the shocks were unavoidable.

After being conditioned to expect a shock that they could not escape, the dogs were once again placed in the shuttlebox. Instead of jumping over the low barrier to escape, the dogs made no efforts to escape the box.

Instead, they simply lay down, whined and whimpered. Since they had previously learned that no escape was possible, they made no effort to change their circumstances. The researchers called this behavior learned helplessness .

Seligman's work is considered controversial because of the mistreating the animals involved in the study.

Impact of Unethical Experiments in Psychology

Many of the psychology experiments performed in the past simply would not be possible today, thanks to ethical guidelines that direct how studies are performed and how participants are treated. While these controversial experiments are often disturbing, we can still learn some important things about human and animal behavior from their results.

Perhaps most importantly, some of these controversial experiments led directly to the formation of rules and guidelines for performing psychology studies.

Blum, Deborah.  Love at Goon Park: Harry Harlow and the science of affection . New York: Basic Books; 2011.

Sperry L.  Mental Health and Mental Disorders: an Encyclopedia of Conditions, Treatments, and Well-Being . Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood, an imprint of ABC-CLIO, LLC; 2016.

Marcus S. Obedience to Authority An Experimental View. By Stanley Milgram. illustrated . New York: Harper &. The New York Times. 

Le Texier T. Debunking the Stanford Prison Experiment .  Am Psychol . 2019;74(7):823‐839. doi:10.1037/amp0000401

Fridlund AJ, Beck HP, Goldie WD, Irons G.  Little Albert: A neurologically impaired child .  Hist Psychol.  2012;15(4):302-27. doi:10.1037/a0026720

Powell RA, Digdon N, Harris B, Smithson C. Correcting the record on Watson, Rayner, and Little Albert: Albert Barger as "psychology's lost boy" .  Am Psychol . 2014;69(6):600‐611. doi:10.1037/a0036854

Seligman ME. Learned helplessness .  Annu Rev Med . 1972;23:407‐412. doi:10.1146/annurev.me.23.020172.002203

By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

The Stanford Prison Experiment was massively influential. We just learned it was a fraud.

The most famous psychological studies are often wrong, fraudulent, or outdated. Textbooks need to catch up. 

by Brian Resnick

The Stanford Prison Experiment, one of the most famous and compelling psychological studies of all time, told us a tantalizingly simple story about human nature.

The study took paid participants and assigned them to be “inmates” or “guards” in a mock prison at Stanford University. Soon after the experiment began, the “guards” began mistreating the “prisoners,” implying evil is brought out by circumstance. The authors, in their conclusions, suggested innocent people, thrown into a situation where they have power over others, will begin to abuse that power. And people who are put into a situation where they are powerless will be driven to submission, even madness.

The Stanford Prison Experiment has been included in many, many introductory psychology textbooks and is often cited uncritically . It’s the subject of movies, documentaries, books, television shows, and congressional testimony .

But its findings were wrong. Very wrong. And not just due to its questionable ethics or lack of concrete data — but because of deceit.

• Philip Zimbardo defends the Stanford Prison Experiment, his most famous work 

A new exposé published by Medium based on previously unpublished recordings of Philip Zimbardo, the Stanford psychologist who ran the study, and interviews with his participants, offers convincing evidence that the guards in the experiment were coached to be cruel. It also shows that the experiment’s most memorable moment — of a prisoner descending into a screaming fit, proclaiming, “I’m burning up inside!” — was the result of the prisoner acting. “I took it as a kind of an improv exercise,” one of the guards told reporter Ben Blum . “I believed that I was doing what the researchers wanted me to do.”

The findings have long been subject to scrutiny — many think of them as more of a dramatic demonstration , a sort-of academic reality show, than a serious bit of science. But these new revelations incited an immediate response. “We must stop celebrating this work,” personality psychologist Simine Vazire tweeted , in response to the article . “It’s anti-scientific. Get it out of textbooks.” Many other psychologists have expressed similar sentiments.

( Update : Since this article published, the journal American Psychologist has published a thorough debunking of the Stanford Prison Experiment that goes beyond what Blum found in his piece. There’s even more evidence that the “guards” knew the results that Zimbardo wanted to produce, and were trained to meet his goals. It also provides evidence that the conclusions of the experiment were predetermined.)

Many of the classic show-stopping experiments in psychology have lately turned out to be wrong, fraudulent, or outdated. And in recent years, social scientists have begun to reckon with the truth that their old work needs a redo, the “ replication crisis .” But there’s been a lag — in the popular consciousness and in how psychology is taught by teachers and textbooks. It’s time to catch up.

Many classic findings in psychology have been reevaluated recently

The Zimbardo prison experiment is not the only classic study that has been recently scrutinized, reevaluated, or outright exposed as a fraud. Recently, science journalist Gina Perry found that the infamous “Robbers Cave“ experiment in the 1950s — in which young boys at summer camp were essentially manipulated into joining warring factions — was a do-over from a failed previous version of an experiment, which the scientists never mentioned in an academic paper. That’s a glaring omission. It’s wrong to throw out data that refutes your hypothesis and only publicize data that supports it.

Perry has also revealed inconsistencies in another major early work in psychology: the Milgram electroshock test, in which participants were told by an authority figure to deliver seemingly lethal doses of electricity to an unseen hapless soul. Her investigations show some evidence of researchers going off the study script and possibly coercing participants to deliver the desired results. (Somewhat ironically, the new revelations about the prison experiment also show the power an authority figure — in this case Zimbardo himself and his “warden” — has in manipulating others to be cruel.)

• The Stanford Prison Experiment is based on lies. Hear them for yourself.

Other studies have been reevaluated for more honest, methodological snafus. Recently, I wrote about the “marshmallow test,” a series of studies from the early ’90s that suggested the ability to delay gratification at a young age is correlated with success later in life . New research finds that if the original marshmallow test authors had a larger sample size, and greater research controls, their results would not have been the showstoppers they were in the ’90s. I can list so many more textbook psychology findings that have either not replicated, or are currently in the midst of a serious reevaluation.

• Social priming: People who read “old”-sounding words (like “nursing home”) were more likely to walk slowly — showing how our brains can be subtly “primed” with thoughts and actions.
• The facial feedback hypothesis: Merely activating muscles around the mouth caused people to become happier — demonstrating how our bodies tell our brains what emotions to feel.
• Stereotype threat: Minorities and maligned social groups don’t perform as well on tests due to anxieties about becoming a stereotype themselves.
• Ego depletion: The idea that willpower is a finite mental resource.

Alas, the past few years have brought about a reckoning for these ideas and social psychology as a whole.

Many psychological theories have been debunked or diminished in rigorous replication attempts. Psychologists are now realizing it's  more likely  that false positives will make it through to publication than inconclusive results. And they’ve realized that experimental methods commonly used just a few years ago aren’t rigorous enough. For instance, it used to be commonplace for scientists to publish experiments that sampled about 50 undergraduate students. Today, scientists realize this is a recipe for false positives , and strive for sample sizes in the hundreds and ideally from a more representative subject pool.

Nevertheless, in so many of these cases, scientists have moved on and corrected errors, and are still doing well-intentioned work to understand the heart of humanity. For instance, work on one of psychology’s oldest fixations — dehumanization, the ability to see another as less than human — continues with methodological rigor, helping us understand the modern-day maltreatment of Muslims and immigrants in America.

In some cases, time has shown that flawed original experiments offer worthwhile reexamination. The original Milgram experiment was flawed. But at least its study design — which brings in participants to administer shocks (not actually carried out) to punish others for failing at a memory test — is basically repeatable today with some ethical tweaks.

And it seems like Milgram’s conclusions may hold up: In a recent study, many people found demands from an authority figure to be a compelling reason to shock another. However, it’s possible, due to something known as the file-drawer effect, that failed replications of the Milgram experiment have not been published. Replication attempts at the Stanford prison study, on the other hand, have been a mess .

In science, too often, the first demonstration of an idea becomes the lasting one — in both pop culture and academia. But this isn’t how science is supposed to work at all! 

Science is a frustrating, iterative process. When we communicate it, we need to get beyond the idea that a single, stunning study ought to last the test of time. Scientists know this as well, but their institutions have often discouraged them from replicating old work, instead of the pursuit of new and exciting, attention-grabbing studies. (Journalists are part of the problem too , imbuing small, insignificant studies with more importance and meaning than they’re due.)

Thankfully, there are researchers thinking very hard, and very earnestly, on trying to make psychology a more replicable, robust science. There’s even a whole Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science devoted to these issues.

Follow-up results tend to be less dramatic than original findings , but they are more useful in helping discover the truth. And it’s not that the Stanford Prison Experiment has no place in a classroom. It’s interesting as history. Psychologists like Zimbardo and Milgram were highly influenced by World War II. Their experiments were, in part, an attempt to figure out why ordinary people would fall for Nazism. That’s an important question, one that set the agenda for a huge amount of research in psychological science, and is still echoed in papers today.

Textbooks need to catch up

Psychology has changed tremendously over the past few years. Many studies used to teach the next generation of psychologists have been intensely scrutinized, and found to be in error. But troublingly, the textbooks have not been updated accordingly .

That’s the conclusion of a 2016 study in Current Psychology. “ By and large,” the study explains (emphasis mine):

introductory textbooks have difficulty accurately portraying controversial topics with care or, in some cases, simply avoid covering them at all. ... readers of introductory textbooks may be unintentionally misinformed on these topics.

The study authors — from Texas A&M and Stetson universities — gathered a stack of 24 popular introductory psych textbooks and began looking for coverage of 12 contested ideas or myths in psychology.

The ideas — like stereotype threat, the Mozart effect , and whether there’s a “narcissism epidemic” among millennials — have not necessarily been disproven. Nevertheless, there are credible and noteworthy studies that cast doubt on them. The list of ideas also included some urban legends — like the one about the brain only using 10 percent of its potential at any given time, and a debunked story about how bystanders refused to help a woman named Kitty Genovese while she was being murdered.

The researchers then rated the texts on how they handled these contested ideas. The results found a troubling amount of “biased” coverage on many of the topic areas.

But why wouldn’t these textbooks include more doubt? Replication, after all, is a cornerstone of any science.

One idea is that textbooks, in the pursuit of covering a wide range of topics, aren’t meant to be authoritative on these individual controversies. But something else might be going on. The study authors suggest these textbook authors are trying to “oversell” psychology as a discipline, to get more undergraduates to study it full time. (I have to admit that it might have worked on me back when I was an undeclared undergraduate.)

There are some caveats to mention with the study: One is that the 12 topics the authors chose to scrutinize are completely arbitrary. “And many other potential issues were left out of our analysis,” they note. Also, the textbooks included were printed in the spring of 2012; it’s possible they have been updated since then.

Recently, I asked on Twitter how intro psychology professors deal with inconsistencies in their textbooks. Their answers were simple. Some say they decided to get rid of textbooks (which save students money) and focus on teaching individual articles. Others have another solution that’s just as simple: “You point out the wrong, outdated, and less-than-replicable sections,” Daniël Lakens , a professor at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, said. He offered a useful example of one of the slides he uses in class.

Anecdotally, Illinois State University professor Joe Hilgard said he thinks his students appreciate “the ‘cutting-edge’ feeling from knowing something that the textbook didn’t.” (Also, who really, earnestly reads the textbook in an introductory college course?)

And it seems this type of teaching is catching on. A (not perfectly representative) recent survey of 262 psychology professors found more than half said replication issues impacted their teaching . On the other hand, 40 percent said they hadn’t. So whether students are exposed to the recent reckoning is all up to the teachers they have.

If it’s true that textbooks and teachers are still neglecting to cover replication issues, then I’d argue they are actually underselling the science. To teach the “replication crisis” is to teach students that science strives to be self-correcting. It would instill in them the value that science ought to be reproducible.

Understanding human behavior is a hard problem. Finding out the answers shouldn’t be easy. If anything, that should give students more motivation to become the generation of scientists who get it right.

“Textbooks may be missing an opportunity for myth busting,” the Current Psychology study’s authors write. That’s, ideally, what young scientist ought to learn: how to bust myths and find the truth.

Further reading: Psychology’s “replication crisis”

• The replication crisis, explained. Psychology is currently undergoing a painful period of introspection. It will emerge stronger than before.
• The “marshmallow test” said patience was a key to success. A new replication tells us s’more.
• The 7 biggest problems facing science, according to 270 scientists
• What a nerdy debate about p-values shows about science — and how to fix it
• Science is often flawed. It’s time we embraced that.

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10 Psychological Experiments That Could Never Happen Today

By meredith danko | sep 20, 2013.

Nowadays, the American Psychological Association has a Code of Conduct in place when it comes to ethics in psychological experiments. Experimenters must adhere to various rules pertaining to everything from confidentiality to consent to overall beneficence. Review boards are in place to enforce these ethics. But the standards were not always so strict, which is how some of the most famous studies in psychology came about. 

1. The Little Albert Experiment

At Johns Hopkins University in 1920, John B. Watson conducted a study of classical conditioning, a phenomenon that pairs a conditioned stimulus with an unconditioned stimulus until they produce the same result. This type of conditioning can create a response in a person or animal towards an object or sound that was previously neutral. Classical conditioning is commonly associated with Ivan Pavlov, who rang a bell every time he fed his dog until the mere sound of the bell caused his dog to salivate.

Watson tested classical conditioning on a 9-month-old baby he called Albert B. The young boy started the experiment loving animals, particularly a white rat. Watson started pairing the presence of the rat with the loud sound of a hammer hitting metal. Albert began to develop a fear of the white rat as well as most animals and furry objects. The experiment is considered particularly unethical today because Albert was never desensitized to the phobias that Watson produced in him. (The child died of an unrelated illness at age 6, so doctors were unable to determine if his phobias would have lasted into adulthood.)

2. Asch Conformity Experiments

Solomon Asch tested conformity at Swarthmore College in 1951 by putting a participant in a group of people whose task was to match line lengths. Each individual was expected to announce which of three lines was the closest in length to a reference line. But the participant was placed in a group of actors, who were all told to give the correct answer twice then switch to each saying the same incorrect answer. Asch wanted to see whether the participant would conform and start to give the wrong answer as well, knowing that he would otherwise be a single outlier.

Thirty-seven of the 50 participants agreed with the incorrect group despite physical evidence to the contrary. Asch used deception in his experiment without getting informed consent from his participants, so his study could not be replicated today.

3. The Bystander Effect

Some psychological experiments that were designed to test the bystander effect are considered unethical by today’s standards. In 1968, John Darley and Bibb Latané developed an interest in crime witnesses who did not take action. They were particularly intrigued by the murder of Kitty Genovese , a young woman whose murder was witnessed by many, but still not prevented.

The pair conducted a study at Columbia University in which they would give a participant a survey and leave him alone in a room to fill out the paper. Harmless smoke would start to seep into the room after a short amount of time. The study showed that the solo participant was much faster to report the smoke than participants who had the exact same experience, but were in a group.

The studies became progressively unethical by putting participants at risk of psychological harm. Darley and Latané played a recording of an actor pretending to have a seizure in the headphones of a person, who believed he or she was listening to an actual medical emergency that was taking place down the hall. Again, participants were much quicker to react when they thought they were the sole person who could hear the seizure.

4. The Milgram Experiment

Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram hoped to further understand how so many people came to participate in the cruel acts of the Holocaust. He theorized that people are generally inclined to obey authority figures, posing the question , “Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?” In 1961, he began to conduct experiments of obedience.

Participants were under the impression that they were part of a study of memory . Each trial had a pair divided into “teacher” and “learner,” but one person was an actor, so only one was a true participant. The drawing was rigged so that the participant always took the role of “teacher.” The two were moved into separate rooms and the “teacher” was given instructions. He or she pressed a button to shock the “learner” each time an incorrect answer was provided. These shocks would increase in voltage each time. Eventually, the actor would start to complain followed by more and more desperate screaming. Milgram learned that the majority of participants followed orders to continue delivering shocks despite the clear discomfort of the “learner.”

Had the shocks existed and been at the voltage they were labeled, the majority would have actually killed the “learner” in the next room. Having this fact revealed to the participant after the study concluded would be a clear example of psychological harm.

5. Harlow’s Monkey Experiments

In the 1950s, Harry Harlow of the University of Wisconsin tested infant dependency using rhesus monkeys in his experiments rather than human babies. The monkey was removed from its actual mother which was replaced with two “mothers,” one made of cloth and one made of wire. The cloth “mother” served no purpose other than its comforting feel whereas the wire “mother” fed the monkey through a bottle. The monkey spent the majority of his day next to the cloth “mother” and only around one hour a day next to the wire “mother,” despite the association between the wire model and food.

Harlow also used intimidation to prove that the monkey found the cloth “mother” to be superior. He would scare the infants and watch as the monkey ran towards the cloth model. Harlow also conducted experiments which isolated monkeys from other monkeys in order to show that those who did not learn to be part of the group at a young age were unable to assimilate and mate when they got older. Harlow’s experiments ceased in 1985 due to APA rules against the mistreatment of animals as well as humans . However, Department of Psychiatry Chair Ned H. Kalin, M.D. of the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health has recently begun similar experiments that involve isolating infant monkeys and exposing them to frightening stimuli. He hopes to discover data on human anxiety, but is meeting with resistance from animal welfare organizations and the general public.

6. Learned Helplessness

The ethics of Martin Seligman’s experiments on learned helplessness would also be called into question today due to his mistreatment of animals. In 1965, Seligman and his team used dogs as subjects to test how one might perceive control. The group would place a dog on one side of a box that was divided in half by a low barrier. Then they would administer a shock, which was avoidable if the dog jumped over the barrier to the other half. Dogs quickly learned how to prevent themselves from being shocked.

Seligman’s group then harnessed a group of dogs and randomly administered shocks, which were completely unavoidable. The next day, these dogs were placed in the box with the barrier. Despite new circumstances that would have allowed them to escape the painful shocks, these dogs did not even try to jump over the barrier; they only cried and did not jump at all, demonstrating learned helplessness.

7. Robbers Cave Experiment

Muzafer Sherif conducted the Robbers Cave Experiment in the summer of 1954, testing group dynamics in the face of conflict. A group of preteen boys were brought to a summer camp, but they did not know that the counselors were actually psychological researchers. The boys were split into two groups, which were kept very separate. The groups only came into contact with each other when they were competing in sporting events or other activities.

The experimenters orchestrated increased tension between the two groups, particularly by keeping competitions close in points. Then, Sherif created problems, such as a water shortage, that would require both teams to unite and work together in order to achieve a goal. After a few of these, the groups became completely undivided and amicable.

Though the experiment seems simple and perhaps harmless, it would still be considered unethical today because Sherif used deception as the boys did not know they were participating in a psychological experiment. Sherif also did not have informed consent from participants.

8. The Monster Study

At the University of Iowa in 1939, Wendell Johnson and his team hoped to discover the cause of stuttering by attempting to turn orphans into stutterers. There were 22 young subjects, 12 of whom were non-stutterers. Half of the group experienced positive teaching whereas the other group dealt with negative reinforcement. The teachers continually told the latter group that they had stutters. No one in either group became stutterers at the end of the experiment, but those who received negative treatment did develop many of the self-esteem problems that stutterers often show. Perhaps Johnson’s interest in this phenomenon had to do with his own stutter as a child , but this study would never pass with a contemporary review board.

Johnson’s reputation as an unethical psychologist has not caused the University of Iowa to remove his name from its Speech and Hearing Clinic .

9. Blue Eyed versus Brown Eyed Students

Jane Elliott was not a psychologist, but she developed one of the most famously controversial exercises in 1968 by dividing students into a blue-eyed group and a brown-eyed group. Elliott was an elementary school teacher in Iowa, who was trying to give her students hands-on experience with discrimination the day after Martin Luther King Jr. was shot, but this exercise still has significance to psychology today. The famous exercise even transformed Elliott’s career into one centered around diversity training.

After dividing the class into groups, Elliott would cite phony scientific research claiming that one group was superior to the other. Throughout the day, the group would be treated as such. Elliott learned that it only took a day for the “superior” group to turn crueler and the “inferior” group to become more insecure. The blue eyed and brown eyed groups then switched so that all students endured the same prejudices.

Elliott’s exercise (which she repeated in 1969 and 1970) received plenty of public backlash, which is probably why it would not be replicated in a psychological experiment or classroom today. The main ethical concerns would be with deception and consent, though some of the original participants still regard the experiment as life-changing .

10. The Stanford Prison Experiment

In 1971, Philip Zimbardo of Stanford University conducted his famous prison experiment, which aimed to examine group behavior and the importance of roles. Zimbardo and his team picked a group of 24 male college students who were considered “healthy,” both physically and psychologically. The men had signed up to participate in a “ psychological study of prison life ,” which would pay them $15 per day. Half were randomly assigned to be prisoners and the other half were assigned to be prison guards. The experiment played out in the basement of the Stanford psychology department where Zimbardo’s team had created a makeshift prison. The experimenters went to great lengths to create a realistic experience for the prisoners, including fake arrests at the participants’ homes.

The prisoners were given a fairly standard introduction to prison life, which included being deloused and assigned an embarrassing uniform. The guards were given vague instructions that they should never be violent with the prisoners, but needed to stay in control. The first day passed without incident, but the prisoners rebelled on the second day by barricading themselves in their cells and ignoring the guards. This behavior shocked the guards and presumably led to the psychological abuse that followed. The guards started separating “good” and “bad” prisoners, and doled out punishments including push ups, solitary confinement, and public humiliation to rebellious prisoners.

Zimbardo explained , “In only a few days, our guards became sadistic and our prisoners became depressed and showed signs of extreme stress.” Two prisoners dropped out of the experiment; one eventually became a psychologist and a consultant for prisons . The experiment was originally supposed to last for two weeks, but it ended early when Zimbardo’s future wife, psychologist Christina Maslach, visited the experiment on the fifth day and told him , “I think it’s terrible what you’re doing to those boys.”

Despite the unethical experiment, Zimbardo is still a working psychologist today. He was even honored by the American Psychological Association with a Gold Medal Award for Life Achievement in the Science of Psychology in 2012 .

How the Classics Changed Research Ethics

Some of history’s most controversial psychology studies helped drive extensive protections for human research participants. some say those reforms went too far..

• Behavioral Research
• Institutional Review Board (IRB)

Photo above: In 1971, APS Fellow Philip Zimbardo halted his classic prison simulation at Stanford after volunteer “guards” became abusive to the “prisoners,” famously leading one prisoner into a fit of sobbing. Photo credit:   PrisonExp.org

Nearly 60 years have passed since Stanley Milgram’s infamous “shock box” study sparked an international focus on ethics in psychological research. Countless historians and psychology instructors assert that Milgram’s experiments—along with studies like the Robbers Cave and Stanford prison experiments—could never occur today; ethics gatekeepers would swiftly bar such studies from proceeding, recognizing the potential harms to the participants. 

But the reforms that followed some of the 20th century’s most alarming biomedical and behavioral studies have overreached, many social and behavioral scientists complain. Studies that pose no peril to participants confront the same standards as experimental drug treatments or surgeries, they contend. The institutional review boards (IRBs) charged with protecting research participants fail to understand minimal risk, they say. Researchers complain they waste time addressing IRB concerns that have nothing to do with participant safety. 

Several factors contribute to this conflict, ethicists say. Researchers and IRBs operate in a climate of misunderstanding, confusing regulations, and a systemic lack of ethics training, said APS Fellow Celia Fisher, a Fordham University professor and research ethicist, in an interview with the Observer . 

“In my view, IRBs are trying to do their best and investigators are trying to do their best,” Fisher said. “It’s more that we really have to enhance communication and training on both sides.” 

‘Sins’ from the past  

Modern human-subjects protections date back to the 1947 Nuremberg Code, the response to Nazi medical experiments on concentration-camp internees. Those ethical principles, which no nation or organization has officially accepted as law or official ethics guidelines, emphasized that a study’s benefits should outweigh the risks and that human subjects should be fully informed about the research and participate voluntarily.  

See the 2014 Observer cover story by APS Fellow Carol A. Tavris, “ Teaching Contentious Classics ,” for more about these controversial studies and how to discuss them with students.

But the discovery of U.S.-government-sponsored research abuses, including the Tuskegee syphilis experiment on African American men and radiation experiments on humans, accelerated regulatory initiatives. The abuses investigators uncovered in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s—decades after the experiments had occurred—heightened policymakers’ concerns “about what else might still be going on,” George Mason University historian Zachary M. Schrag explained in an interview. These concerns generated restrictions not only on biomedical research but on social and behavioral studies that pose a minute risk of harm.  

“The sins of researchers from the 1940s led to new regulations in the 1990s, even though it was not at all clear that those kinds of activities were still going on in any way,” said Schrag, who chronicled the rise of IRBs in his book  Ethical Imperialism: Institutional Review Boards and the Social Sciences, 1965–2009.  

Accompanying the medical research scandals were controversial psychological studies that provided fodder for textbooks, historical tomes, and movies.  

• In the early 1950s, social psychologist Muzafer Sherif and his colleagues used a Boy Scout camp called Robbers Cave to study intergroup hostility. They randomly assigned preadolescent boys to one of two groups and concocted a series of competitive activities that quickly sparked conflict. They later set up a situation that compelled the boys to overcome their differences and work together. The study provided insights into prejudice and conflict resolution but generated criticism because the children weren’t told they were part of an experiment. 
• In 1961, Milgram began his studies on obedience to authority by directing participants to administer increasing levels of electric shock to another person (a confederate). To Milgram’s surprise, more than 65% of the participants delivered the full voltage of shock (which unbeknownst to them was fake), even though many were distressed about doing so. Milgram was widely criticized for the manipulation and deception he employed to carry out his experiments. 
• In 1971, APS Fellow Philip Zimbardo halted his classic prison simulation at Stanford after volunteer “guards” became abusive to the “prisoners,” famously leading one prisoner into a fit of sobbing. 

Western policymakers created a variety of safeguards in the wake of these psychological studies and other medical research. Among them was the Declaration of Helsinki, an ethical guide for human-subjects research developed by the Europe-based World Medical Association. The U.S. Congress passed the National Research Act of 1974, which created a commission to oversee participant protections in biomedical and behavioral research. And in the 90s, federal agencies adopted the Federal Policy for the Protection of Human Subjects (better known as the Common Rule), a code of ethics applied to any government-funded research. IRBs review studies through the lens of the Common Rule. After that, social science research, including studies in social psychology, anthropology, sociology, and political science, began facing widespread institutional review (Schrag, 2010).  

Sailing Through Review

Psychological scientists and other researchers who have served on institutional review boards provide these tips to help researchers get their studies reviewed swiftly.  

• Determine whether your study qualifies for minimal-risk exemption from review. Online tools are even in development to help researchers self-determine exempt status (Ben-Shahar, 2019; Schneider & McClutcheon, 2018). 
• If you’re not clear about your exemption, research the regulations to understand how they apply to your planned study. Show you’ve done your homework and have developed a protocol that is safe for your participants.  
• Consult with stakeholders. Look for advocacy groups and representatives from the population you plan to study. Ask them what they regard as fair compensation for participation. Get their feedback about your questionnaires and consent forms to make sure they’re understandable. These steps help you better show your IRB that the population you’re studying will find the protections adequate (Fisher, 2022). 
• Speak to IRB members or staff before submitting the protocol. Ask them their specific concerns about your study, and get guidance on writing up the protocol to address those concerns. Also ask them about expected turnaround times so you can plan your submission in time to meet any deadlines associated with your study (e.g., grant application deadlines).  

Ben-Shahar, O. (2019, December 2). Reforming the IRB in experimental fashion. The Regulatory Review . University of Pennsylvania. https://www.theregreview.org/2019/12/02/ben-shahar-reforming-irb-experimental-fashion/  

Fisher, C. B. (2022). Decoding the ethics code: A practical guide for psychologists (5 th ed.). Sage Publications. 

Schneider, S. L. & McCutcheon, J. A. (2018).  Proof of concept: Use of a wizard for self-determination of IRB exempt status . Federal Demonstration Partnership.   http://thefdp.org/default/assets/File/Documents/wizard_pilot_final_rpt.pdf  

Social scientists have long contended that the Common Rule was largely designed to protect participants in biomedical experiments—where scientists face the risk of inducing physical harm on subjects—but fits poorly with the other disciplines that fall within its reach.

“It’s not like the IRBs are trying to hinder research. It’s just that regulations continue to be written in the medical model without any specificity for social science research,” she explained. 

The Common Rule was updated in 2018 to ease the level of institutional review for low-risk research techniques (e.g., surveys, educational tests, interviews) that are frequent tools in social and behavioral studies. A special committee of the National Research Council (NRC), chaired by APS Past President Susan Fiske, recommended many of those modifications. Fisher was involved in the NRC committee, along with APS Fellows Richard Nisbett (University of Michigan) and Felice J. Levine (American Educational Research Association), and clinical psychologist Melissa Abraham of Harvard University. But the Common Rule reforms have yet to fully expedite much of the research, partly because the review boards remain confused about exempt categories, Fisher said.  

Interference or support?  

That regulatory confusion has generated sour sentiments toward IRBs. For decades, many social and behavioral scientists have complained that IRBs effectively impede scientific progress through arbitrary questions and objections. 

In a Perspectives on Psychological Science  paper they co-authored, APS Fellows Stephen Ceci of Cornell University and Maggie Bruck of Johns Hopkins University discussed an IRB rejection of their plans for a study with 6- to 10-year-old participants. Ceci and Bruck planned to show the children videos depicting a fictional police officer engaging in suggestive questioning of a child.  

“The IRB refused to approve the proposal because it was deemed unethical to show children public servants in a negative light,” they wrote, adding that the IRB held firm on its rejection despite government funders already having approved the study protocol (Ceci & Bruck, 2009).   

Other scientists have complained the IRBs exceed their Common Rule authority by requiring review of studies that are not government funded. In 2011, psychological scientist Jin Li sued Brown University in federal court for barring her from using data she collected in a privately funded study on educational testing. Brown’s IRB objected to the fact that she paid her participants different amounts of compensation based on need. (A year later, the university settled the case with Li.) 

In addition, IRBs often hover over minor aspects of a study that have no genuine relation to participant welfare, Ceci said in an email interview.  

“You can have IRB approval and later decide to make a nominal change to the protocol (a frequent one is to add a new assistant to the project or to increase the sample size),” he wrote. “It can take over a month to get approval. In the meantime, nothing can move forward and the students sit around waiting.” 

Not all researchers view institutional review as a roadblock. Psychological scientist Nathaniel Herr, who runs American University’s Interpersonal Emotion Lab and has served on the school’s IRB, says the board effectively collaborated with researchers to ensure the study designs were safe and that participant privacy was appropriately protected 

“If the IRB that I operated on saw an issue, they shared suggestions we could make to overcome that issue,” Herr said. “It was about making the research go forward. I never saw a project get shut down. It might have required a significant change, but it was often about confidentiality and it’s something that helps everybody feel better about the fact we weren’t abusing our privilege as researchers. I really believe it [the review process] makes the projects better.” 

Some universities—including Fordham University, Yale University, and The University of Chicago—even have social and behavioral research IRBs whose members include experts optimally equipped to judge the safety of a psychological study, Fisher noted. 

Training gaps  

Institutional review is beset by a lack of ethics training in research programs, Fisher believes. While students in professional psychology programs take accreditation-required ethics courses in their doctoral programs, psychologists in other fields have no such requirement. In these programs, ethics training is often limited to an online program that provides, at best, a perfunctory overview of federal regulations. 

“It gives you the fundamental information, but it has nothing to do with our real-world deliberations about protecting participants,” she said. 

Additionally, harm to a participant is difficult to predict. As sociologist Martin Tolich of University of Otago in New Zealand wrote, the Stanford prison study had been IRB-approved. 

“Prediction of harm with any certainty is not necessarily possible, and should not be the aim of ethics review,” he argued. “A more measured goal is the minimization of risk, not its eradication” (Tolich, 2014). 

Fisher notes that scientists aren’t trained to recognize and respond to adverse events when they occur during a study. 

“To be trained in research ethics requires not just knowing you have to obtain informed consent,” she said. “It’s being able to apply ethical reasoning to each unique situation. If you don’t have the training to do that, then of course you’re just following the IRB rules, which are very impersonal and really out of sync with the true nature of what we’re doing.” 

Researchers also raise concerns that, in many cases, the regulatory process harms vulnerable populations rather than safeguards them. Fisher and psychological scientist Brian Mustanski of University of Illinois at Chicago wrote in 2016, for example, that the review panels may be hindering HIV prevention strategies by requiring researchers to get parental consent before including gay and bisexual adolescents in their studies. Under that requirement, youth who are not out to their families get excluded. Boards apply those restrictions even in states permitting minors to get HIV testing and preventive medication without parental permission—and even though federal rules allow IRBs to waive parental consent in research settings (Mustanski & Fisher, 2016) 

IRBs also place counterproductive safety limits on suicide and self-harm research, watching for any sign that a participant might need to be removed from a clinical study and hospitalized. 

“The problem is we know that hospitalization is not the panacea,” Fisher said. “It stops suicidality for the moment, but actually the highest-risk period is 3 months after the first hospitalization for a suicide attempt. Some of the IRBs fail to consider that a non-hospitalization intervention that’s being tested is just as safe as hospitalization. It’s a difficult problem, and I don’t blame them. But if we have to take people out of a study as soon as they reach a certain level of suicidality, then we’ll never find effective treatment.” 

Communication gaps  

Supporters of the institutional review process say researchers tend to approach the IRB process too defensively, overlooking the board’s good intentions.  

“Obtaining clarification or requesting further materials serve to verify that protections are in place,” a team of institutional reviewers wrote in an editorial for  Psi Chi Journal of Psychological Research . “If researchers assume that IRBs are collaborators in the research process, then these requests can be seen as prompts rather than as admonitions” (Domenech Rodriguez et al., 2017). 

Fisher agrees that researchers’ attitudes play a considerable role in the conflicts that arise over ethics review. She recommends researchers develop each protocol with review-board questions in mind (see sidebar). 

“For many researchers, there’s a disdain for IRBs,” she said. “IRBs are trying their hardest. They don’t want to reject research. It’s just that they’re not informed. And sometimes if behavioral scientists or social scientists are disdainful of their IRBs, they’re not communicating with them.” 

Some researchers are building evidence to help IRBs understand the level of risk associated with certain types of psychological studies.  

• In a study involving more than 500 undergraduate students, for example, psychological scientists at the University of New Mexico found that the participants were less upset than expected by questionnaires about sex, trauma , and other sensitive topics. This finding, the researchers reported in  Psychological Science , challenges the usual IRB assumption about the stress that surveys on sex and trauma might inflict on participants (Yeater et al., 2012). 
• A study involving undergraduate women indicated that participants who had experienced child abuse , although more likely than their peers to report distress from recalling the past as part of a study, were also more likely to say that their involvement in the research helped them gain insight into themselves and hoped it would help others (Decker et al., 2011). 
• A multidisciplinary team, including APS Fellow R. Michael Furr of Wake Forest University, found that adolescent psychiatric patients showed a drop in suicide ideation after being questioned regularly about their suicidal thoughts over the course of 2 years. This countered concerns that asking about suicidal ideation would trigger an increase in such thinking (Mathias et al., 2012). 
• A meta-analysis of more than 70 participant samples—totaling nearly 74,000 individuals—indicated that people may experience only moderate distress when discussing past traumas in research studies. They also generally might find their participation to be a positive experience, according to the findings (Jaffe et al., 2015). 

The takeaways  

So, are the historians correct? Would any of these classic experiments survive IRB scrutiny today? 

Reexaminations of those studies make the question arguably moot. Recent revelations about some of these studies suggest that scientific integrity concerns may taint the legacy of those findings as much as their impact on participants did (Le Texier, 2019, Resnick, 2018; Perry, 2018).  

Also, not every aspect of the controversial classics is taboo in today’s regulatory environment. Scientists have won IRB approval to conceptually replicate both the Milgram and Stanford prison experiments (Burger, 2009; Reicher & Haslam, 2006). They simply modified the protocols to avert any potential harm to the participants. (Scholars, including Zimbardo himself, have questioned the robustness of those replication findings [Elms, 2009; Miller, 2009; Zimbardo, 2006].) 

Many scholars believe there are clear and valuable lessons from the classic experiments. Milgram’s work, for instance, can inject clarity into pressing societal issues such as political polarization and police brutality . Ethics training and monitoring simply need to include those lessons learned, they say. 

“We should absolutely be talking about what Milgram did right, what he did wrong,” Schrag said. “We can talk about what we can learn from that experience and how we might answer important questions while respecting the rights of volunteers who participate in psychological experiments.”  

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References   

Burger, J. M. (2009). Replicating Milgram: Would people still obey today? American Psychologist , 64 (1), 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0010932  

Ceci, S. J. & Bruck, M. (2009). Do IRBs pass the minimal harm test? Perspectives on Psychological Science , 4 (1), 28–29. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-6924.2009.01084.x   

Decker, S. E., Naugle, A. E., Carter-Visscher, R., Bell, K., & Seifer, A. (2011). Ethical issues in research on sensitive topics: Participants’ experiences of stress and benefit . Journal of Empirical Research on Human Research Ethics: An International Journal , 6 (3), 55–64. https://doi.org/10.1525/jer.2011.6.3.55  

Domenech Rodriguez, M. M., Corralejo, S. M., Vouvalis, N., & Mirly, A. K. (2017). Institutional review board: Ally not adversary. Psi Chi Journal of Psychological Research , 22 (2), 76–84.  https://doi.org/10.24839/2325-7342.JN22.2.76  

Elms, A. C. (2009). Obedience lite. American Psychologist , 64 (1), 32–36.  https://doi.org/10.1037/a0014473

Fisher, C. B., True, G., Alexander, L., & Fried, A. L. (2009). Measures of mentoring, department climate, and graduate student preparedness in the responsible conduct of psychological research. Ethics & Behavior , 19 (3), 227–252. https://doi.org/10.1080/10508420902886726  

Jaffe, A. E., DiLillo, D., Hoffman, L., Haikalis, M., & Dykstra, R. E. (2015). Does it hurt to ask? A meta-analysis of participant reactions to trauma research. Clinical Psychology Review , 40 , 40–56. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2015.05.004  

Le Texier, T. (2019). Debunking the Stanford Prison experiment. American Psychologist , 74 (7), 823–839. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/amp0000401  

Mathias, C. W., Furr, R. M., Sheftall, A. H., Hill-Kapturczak, N., Crum, P., & Dougherty, D. M. (2012). What’s the harm in asking about suicide ideation? Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior , 42 (3), 341–351. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1943-278X.2012.0095.x  

Miller, A. G. (2009). Reflections on “Replicating Milgram” (Burger, 2009). American Psychologist , 64 (1), 20–27. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0014407  

Mustanski, B., & Fisher, C. B. (2016). HIV rates are increasing in gay/bisexual teens: IRB barriers to research must be resolved to bend the curve.  American Journal of Preventive Medicine ,  51 (2), 249–252. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.amepre.2016.02.026  

Perry, G. (2018). The lost boys: Inside Muzafer Sherif’s Robbers Cave experiment. Scribe Publications.  

Reicher, S. & Haslam, S. A. (2006). Rethinking the psychology of tyranny: The BBC prison study. British Journal of Social Psychology , 45 , 1–40. https://doi.org/10.1348/014466605X48998  

Resnick, B. (2018, June 13). The Stanford prison experiment was massively influential. We just learned it was a fraud. Vox. https://www.vox.com/2018/6/13/17449118/stanford-prison-experiment-fraud-psychology-replication  

Schrag, Z. M. (2010). Ethical imperialism: Institutional review boards and the social sciences, 1965–2009 . Johns Hopkins University Press. 

Tolich, M. (2014). What can Milgram and Zimbardo teach ethics committees and qualitative researchers about minimal harm? Research Ethics , 10 (2), 86–96. https://doi.org/10.1177/1747016114523771  

Yeater, E., Miller, G., Rinehart, J., & Nason, E. (2012). Trauma and sex surveys meet minimal risk standards: Implications for institutional review boards.  Psychological Science , 23 (7), 780–787. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797611435131  

Zimbardo, P. G. (2006). On rethinking the psychology of tyranny: The BBC prison study. British Journal of Social Psychology , 45 , 47–53. https://doi.org/10.1348/014466605X81720  

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About the Author

Scott Sleek is a freelance writer in Silver Spring, Maryland, and the former director of news and information at APS.

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The 10 Most Controversial Psychology Studies Ever Published

Controversy is essential to scientific progress - here we digest ten of the most controversial studies in psychology’s history.

19 September 2014

By Christian Jarrett

Controversy is essential to scientific progress. As  Richard Feynman  said, "science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." Nothing is taken on faith, all assumptions are open to further scrutiny. It's a healthy sign therefore that psychology studies continue to generate great controversy. Often the heat is created by arguments about the logic or ethics of the methods, other times it's because of disagreements about the implications of the findings to our understanding of human nature. Here we digest ten of the most controversial studies in psychology's history. Please use the comments to have your say on these controversies, or to highlight provocative studies that you think should have made it onto our list.

The Stanford Prison Experiment

Conducted in 1971, Philip Zimbardo's experiment had to be aborted when students allocated to the role of prison guards began abusing students who were acting as prisoners. Zimbardo interpreted the events as showing that certain situations inevitably turn good people bad, a theoretical stance he later applied to the acts of abuse that occurred at the Abu Ghraib prison camp in Iraq from 2003 to 2004. This situationist interpretation has been  challenged , most forcibly by the British psychologists Steve Reicher and Alex Haslam. The pair argue, on the basis of their own  BBC Prison study  and real-life instances of prisoner resistance, that people do not yield mindlessly to toxic environments. Rather, in any situation, power resides in the group that manages to establish a sense of shared identity.  Critics also point out  that Zimbardo led and inspired his abusive prison guards; that the Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE) may have attracted particular personality types; and that many guards did behave appropriately. The debate continues, as does the influence of the SPE on popular culture, so far inspiring at least two feature length  movies .

Further reading

Zimbardo, P. G. (1972).  Comment: Pathology of imprisonment . Society, 9(6), 4-8.

Haney, C., Banks, W. C., & Zimbardo, P. G. (1973).  Study of prisoners and guards in a simulated prison . Naval Research Reviews, 9(1-17). 

The Milgram "Shock Experiments"

Stanley Milgram's studies conducted in the 1960s appeared to show that many people are incredibly obedient to authority.  Given the instruction from a scientist, many participants  applied  what they thought were deadly levels of electricity to an innocent person. Not one study, but several, Milgram's research has inspired many imitations, including in  virtual reality  and in the form of a  French TV show . The original studies have attracted  huge controversy , not only because of their ethically dubious nature, but also because of the way they have been interpreted and used to explain historical events such as the supposedly blind obedience to authority in the Nazi era. Haslam and Reicher have again been at the forefront of counter-arguments. Most recently, based on archived feedback from Milgram's participants, the pair  argue  that the observed obedience was far from blind – in fact many participants were pleased to have taken part, so convinced were they that their efforts were making an important contribution to science. It's also notable that many participants in fact disobeyed instructions, and in such cases, verbal prompts from the scientist were  largely   ineffective .

Milgram, S. (1963).  Behavioral study of obedience . The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 67(4), 371. 

The "Elderly-related Words Provoke Slow Walking" Experiment (and other social priming research)

One of the experiments in a 1996 paper published by John Bargh and colleagues showed that when people were exposed to words that pertained to being old, they subsequently walked away from the lab more slowly. This finding is just one of many in the field of "social priming" research, all of which suggest our minds are far more open to influence than we realise. In 2012, a different lab  tried to replicate  the elderly words study and failed. Professor Bargh reacted  angrily . Ever since, the controversy over his study and other related findings has only intensified. Highlights of the furore include an  open letter  from Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman to researchers working in the area, and  a mass replication attempt  of several studies in social psychology, including social priming effects.  Much of the disagreement  centres around whether replication attempts in this area fail because the original effects don't exist, or because those attempting a replication lack the necessary research skills, make statistical errors, or fail to perfectly match the original research design.

Bargh, J. A., Chen, M., & Burrows, L. (1996).  Automaticity of social behavior: Direct effects of trait construct and stereotype activation on action . Journal of personality and social psychology, 71(2), 230. 

The Conditioning of Little Albert

Back in 1920 John Watson and his future wife Rosalie Rayner deliberately induced fears in an 11-month-old baby. They did this by exposing him to a particular animal, such as a white rat, at the same time as banging a steel bar behind his head. The research is controversial not just because it seems so unethical, but also because the results have tended to be  reported in an inaccurate and overly simplified way . Many textbooks claim the study shows how fears are easily conditioned and generalised to similar stimuli; they say that after being conditioned to fear a white rat, Little Albert subsequently feared all things that were white and fluffy. In fact, the results were far messier and more inconsistent than that, and the methodology was poorly controlled. Over the last few years, controversy has also developed around the identity of poor Little Albert. In 2009, a team led by Hall Beck  claimed  that the baby was in fact Douglas Merritte. They later  claimed  that Merritte was neurologically impaired, which if true would only add to the unethical nature of the original research. However, a new paper  published this year  by Ben Harris and colleagues argues that Little Albert was actually a child known as Albert Barger.

Watson, J. B., & Rayner, R. (1920).  Conditioned emotional reactions . Journal of Experimental Psychology, 3(1), 1. 

Loftus' "Lost in The Mall" Study

In 1995 and ' 96 ,  Elizabeth Loftus , James Coan and Jacqueline Pickrell documented how easy it was to implant in people a fictitious memory of having been lost in a shopping mall as a child. The false childhood event is simply described to a participant alongside true events, and over a few interviews it soon becomes absorbed into the person's true memories, so that they think the experience really happened. The research and other  related findings  became hugely controversial because they showed how unreliable and suggestible memory can be. In particular, this cast doubt on so-called "recovered memories" of abuse that originated during sessions of psychotherapy. This is a highly sensitive area and experts continue to debate  the nature of false memories, repression and recovered memories . One challenge to the "lost in the mall" study was that participants may really have had the childhood experience of having been lost, in which case Loftus' methodology was recovering lost memories of the incident rather than implanting false memories. This criticism was refuted in a later study ( pdf ) in which Loftus and her colleagues implanted in people the memory of having met Bugs Bunny at Disneyland. Cartoon aficionados will understand why this memory was definitely false.

Loftus, E. F., & Pickrell, J. E. (1995).  The formation of false memories . Psychiatric annals, 25(12), 720-725. 

Loftus, E. F., Coan, J. A., & Pickrell, J. E. (1996). Manufacturing false memories using bits of reality. Implicit memory and metacognition, 195-220.

Loftus, E. F. (1993).  The reality of repressed memories . American psychologist, 48(5), 518. 

The Daryl Bem Pre-cognition Study

In 2010 social psychologist Daryl Bem attracted huge attention when he  claimed to have shown  that many established psychological phenomena work backwards in time. For instance, in one of his experiments, he found that people performed better at a memory task for words they revised in the future. Bem interpreted this as evidence for pre-cognition, or psi – that is, effects that can't be explained by current scientific understanding. Superficially at least, Bem's methodology appeared robust, and he took the laudable step of making his procedures readily available to other researchers. However, many experts have since  criticised  Bem's methods and statistical analyses ( pdf ), and many replication attempts have  failed to support the original findings .

Further controversy came from the the fact that the journal that published Bem's results refused at first to publish any replication attempts. This prompted uproar in the research community and contributed to what's become known as the " replication crisis " or "replication wars" in psychology. Unabashed, Bem published a  meta-analysis  this year (an analysis that collated results from 90 attempts to replicate his 2010 findings) and he concluded that overall there was solid support for his earlier work. Where will this controversy head next? If Bem's right, you probably know the answer already.

Bem, D. J. (2011).  Feeling the future: experimental evidence for anomalous retroactive influences on cognition and affect . Journal of personality and social psychology, 100(3), 407.

The Voodoo Correlations in Social Neuroscience study

This paper was released online before print, where it initially bore the provocative title "Voodoo correlations in social neuroscience". Voodoo in this sense meant non-existent or spurious. Ed Vul and his colleagues had analysed over 50 studies that linked localised patterns of brain activity with specific aspects of behaviour or emotion, such as  one  that reported feelings of rejection were correlated highly with activity in the anterior cingulate cortex. Vul and his team said the high correlations reported in these papers were due to the use of inappropriate analyses – a form of "double-dipping" in which researchers took two or more steps: first identifying a region, or even a single voxel, linked with a certain behaviour, and then performing further analyses on just that area. The paper caused great offence to the many brain imaging researchers in social neuroscience whose work had been targeted. "Several of [Vul et al's] conclusions are incorrect due to flawed reasoning, statistical errors, and sampling anomalies," said the authors of one  rebuttal paper . However, concerns about the statistical analyses used in imaging neuroscience haven't gone away. For example, in 2012 Joshua Carp wrote a  paper  claiming that most imaging papers fail to provide enough methodological detail to allow others to attempt replications.

Vul, E., Harris, C., Winkielman, P., & Pashler, H. (2009).  Puzzlingly high correlations in fMRI studies of emotion, personality, and social cognition . Perspectives on psychological science, 4(3), 274-290. 

The Kirsch Anti-Depressant Placebo Effect Study

In 2008 Irving Kirsch, a psychologist who was then based at the University of Hull in the UK, analysed all the trial data on anti-depressants, published and unpublished, submitted to the US Food and Drug Administration. He and his colleagues concluded that for most people with mild or moderate depression, the extra benefit of anti-depressants versus placebo is not clinically meaningful.  The results led to headlines like "Depression drugs don't work" and provided ammunition for people concerned with the overprescription of antidepressant medication. But there was also a backlash.  Other experts analysed Kirsch's dataset using different methods and came to different conclusions . Another group made  similar findings  to Kirsch, but interpreted them very differently – as showing that drugs are more effective than placebo. Kirsch is standing his ground. Writing earlier this year, he  said : "Instead of curing depression, popular antidepressants may induce a biological vulnerability making people more likely to become depressed in the future."

Kirsch, I., Deacon, B. J., Huedo-Medina, T. B., Scoboria, A., Moore, T. J., & Johnson, B. T. (2008).  Initial severity and antidepressant benefits: a meta-analysis of data submitted to the Food and Drug Administration . PLoS medicine, 5(2), e45.

Judith Rich Harris and the "Nurture Assumption"

You could fill a library or two with all the books that have been published on how to be a better parent. The implicit assumption, of course, is that parents play a profound role in shaping their offspring. Judith Rich Harris challenged this idea with a provocative paper published in 1995 in which she proposed that children are shaped principally by their peer groups and their experiences outside of the home. She followed this up with two best-selling books: The Nurture Assumption and No Two Alike . 

Writing for the BPS Research Digest in 2007 , Harris described some of the evidence that supports her claims: "identical twins reared by different parents are (on average) as similar in personality as those reared by the same parents … adoptive siblings reared by the same parents are as dissimilar as those reared by different parents … [and] … children reared by immigrant parents have the personality characteristics of the country they were reared in, rather than those of their parents' native land."

Harris has powerful supporters, Steven Pinker among them, but her ideas also unleashed a storm of controversy and criticism. " I am embarrassed for psychology ," Jerome Kagan told Newsweek after the publication of Harris' Nurture Assumption.

Harris, J. R. (1995).  Where is the child's environment? A group socialization theory of development . Psychological review, 102(3), 458. 

Libet's Challenge to Free Will

Your decisions feel like your own, but Benjamin Libet's study using electroencephalography (EEG) appeared to show that preparatory brain activity precedes your conscious decisions of when to move. One controversial interpretation is that this challenges the notion that you have free will. The decision of when to move is made non-consciously, so the argument goes, and then your subjective sense of having willed that act is tagged on afterwards. Libet's study and others like it have inspired deep philosophical debate. Some philosophers like Daniel Dennett  believe  that neuroscientists have overstated the implications of these kinds of findings for people's conception of free will.  Other researchers  have pointed out flaws in Libet's research, such as people's inaccuracy in judging the instant of their own will. However, the principle of non-conscious neural activity preceding conscious will has been  replicated using fMRI , and influential neuroscientists like Sam Harris continue to argue that Libet's work undermines the idea of free will.

Libet, B., Gleason, C. A., Wright, E. W., & Pearl, D. K. (1983).  Time of conscious intention to act in relation to onset of cerebral activity (readiness-potential) the unconscious initiation of a freely voluntary act . Brain, 106(3), 623-642. 

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5 Unethical Medical Experiments Brought Out of the Shadows of History

Prisoners and other vulnerable populations often bore the brunt of unethical medical experimentation..

Most people are aware of some of the heinous medical experiments of the past that violated human rights. Participation in these studies was either forced or coerced under false pretenses. Some of the most notorious examples include the experiments by the Nazis, the Tuskegee syphilis study, the Stanford Prison Experiment, and the CIA’s LSD studies.

But there are many other lesser-known experiments on vulnerable populations that have flown under the radar. Study subjects often didn’t — or couldn’t — give consent. Sometimes they were lured into participating with a promise of improved health or a small amount of compensation. Other times, details about the experiment were disclosed but the extent of risks involved weren’t.

This perhaps isn’t surprising, as doctors who conducted these experiments were representative of prevailing attitudes at the time of their work. But unfortunately, even after informed consent was introduced in the 1950s , disregard for the rights of certain populations continued. Some of these researchers’ work did result in scientific advances — but they came at the expense of harmful and painful procedures on unknowing subjects.

Here are five medical experiments of the past that you probably haven’t heard about. They illustrate just how far the ethical and legal guidepost, which emphasizes respect for human dignity above all else, has moved.

The Prison Doctor Who Did Testicular Transplants

From 1913 to 1951, eugenicist Leo Stanley was the chief surgeon at San Quentin State Prison, California’s oldest correctional institution. After performing vasectomies on prisoners, whom he recruited through promises of improved health and vigor, Stanley turned his attention to the emerging field of endocrinology, which involves the study of certain glands and the hormones they regulate. He believed the effects of aging and decreased hormones contributed to criminality, weak morality, and poor physical attributes. Transplanting the testicles of younger men into those who were older would restore masculinity, he thought.  

Stanley began by using the testicles of executed prisoners — but he ran into a supply shortage. He solved this by using the testicles of animals, including goats and deer. At first, he physically implanted the testicles directly into the inmates. But that had complications, so he switched to a new plan: He ground up the animal testicles into a paste, which he injected into prisoners’ abdomens. By the end of his time at San Quentin, Stanley did an estimated 10,000 testicular procedures .

The Oncologist Who Injected Cancer Cells Into Patients and Prisoners

During the 1950s and 1960s, Sloan-Kettering Institute oncologist Chester Southam conducted research to learn how people’s immune systems would react when exposed to cancer cells. In order to find out, he injected live HeLa cancer cells into patients, generally without their permission. When patient consent was given, details around the true nature of the experiment were often kept secret. Southam first experimented on terminally ill cancer patients, to whom he had easy access. The result of the injection was the growth of cancerous nodules , which led to metastasis in one person.

Next, Southam experimented on healthy subjects , which he felt would yield more accurate results. He recruited prisoners, and, perhaps not surprisingly, their healthier immune systems responded better than those of cancer patients. Eventually, Southam returned to infecting the sick and arranged to have patients at the Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital in Brooklyn, NY, injected with HeLa cells. But this time, there was resistance. Three doctors who were asked to participate in the experiment refused, resigned, and went public.

The scandalous newspaper headlines shocked the public, and legal proceedings were initiated against Southern. Some in the scientific and medical community condemned his experiments, while others supported him. Initially, Southam’s medical license was suspended for one year, but it was then reduced to a probation. His career continued to be illustrious, and he was subsequently elected president of the American Association for Cancer Research.

The Aptly Named ‘Monster Study’

Pioneering speech pathologist Wendell Johnson suffered from severe stuttering that began early in his childhood. His own experience motivated his focus on finding the cause, and hopefully a cure, for stuttering. He theorized that stuttering in children could be impacted by external factors, such as negative reinforcement. In 1939, under Johnson’s supervision, graduate student Mary Tudor conducted a stuttering experiment, using 22 children at an Iowa orphanage. Half received positive reinforcement. But the other half were ridiculed and criticized for their speech, whether or not they actually stuttered. This resulted in a worsening of speech issues for the children who were given negative feedback.

The study was never published due to the multitude of ethical violations. According to The Washington Post , Tudor was remorseful about the damage caused by the experiment and returned to the orphanage to help the children with their speech. Despite his ethical mistakes, the Wendell Johnson Speech and Hearing Clinic at the University of Iowa bears Johnson's name and is a nod to his contributions to the field.

The Dermatologist Who Used Prisoners As Guinea Pigs

One of the biggest breakthroughs in dermatology was the invention of Retin-A, a cream that can treat sun damage, wrinkles, and other skin conditions. Its success led to fortune and fame for co-inventor Albert Kligman, a dermatologist at the University of Pennsylvania . But Kligman is also known for his nefarious dermatology experiments on prisoners that began in 1951 and continued for around 20 years. He conducted his research on behalf of companies including DuPont and Johnson & Johnson.

Kligman’s work often left prisoners with pain and scars as he used them as study subjects in wound healing and exposed them to deodorants, foot powders, and more for chemical and cosmetic companies. Dow once enlisted Kligman to study the effects of dioxin, a chemical in Agent Orange, on 75 inmates at Pennsylvania's Holmesburg Prison. The prisoners were paid a small amount for their participation but were not told about the potential side effects.

In the University of Pennsylvania’s journal, Almanac , Kligman’s obituary focused on his medical advancements, awards, and philanthropy. There was no acknowledgement of his prison experiments. However, it did mention that as a “giant in the field,” he “also experienced his fair share of controversy.”

The Endocrinologist Who Irradiated Prisoners

When the Atomic Energy Commission wanted to know how radiation affected male reproductive function, they looked to endocrinologist Carl Heller . In a study involving Oregon State Penitentiary prisoners between 1963 and 1973, Heller designed a contraption that would radiate their testicles at varying amounts to see what effect it had, particularly on sperm production. The prisoners also were subjected to repeated biopsies and were required to undergo vasectomies once the experiments concluded.

Although study participants were paid, it raised ethical issues about the potential coercive nature of financial compensation to prison populations. The prisoners were informed about the risks of skin burns, but likely were not told about the possibility of significant pain, inflammation, and the small risk of testicular cancer.

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What Are The Top 10 Unethical Psychology Experiments?

• By Cliff Stamp, BS Psychology, MS Rehabilitation Counseling
• Published September 9, 2019
• Last Updated November 13, 2023
• Read Time 8 mins

Posted September 2019 by Clifton Stamp, B.S. Psychology; M.A. Rehabilitation Counseling, M.A. English; 10 updates since. Reading time: 8 min. Reading level: Grade 9+. Questions on unethical psychology experiments? Email Toni at: [email protected] .

Like all sciences, psychology relies on experimentation to validate its hypotheses. This puts researchers in a bit of a bind, in that experimentation requires manipulation of one set of variables. Manipulating human beings can be unethical and has the potential to lead to outright harm. Nowadays experiments that involve human beings must meet a high standard for safety and security for all research participants. Although ethical and safety standards in the 21st century keep people safe from any potential ill effects of experiments and studies, conditions just a few decades ago were far from ideal and were in many cases out and out harmful. 

The Top 10 Unethical Psychology Experiments

10. The Stanford Prison Experiment (1971). This example of unethical research studies occurred in August of 1971, Dr. Philip Zimbardo of Stanford University began a Navy-funded experiment examining the effects of power dynamics between prison officers and prisoners. It only took six days before the experiment collapsed. Participants so completely absorbed their roles that the “officers” began psychologically torturing the prisoners and the prisoners became aggressive toward the officers. The prisoners, in turn, fought the guards and refused to comply with requests.  By the second day, prisoners refused to obey guards and the guards started threatening prisoners with violence, far over their instructions.  By the 6 th day, guards were harassing the prisoners physically and mentally and some guards had harmed prisoners. Zimbardo stopped the experiment at that point.

9. The Monster Study (1939). The Monster Study is a prime example of an unethical psychology experiment on humans that changed the world. Wendell Johnson, a psychologist at the University of Iowa, conducted an experiment about stuttering on 22 orphans. His graduate student, Mary Tudor, experimented while Johnson supervised her work. She divided a group of 22 children into two groups. Each group was a mixture of children with and without speech problems. One group received encouragement and positive feedback, but the other was ridiculed for any speech problems, including non-existent problems. Children who received ridicule naturally made no progress, and some of the orphans with no speech problems developed those very problems.

The study continued for six months and caused lasting, chronic psychological issues for some of the children. The study caused so much harm that some of the former subjects secured a monetary award from the University of Iowa in 2007 due to the harm they’d suffered.

8. The Milgram Conformity Experiment (1961 ). After the horrors of the Second World War, psychological researchers like Stanley Milgram wondered what made average citizens act like those in Germany who had committed atrocities. Milgram wanted to determine how far people would go carrying out actions that might be detrimental to others if they were ordered or encouraged to do so by an authority figure. The Milgram experiment showed the tension between that obedience to the orders of the authority figure and personal conscience. 

In each experiment, Milgram designated  three people as either a teacher, learner or experimenter. The “learner” was an actor planted by Milgram and stayed in a room separate from the experimenter and teacher. The teacher attempted to teach the learner how to perform small sets of word associations. When the learner got a pair wrong, the teacher delivered an electric shock to the learner. In reality, there was no shock given. The learner pretended to be in increasingly greater amounts of distress. When some teachers expressed hesitation about increasing the level of shocks, the experimenter encouraged them to do so.

Many of the subjects (the teachers) experienced severe and lasting psychological distress. The Milgram Conformity Experiment has become the byword for well-intentioned psychological experiments gone wrong.

8. David Reimer (1967–1977) . When David Reimer was eighth months old, his penis was seriously damaged during a failed circumcision. His parents contacted John Money, a professor of psychology and pediatrics at Johns Hopkins, who was a researcher in the development of gender. As David had an identical twin brother, Money viewed the situation as a rare opportunity to conduct his own experiment into the nature of gender, by advising Reimer’s parents to have the David sexually reassigned as a female. Money’s theory was that gender was a completely sociological construct and primarily influenced by nurture, as opposed to nature. Money was catastrophically wrong. 

Reimer never identified as female and developed strong psychological attachment to being a male. At age 14, Reimer’s parents told him the truth about his condition and he elected to switch to a male identity. Although he later had surgery to correct the initial sex re-assignment, he suffered from profound depression related to his sex and gender issues and committed suicide in 2004. Money’s desire to test his controversial psychology experiment on humans without their consent cost someone his life. 

7. Landis’ Facial Expressions Experiment (1924). In 1924, at the University of Minnesota, Carney Landis created an experiment on humans to investigate the similarity of different people’s’ facial expressions. He wanted to determine if people displayed similar or different facial expressions while experiencing common emotions.

Carney chose students as participants, who were exposed to different situations to prompt emotional reactions. However, to elicit revulsion, he ordered the participants to behead a live rat. One-third of participants refused to do it, while another two-thirds complied, with a great deal of trauma done to them–and the rats. This unethical experiment is one of many reasons review boards were created and have made drastic changes in policy over experiments done on humans.

6. The Aversion Project (1970s and 80s). During the apartheid years in South Africa,  doctors in the South African military tried to “cure” homosexuality in conscripts by forcing them to undergo electroshock therapy and chemical castration. The military also forced gay conscripts to undergo sex-change operations. This happened as one segment of a secret military program headed by Dr. Aubrey Levin that sought to study and eliminate homosexuality in the military as recently as 1989. Exception for several cases of lesbian soldiers who were abused, most of the 900 soldiers to be abused were very young, from 16 to 24-year-old male conscripts. Astoundingly, Dr. Levin relocated to Canada where he worked until he was sent to prison for assaulting a patient.

5. Monkey Drug Trials (1969).  The Monkey Drug Trials experiment was ostensibly meant to test the effects of  illicit drugs on monkeys. Given that monkeys and humans have similar reactions to drugs, and that animals have long been part of medical experiments, the face of this experiment might not look too bad. It’s actually horrific. Monkeys and rats learned to self-administer a range of drugs, from cocaine, amphetamines, codeine, morphine and alcohol. The animals suffered horribly, tearing their fingers off, clawing fur away, and in some cases breaking bones attempting to break out of their cages. This psychology experiment study had no purpose other than to re-validate studies that had been validated many times before. 

4. Little Albert (1920). John Watson, the founder of the psychological school of behaviorism, believed that behaviors were primarily learned. Anxious to test his hypothesis, he used an orphan, “Little Albert,” as an experimental subject. He exposed the child to a laboratory rat, which caused no fear response from the boy, for several months. Next, at the same time, the child was exposed to the rat, he struck a steel bar with a hammer, scaring the little boy and causing a fear response. By associating the appearance of the rat with the loud noise, Little Albert became afraid of the rat. Naturally, the fear was a condition that needed to be fixed, but the boy left the facility before Watson could remedy things.

3. Harlow’s Pit of Despair (1970s). Harry Harlow, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was a researcher in the field of maternal bonding. To investigate the effects of attachment on development, he took young monkeys and isolated them after they’d bonded with their mothers. He kept them completely isolated, in a vertical chamber that prevented all contact with other monkeys.  They developed no social skills and became completely unable to function as normal rhesus monkeys. These controversial psychology experiments, were not only staggeringly cruel but revealed no data that wasn’t already known.

2. Learned Helplessness (1965). In 1965, Doctors Martin Seligman and Steve Maier investigated the concept of learned helplessness. Three sets of dogs were placed in harnesses. One group of dogs were control subjects. Nothing happened to them. Dogs from group two received electric shocks; however, they were able to stop the shocks when they pressed a lever. In group three, the subjects were shocked, but the levers didn’t abort the shocks. Next, the psychologists placed the dogs in an open box the dogs could easily jump out of, but even though they received shocks, they didn’t leap out of the box. The dogs developed a sense of helplessness, or an inability to take successful action to change a bad situation.

1. The Robbers Cave Experiment (1954). Although the Robbers Cave Experiment is much less disturbing than some of the others in the list, it’s still a good example of the need for informed consent. In 1954, Muzafer Sherif, a psychologist interested in group dynamics and conflict, brought a group of preteen boys to a summer camp. He divided them into groups and engaged the boys in competitions. However, Sherif manipulated the outcomes of the contests, keeping the results close for each group. Then he gave the boys tasks to complete as a unified group, with everyone working together. The conflicts that had arisen when the boys were competing vanished when they worked as one large group.

More Psychology Rankings of Interest:

• 10 Key Moments in the History of Psychology
• 5 Key Moments in Social Psychology
• 5 Learning Theories in Psychology
• Top 10 Movies About Psychology

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Controversial New Guidelines Would Allow Experiments On More Mature Human Embryos

New guidance would ease restrictions on researching embryos in the lab. BSIP/Science Source hide caption

New guidance would ease restrictions on researching embryos in the lab.

For decades, scientists have been prohibited from keeping human embryos alive in their labs for more than 14 days. The prohibition was aimed at avoiding a thicket of ethical issues that would be raised by doing experiments on living human embryos as they continue to develop.

But on Wednesday, an influential scientific society recommended scrapping that blanket taboo, known as the "14-day rule." The International Society for Stem Cell Research released new guideline s that say it could be permissible to study living human embryos in the lab for longer than two weeks.

This guidance will now be considered by regulatory bodies in each country that conducts this type of research to decide what research will be permitted and how. Currently in the U.S., regulatory bodies at universities and other research institutions universally adhere to the 14-day rule. If the new guidance is adopted, it would be a major change.

"When you ask, 'Is this ethically bad?' Well, you also have to put the opposite: Are there ethical issues for not doing research in that period?" says Robin Lovell-Badge of the Crick Institute , who chaired the task force that wrote the guidelines. "In many ways, you could argue it would be unethical not to do it."

Studying embryos as they develop beyond 14 days could help scientists solve many medical problems, including infertility, miscarriages and birth defects, Lovell-Badge and others argue.

"There's very good reasons for doing this research. And people shouldn't be scared about it if there are robust mechanisms of review and oversight," Lovell-Badge says.

While many scientists and bioethicists are welcoming the new guidelines, others criticize them as being far too permissive.

"I think it's deeply troubling," says Dr. Daniel Sulmasy , a bioethicist at Georgetown University. "Now, any sign of respect for the human embryo is gone."

Others are especially concerned that the new guidelines include no clear stopping point for how long a developing embryo could be studied in a lab dish.

"If you don't have any endpoint, could you take embryos to 20 weeks? To 24 weeks? Is viability the only endpoint," asks Hank Greely, a Stanford University bioethicist who otherwise praises the new guidelines. "Is viability even an endpoint?"

Lovell-Badge defends the recommendations.

"I felt that it would be both difficult and a little pointless to propose any new limit, which would be arbitrary, much like 14 days," Lovell-Badge says.

The original cutoff was set at 14 days for a variety of reasons. For example, 14 days is around the time when an embryo starts to develop the first signs of a central nervous system. It's also when an embryo can no longer split into twins. At the time, scientists were far from being able to sustain living embryos in the lab anywhere close to 14 days.

But in recent years scientists have gradually extended how long they can sustain human embryos in lab dishes, increasing pressure from some researchers and bioethicists to revise the rule.

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Scientists create living entities in the lab that closely resemble human embryos.

At the same time, scientists developed the ability to create "embryoids," which are living entities made from human stem cells that have become increasingly complex and similar to human embryos. That added pressure to extend the rule so scientists could compare these new entities with naturally conceived embryos.

"That period of development between, say, 14 days, which is the current limit, and let's say 28 days, a huge amount is happening. It's a very critical period," Lovell-Badge says.

The guidelines stress such experiments should only be allowed after each country has a robust public debate and the public at large agrees that such research is acceptable. In addition, any experiments must be carefully monitored to make sure the research is absolutely necessary to learn something important, according to the guidelines.

"We're not saying it should now happen. We're saying it's possible for it to happen," Lovell-Badge says.

The guidelines could be especially influential in countries that do not have laws or regulations governing this kind of research.

In the U.S., the federal government is prohibited from funding for research involving human embryos. But that kind of research can be done with private money. And the National Institutes of Health has been waiting for the new guidelines to help decide whether to lift a moratorium on funding research involving chimera embryos.

"We are looking forward to reading the ISSCR guidelines," the NIH said in a statement to NPR. "ISSCR has long been a thoughtful voice for the international stem cell research community, and we will certainly think carefully about their report."

Martin Pera, a stem cell researcher at the Jackson Laboratory who was not involving in writing the guidelines, called them "responsible and well-considered" in an email to NPR. "Adoption of these guidelines by regulatory bodies will ensure that research that has wide-ranging potential to improve human health can proceed with appropriate ethical oversight."

The change in the 14-day rule is just one of a long list of sensitive lines of scientific research the new guidelines address, ranging from human cloning to gene-editing human embryos. Some research, such as human cloning and creating babies from gene-edited embryos, remains off-limits. But the guidelines generally take a more permissive stance, including opening the door to creating gene-edited babies someday if it would be safe and solve an important medical problem.

Scientists Create Early Embryos That Are Part Human, Part Monkey

The guidelines also detail rules that would allow researchers to create chimera embryos for research. These are embryos that are part human, part animal. They're made by injecting human stem cells into animal embryos. Scientists recently announced they had done this with monkey embryos .

The goal is to learn more about basic embryonic development and perhaps someday use these embryos to breed animals such as pigs and cows with human hearts, livers and kidneys for organ transplants. Those entities raise many difficult ethical questions. One concern is that the cells could end up in other parts of the animals' bodies, such as their brains.

"Surely there are some human-animal chimera experiments that are entirely permissible and good. But there are some that would be monstrous," wrote J. Benjamin Hurlbut, a Arizona State University bioethicist, in an email to NPR.

"Do we really need to hark back to Mary Shelley to remind ourselves that the production of monstrosity may well grow out of a misguided sense of the good — combined with the thrill of the power of control over life? What is at stake here if not that?" Hurlbut wrote.

To assuage such concerns, the guidelines recommend a variety of restrictions and steps that should be taken to prevent that from occurring.

"There is a way to genetically engineer both the embryo and the stem cells so that the stem cells will only make a particular organ," says Insoo Hyun, a bioethicist at Harvard and Case Western Reserve universities, who helped write the guidelines. "Nobody wants a chimeric embryo to grow into a part-human, part-animal thing that has human cells from head to toe mixed in."

But the guidelines could conceivably allow a human-monkey embryo to develop inside a monkey's womb. And so those requirements did little to satisfy critics.

"I think we have just not thought through the moral status of these novel beings," says Françoise Baylis, a bioethicist at Dalhousie University in Canada.

"I think a number of people would be, you know, rightfully concerned that, that there are very little constraints on what's happening with the human embryo."

Hurlbut, who called the new guidelines "breathtakingly expansive," agrees.

"What was ethically unthinkable just a few years ago is getting treated as not only permissible but even unproblematic now," Hurlbut says.

"Under these guidelines an oversight committee can deliberate behind closed doors and quietly give its blessing to scientists to impregnate a monkey with a partly human embryo, or to see how far into human development scientists can grow artificially constructed synthetic human embryos in bottles."

Others, however, praise the new guidelines.

"As this is a time of rapid advances in stem cell-based research, it is critical to have a set of guidelines that all researchers can refer to, regardless of the stage of their research," says Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte , a researcher at the Salk Institute, who created the part-human, part-monkey embryos.

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• v.34(5); 2021

Review of current controversial issues in clinical trials

Shein-chung chow.

1 Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics, Duke University School of Medicine, Durham, North Carolina, USA

Susan S Chow

2 Kansas City University, College of Osteopathic Medicine, Kansas City, Missouri, USA

Annpey Pong

3 Merck & Co Inc, Kenilworth, New Jersey, USA

Associated Data

All data relevant to the study are included in the article. All relevant data are available via the General Psychiatry journal from BMJ ( https://doi.org/gpsych-2021-100540 ).

In clinical development, adequate and well-controlled randomised clinical trials are usually conducted to evaluate the safety and efficacy of test treatment under investigation. The purpose is to ensure that there is an accurate and reliable assessment of test treatment under study. In practice, however, some controversial issues inevitably appear despite the compliance of good clinical practice. These debatable issues include, but are not limited to, (1) appropriateness of hypotheses for clinical investigation, (2) feasibility of power calculation for sample size requirement, (3) integrity of randomisation/blinding, (4) strategy for clinical endpoint selection, (5) demonstrating effectiveness or ineffectiveness, (6) impact of protocol amendments and (7) independence of independent data monitoring committee. In this article, these controversial issues are discussed. The impact of these issues in evaluating the safety and efficacy of the test treatment under investigation is also assessed. Recommendations regarding possible resolutions to these issues are provided whenever possible.

Introduction

In clinical development, adequate and well-controlled randomised clinical trials are often conducted for evaluation of the safety and efficacy of a test treatment under study. The purpose is to provide substantial evidence in support of regulatory submission for demonstration of the safety and efficacy of the test treatment under investigation. To provide an accurate and reliable assessment of the test treatment under investigation, adequate and well-controlled randomised clinical trials should follow good clinical practice (GCP) at different phases (ie, phases 1 to 3) of clinical development. In practice, some controversial statistical issues inevitably occur regardless of the compliance of GCP. Controversial issues, referred to as debatable issues, are commonly encountered during the conduct of clinical trials. These debatable issues could be raised from (1) compromises between theoretical and real-world practices, (2) miscommunication, misunderstanding and/or misinterpretation in medical and/or statistical perception among regulatory agencies, clinical scientists and biostatisticians and (3) disagreement, inconsistency, miscommunication/misunderstanding and errors in clinical practice.

Basically, these controversial issues present conceptually different perspectives from clinicians (investigators/sponsors), biostatisticians and regulatory reviewers for evaluation of the test treatment under investigation. The major concern from the clinicians is whether the observed difference is of clinical meaning; whereas, the biostatisticians are interested in determining whether the observed difference is of any statistical meaning (ie, whether the observed difference is by chance alone). On the contrary, the reviewers from regulatory agencies, such as the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA), would like to make sure if the observed clinically meaningful difference (clinical benefits) has reached statistical significance before they can approve the test treatment under investigation. Most regulatory reviewers consider these debatable issues as review issues (in the sense that only regulatory reviewers can make the final judgement). Thus, a clinical trial is considered successful in clinical development when it meets the expectations of clinicians, biostatisticians and regulatory reviewers.

In the subsequent sections, background and relevant information regarding these controversial issues and their potential impacts on clinical development are briefly described. Whenever possible, resolutions for each controversial issue are provided. A final concluding remark is given in the last section.

Appropriateness of hypotheses for clinical evaluation

For clinical evaluation of the safety and efficacy of a test treatment under investigation, a traditional approach is to first test for a null hypothesis that there is no treatment difference in efficacy under a valid trial design. If there is sufficient power to correctly detect a clinically meaningful difference (or treatment effect) showing that such a difference truly exists, we are then in favour of the alternative hypothesis that the test treatment is efficacious. The test treatment will be approved by the regulatory agency, such as the United States FDA, if there appears no evidence of safety concerns.

However, this typical approach based on efficacy alone could lead to the withdrawal of drug products owing to safety concerns after approval. As an example, table 1 provides a list of drug products being withdrawn, which were marketed between 1982 and 2010.

Examples of drug products being withdrawn

As an alternative to the traditional approach, Chow and Shao 1 suggested testing composite hypotheses to take into account safety and efficacy (see table 2 ). In practice, common approaches for clinical evaluation of efficacy are testing for hypotheses of superiority (S), non-inferiority (N) and (therapeutic) equivalence (E). To assess for safety, the investigator typically examines the safety profile relative to the adverse events and other safety parameters to ascertain if the test treatment is better (superiority), at least as good as (non-inferiority) or similar (equivalence) to the control treatment.

Composite hypotheses for clinical evaluation of both safety and efficacy

E, equivalence; N, non-inferiority; S, superiority.

As an example, an investigator may be interested in testing non-inferiority in efficacy and superiority in safety of a test treatment compared with a control. In this case, we can consider testing the null hypothesis that H 0 : not NS , where N denotes the non-inferiority in efficacy and S represents superiority of safety. We would reject the null hypothesis and be in favour of the alternative hypothesis that H a : NS , that is, the efficacy of the test treatment is non-inferior to the control group and the safety of the test treatment is superior to the control group. For testing the null hypothesis of H 0 : not NS , the test statistics is derived based on the null hypothesis. In addition, the derived test statistics can then be evaluated to achieve the desired power under the alternative hypothesis and the required sample size in the trial can be estimated by power analysis. The objectives of selecting the required sample sizes in the intended trial are for (1) demonstrating the non-inferiority of the test treatment compared with the control group in efficacy and (2) exhibiting the superiority of the safety profile of the test treatment compared with the control group at a prespecified level of significance. Note that the significance levels for efficacy and safety need to be chosen to control the overall type I error rate at the α level (such as 5%). A sample size increase would be expected after switching from a single hypothesis testing to a composite hypothesis testing.

Feasibility of power calculation for sample size requirement

In clinical trials, a power analysis for sample size calculation (power calculation) is often performed to select a sample size required for achieving the study objective with a desired power of correctly detecting a clinically meaningful difference (or treatment effect) at a prespecified level of significance. A required sample size is typically determined based on an appropriate statistical test derived under the null hypothesis and a valid study design. The test statistic is then evaluated under the alternative hypothesis to achieve the desired power at a prespecified level of significance. In cases of clinical studies with extremely low incidence rates or rare disease clinical trials, power calculation for sample size may not be feasible.

For illustration purpose, consider an example concerning a safety study of a test treatment for treating patients with diabetes. A pharmaceutical company is asked to conduct a diabetes study with an extremely low incidence rate of glycosylated haemoglobin (HbA1c) to demonstrate that there is no safety concern of the test treatment under investigation. However, the incidence rate of HbA1c is extremely low, which is 3 per 10 000.

FDA indicates that 1 per 10 000 is of clinical importance and suggests that a clinical safety study should be powered to detect a 1 per 10 000 (clinically meaningful difference) at the 5% level of significance, assuming that the true incidence rate is 3 per 10 000. A power analysis is then performed to determine the sample size required for achieving the study objective with a desired power of 80% at the 5% level of significance. The result of power calculation indicates that a total sample size of 784 684 is required to have a desired power of 80% for correctly detecting a 1 per 10 000 incidence rate of HbA1c at the 5% level of significance. In this case, the power calculation is definitely not feasible for FDA-suggested clinical safety study.

Alternatively, the sponsor considered a probability statement to justify a selected, more feasible sample size of 800. In other words, assuming that the incidence rate of HbA1c is 3 per 10 000 (ie, 0.000 3), with a selected sample size of 800, we expected to not observe a single event during the conduct of the study. FDA eventually accepted the approach and issued an approvable letter based on the reason that there is not sufficient evidence to demonstrate that the test treatment is not safe. It should be noted that the term ‘safe ’ is not the same as the term ‘not unsafe ’ . Sample size justification based on probability statement allows us to demonstrate that the test treatment is ‘not unsafe ’ rather than ‘safe ’ with a relatively small sample size.

Integrity of randomisation/blinding

In clinical trials, randomisation and blinding are essential for minimising the bias that may be owing to subjective selection bias and prior knowledge of the treatment codes. For this purpose, block randomisation is often considered to prevent treatment imbalance, especially when the sample size is small or subjects’ characteristics change overtime. In practice, however, treatment imbalance may still occur, especially in multicentre clinical trials. Breaching blindness in clinical trials is another serious problem leading to subjective judgement and observational bias. In practice, the questions listed below are commonly asked:

• How do we test the integrity of blinding in clinical trials?
• In a comparative trial, what is the difference in the probability of correctly guessing the treatment code for a blocking size 2 compared with that of the blocking size 4?

Regarding the first question, one method to determine whether the blindness is seriously violated is to ask patients to guess their treatment codes during the study or at the conclusion of the trial prior to unblinding. In some cases, investigators may also be asked to guess patients’ treatment codes. Once the guesses are recorded on the case report forms and entered into the database, the integrity of blinding can be tested (Chow and Shao). 2 For illustration purpose, consider the example described in Karlowski et al . 3 To evaluate the difference between the prophylactic and therapeutic effects of ascorbic acid for common cold, a double-blind placebo-controlled study was conducted by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). On completion of the study, a questionnaire was distributed to each of the 190 subjects enrolled in the study for them to guess which treatment they received. Results from the subjects who completed the study are summarised in table 3 .

Results of patients’ guess

Consider a single site parallel design comparing a ≥2 treatments. Let A ij be the event that a patient in the j th treatment group guesses that he/she is in the i th group, i =1,…, a , a +1, where i = a +1 defines the event that a patient does not guess (or answers ‘do not know’). To test the integrity of blinding, Chow and Shao 2 considered testing the following null hypothesis:

H 0 : P(A ij )=P(A 1j ) for any i and j

If the null hypothesis holds, then the blindness is considered to be preserved. Note that the hypothesis H 0 can be tested using the Pearson’s χ 2 test. Based on data given in table 3 , the observed Pearson’s χ 2 statistic is 31.3. Thus, the null hypothesis of independence is rejected at a significance level of <0.001 (ie, the p value is smaller than 0.001). Thus, the blindness is not preserved and, hence, the integrity of blinding is in doubt.

To address the second question, Wang and Chow 4 considered two fixed block randomisation design with block size of 4 and 2 when comparing a placebo or an active control and a test treatment under investigation. In addition, Wang and Chow also examined the probabilities of observing various degrees of imbalance and investigated the probabilities of correctly guessing the treatment under three types of prior knowledge. 4 The results showed that smaller block size design is more likely to maintain treatment balance than larger block size; however, the difference of imbalance between the two designs decreases when the sample size gets larger. The number of subjects per site in multicentre trials also has impact on the degree of imbalance. Additionally, both block size and prior knowledge have impact on the probability of guessing the treatment right. Large sample size in conjunction with varying block size is suggested for keeping treatment balance and avoiding the chance of guessers to guess the treatment right.

For illustration purpose, probabilities of guessing treatment codes right for a small clinical trial are given in table 4 .

Probability of correctly guessing treatment codes

Note that analysis on investigators' guesses of patients' treatment codes can be performed similarly.

One of the controversial issues regarding the randomisation/blinding is whether a formal statistical test for the integrity of the randomisation/blinding should be performed at the end of the clinical trial (especially when significantly positive results are observed). In addition, what action should be taken if a positive clinical trial fails to pass the test for the integrity of the randomisation/blinding? Regarding the impact of different blocking sizes in the randomisation of a clinical trial, it should be noted that the knowledge of the blocking size may increase the probability of guessing the treatment codes right for the investigator. Although the increase of the blocking size may decrease the probability of guessing the treatment codes right, it will also increase the probability of mixing up the randomisation schedule and the possibility of treatment imbalance at the end of the trial.

Strategy for clinical endpoint selection

In psychiatry clinical trials, commonly considered clinical endpoints, there are rating scales for functional outcomes that include, but are not limited to, (1) depression, (2) cognitive functioning, (3) motor functioning and (4) proximity to diagnosis. Suppose that these four rating scales are available for psychiatry clinical studies. These four rating scales will lead to (1) four single primary endpoints, (2) six co-primary endpoints, (3) four triad endpoints and (4) one composite endpoint. Thus, there are a total of 15 endpoints for measuring functional outcomes.

In practice, it is usually not clear which of the 15 study endpoints can best inform the disease status and/or measure the treatment effect. Moreover, although different study endpoints may not translate one another, they may be highly correlated to one another. In clinical trials, it should be noted that different endpoints may result in different sample sizes. Thus, it is critical to select a promising endpoint that can achieve the study objective of the intended study with a desired power at a prespecified level of significance. This, however, is a very controversial issue (or purely a review issue as pointed out by regulatory agencies) in regulatory submissions.

To address this controversial issue, Filozof et al 5 proposed using a utility function to develop a therapeutic index by fully utilising all clinical information collected from all available study endpoints. The idea is briefly described below. Let e i be the i th endpoint, where i = 1 , 2 , … , 15 . Consider a therapeutic index (TI) in the following:

where f is a utility function and w i is the weight of e i depending on the level of evidence (eg, p value) observed from e i . Compared with a given endpoint (say e i for some i ), the therapeutic index has the following good statistical properties (Chow and Huang). 6 First, the therapeutic index can also detect the true treatment effect provided that the given i th endpoint has successfully detected the treatment effect. Second, if the therapeutic index has successfully detected the treatment effect, the i th given endpoint may not.

Demonstrating effectiveness or not ineffectiveness

For approval of a new drug product, the sponsor is required to provide substantial evidence regarding the safety and efficacy of the drug product under investigation. A typical approach is to conduct adequate and placebo-controlled clinical studies and test the following point hypotheses:

The rejection of the null hypothesis of ineffectiveness is in favour of the alternative hypothesis of effectiveness. Most researchers interpret the rejection of the null hypothesis as demonstration of the effectiveness of the alternative hypothesis. It should be noted, however, that ‘in favour of effectiveness’ does not imply ‘the demonstration of effectiveness’. Alternatively, Chow and Huang 6 indicated that the alternative hypotheses of (1) should be ‘not H 0 : not ineffectiveness’ rather than ‘ H a : effectiveness’. In other words, H a =not H 0 as follows:

As it can be seen from H a in (1) and (2), the concept of ‘effectiveness’ and the concept of ‘not ineffectiveness’ are not the same. Not ineffectiveness does not imply effectiveness. Thus, the traditional approach for clinical evaluation of the drug product under investigation can only demonstrate ‘not ineffectiveness’ but not ‘effectiveness’. In practice, we typically test the null hypothesis at the α=5% level of significance. However, many researchers prefer testing the null hypothesis at the α=1%. If the observed p value falls between 1% and 5%, we claim the test result is ‘inconclusive’. In placebo-controlled studies, conceptually, ‘not ineffectiveness’ includes the portion of ‘inconclusiveness’ and ‘effectiveness’ ( figure 1 ).

The relationship between ‘effectiveness’ and ‘not ineffectiveness’ in placebo-controlled studies.

As indicated in Chow, 7 the concept of demonstrating ‘not ineffectiveness’ rather than demonstrating ‘effectiveness’ is useful in support of regulatory submission of rare diseases drug development and can be used in drug development with normal conditions.

Impact of protocol amendments

During the conduct of a clinical trial, it is not uncommon to have 2–5 protocol amendments. These amendments are necessary to describe the changes that have been made and the rationales or justifications (both statistically and clinically) behind the changes to ensure the quality, integrity and validity of the intended clinical trial. If the changes are major, the originally target patient population under study may have shifted to a similar but different target patient population. In this case, the original clinical trial may have become a totally different trial, which cannot address the scientific/medical questions that the clinical trial is intended to answer. In practice, it is suggested that potential risks for introducing additional bias/variation as a result of protocol amendments should be carefully evaluated. It is important to identify, control and hopefully eliminate/minimise the sources of bias/variation owing to protocol amendments.

One of the major impacts of many protocol amendments is that the target patient population may have been shifted during the process, especially when significant changes or modifications are made to inclusion/exclusion criteria of the study. Thus, one of the controversial issues in this regard is whether the conclusion drawn (by ignoring the population shift) at the end of the trial is accurate and reliable.

Denote by (μ,σ) the target patient population. After a given protocol amendment, the resultant (actual) patient population may have been shifted to (μ 1 ,σ 1 ), where (μ 1 =μ+ε) is the population mean of the primary study endpoint and (σ 1 =Cσ) (C>0) is the population standard deviation (SD) of the primary study endpoint. The shift in target patient population can be characterised as follows:

where Δ=(1+ε/μ)/ C , and E and E 1 are the effect sizes before and after population shift (or protocol amendment), respectively. Chow et al 8 and Chow and Chang 9 refer to Δ as a sensitivity index measuring the change in effect size between the actual patient population and the original target patient population. Chow and Chang 9 indicated that the impact of protocol amendments on statistical inference owing to shift in target patient population can be studied through a model that links the moving population means with some covariates (see also Chow and Shao 10 ). In many cases, however, such covariates may not exist or exist but not be observable. In this case, Chow et al 11 suggested that inference on Δ be considered to measure the degree of shift in location and scale of patient population based on a mixture distribution by assuming that the location or scale parameter is random.

In summary, frequent protocol amendments could result in a moving target patient population, which makes the intended trial more difficult (if not impossible) to address the medical or scientific questions that the study intends to answer. In practice, however, there are no existing regulations regarding how many protocol amendments after the initiation of a clinical trial can be issued. Thus, it is strongly suggested that regulatory guideline/guidance regarding (1) levels of changes and (2) number of protocol amendments that are allowed should be developed in order to maintain the quality, integrity and validity of the intended study.

Independence of data monitoring committee

In clinical trials, especially during the late phase of clinical studies, an independent data monitoring committee (IDMC) is often established to maintain the integrity and validity of the intended clinical trials. The IDMC is responsible for conducting ongoing safety monitoring and/or performing interim analyses for efficacy. The IDMC supposes to be independent of any activities related to clinical operation (project team) of the study. The role and responsibility are often clearly stated in the Charter of the IDMC. An IDMC typically comprises experienced physicians and statisticians and, if established, has a separate IDMC staff support to perform responsibilities more efficiently. A typical organisational flow for an IDMC is given in figure 2 .

Organisational flowchart for IDMC. IDMC, independent data monitoring committee; CRO, contract research organization.

As indicated in figure 2 , the primary responsibilities of the IDMC include ongoing data safety monitoring and possibly interim analysis for early stopping owing to safety, futility and/or efficacy. The IDMC will make a recommendation to the sponsor regardless of whether the sponsor chooses to accept or reject the recommendation. The good intention of the IDMC will ensure the quality, integrity and validity of the clinical trial.

One of the most controversial issues when utilising an IDMC is probably the independence of the IDMC. In addition, the following controversial issues have been raised:

• If there is any wrongdoing in the conduct of the intended clinical trial, should the IDMC be encouraged to communicate to regulatory agencies?
• Should additional burden be placed on the IDMC if adaptive design methods are utilised?

These controversial issues have an impact on the quality, integrity, validity and success of clinical trials conducted throughout various phases of clinical development.

In practice, however, some sponsors will make every attempt to direct the function and activity of IDMC. In some cases, they have been successful, and in many cases, they have failed. The following is a summary of commonly seen issues at IDMCs of clinical trials across therapeutic areas.

First, the sponsor usually will draft an IDMC charter that outline the role/responsibility and function/activity of an IDMC before consulting the IDMC members. This prevents IDMC members from having the chance to review the charter until the first meeting. Note that the initial IDMC meeting is usually a teleconference call rather than a face-to-face in order to save on costs. Since IDMC members are usually key opinion leaders in the subject area, they may not have the chance to thoroughly review the charter prior to the meeting. Consequently, the charter is approved in a hurry. In some cases, the sponsor may have begun to enrol patients prior to the initial IDMC meeting. Although this is definitely not a GCP, it does occur.

Concluding remarks

In addition to the controversial issues described in previous sections, there are many other controversial issues that are commonly encountered in the conduct of clinical trials. Just to name a few, these controversial issues include, but are not limited to, (1) validation of an instrument (or a questionnaire) for subjective evaluation of a test treatment under investigation (Did we ask the right questions?), (2) strategy for handling of missing value imputation (Can we use a legal procedure, that is, statistical method for missing data imputation, to illegally make up clinical data for analysis?), (3) determination of non-inferiority margin in active control trials (What if there is a disagreement between the principal investigators or sponsors and regulatory reviewers?), (4) the issue of recording replicates in QT/QTc interval prolongation for cardiotoxicity (Is a recording replicate really a replicate?), (5) power calculation for multi-regional clinical trials (Is the selected sample size at specific regions sufficient?), (6) the use of simulation in clinical trials (Clinical trial simulation is ‘a ’ solution not ‘the ’ solution), (7) the issue of multiplicity (Should we always adjust for alpha for multiple comparison?), (8) clinical studies utilising complex innovative design such as adaptive trial design (Can the type I error rate be controlled?), (9) the modernisation of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) (Can current regulatory requirements for Western medicine be applied to TCM directly?) and (10) the assessment of interchangeability for biosimilar products (Is it possible to show that there is same therapeutic effect in any given patient according to FDA guidance?)

Controversial issues are commonly encountered during the conduct of clinical trials. Thus, accuracy and reliability are concerns when assessing the treatment effect at the end of the clinical trials. Shao and Chow 12 recommended evaluating the probability of reproducibility as a tool to monitor the performance of an approved drug product. 12 The reproducibility probability is the chance of observing significant (positive) results of future clinical trials that are to be conducted under similar circumstances (ie, experimental conditions) given the observed clinical results. Note that if p value is slightly less than 5%, which is a prespecified level of significance, the reproducibility probability could be less than 50% or less than a tossing of an unbiased coin. Thus, evaluating the reproducibility probability can be deemed useful, especially after postapproval by both the sponsor and the regulatory agencies to protect patients from an unexpected risk of test treatment.

Shein-Chung Chow, PhD, is a Professor at the Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics, Duke University School of Medicine, Durham, North Carolina, USA. Dr Chow is also a special government employee (SGE) appointed by the FDA as an Oncologic Drug Advisory Committee (ODAC) voting member and Statistical Advisor to the FDA. Dr Chow was the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Biopharmaceutical Statistics (from 1992 to 2020) and the Editor-in-Chief of the Biostatistics Book Series at Chapman and Hall/CRC Press of Taylor & Francis Group. He was elected Fellow of the American Statistical Association in 1995 and was an elected member of the ISI (International Statistical Institute) in 1999. Dr Chow is the author or co-author of over 310 methodology papers and 32 books including Design and Analysis of Clinical Trials , Adaptive Design Methods in Clinical Trials , and, most recently, Innovative Methods for Rare Diseases Drug Development.

Contributors: The contribution of SCC is the development of the idea and structure of the manuscript. The main contribution of SSC is the medical writing of the manuscript, and the contribution of AP is the discussion from industrial experience and perspectives.

Funding: The authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

Competing interests: None declared.

Provenance and peer review: Commissioned; externally peer reviewed.

Data availability statement

Ethics statements, patient consent for publication.

Not applicable.

7 ethically controversial research areas in science and technology

There are a number of scientific endeavors that push the ethical lines of what science should be. let’s take a look at them..

Trevor English

U.S. Army & U.S. DOD

Science and technology are the great drivers of innovation in the world around us. Technological and scientific breakthroughs help people every day, bringing clean water, access to information through the internet, and cures for rare diseases.

Many aspects of scientific discovery face a few ethical questions. But there are also a number of scientific endeavors that push the ethical lines of what science should revolve around. While all the areas of controversy covered here have great benefits, they also come with potential ethical burdens, such as potential harm to animals, people, or the environment. 

It all should make us stop and think – at what point do the negatives of innovation overshadow the good that it may bring? And is there ever an innovation so beneficial to the world that it would be worth compromising on ethics in order to achieve scientific and technological progress? Ponder these questions as we look into 7 ethically controversial areas of science and technology…

Artificial intelligence is at the forefront of technological development in many areas. Almost every company that has anything to do with technology is using it as a buzzword to sell their product: A new dog collar with built-in AI to detect when your dog is in distress! Install our simple computer plug-in and we’ll optimize your workday.

Markus Winkler/Unsplash  

AI certainly has many valuable applications and benefits, but there are also areas where it has some extensive drawbacks. Take two, key AI technologies that have questionable benefits, or rather extensive drawbacks: deep fake and Neuralink .

You’ve probably heard of deep fakes, the face-swapping technology that is used to bring dead movie stars back to life, but can also make world leaders appear to say things they never did –  or for even less family-friendly things.

You might not know about Neuralink, though. It’s one of Elon Musk’s technological endeavors and aims to improve brain-machine interfaces, record memories, and make other technological advancements to do with the brain.  

Focusing in on Neuralink first, questions surround the ethics of connecting human brains to machines and utilizing AI to make human brains function better. Ethical questions primarily focus on the development of said technology and potential side effects. The company’s goal is to optimize human brain function, but the testing that will be needed to get there will be extensive. This will eventually involve testing on human brains, with unknown consequences. At what point is the potential promise of drastic technological advancement not worth the potential human loss in the development of the technology?

Moving on from Neuralink, we’re met with technology, deep fakes, that pose less potential benefit to humanity. There’s arguably little reason that anyone needs to replace someone’s face with another in a video – at least, a little reason that isn’t nefarious. 

Yet, the technology exists to do this, thanks to artificial intelligence and machine learning. It continues to be researched under the guise of benefits to improved video editing technology, but at the end of the day, there’s no way to keep it from being used for negative purposes.

At the end of the day, artificial intelligence has the potential to completely change how we interact with the world, but are there too many negatives? Time will tell…

Through CRISPR , scientists are able to quickly and cheaply edit the human genome. That means researchers can alter DNA sequences and how our genes function. That means the potential to correct genetic defects, preventing the spread of disease –  or making designer babies.

CRISPR is short for ‘Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats’, a gene-editing tool whose best-known form utilizes the Cas9 enzyme to cut strands of DNA. It’s basically like molecular scrapbooking.

The development of CRISPR technology emerged from discoveries of how bacteria defend themselves, by creating a ‘library’ of virus DNA that the bacteria can draw on to destroy the DNA of foreign invaders before they are able to take hold of the organism.

CRISPR has emerged very recently, with a 2017 paper demonstrating using the technique for gene editing.

Chinese scientists have started using CRISPR to engineer designer babies – human babies with genes edited to be resistant to particular viruses. All of this seems can potentially improve humanity’s quality of life, but at what cost? The long-term side effects are still completely unknown. And there is no way to tell where this could end. It is one thing to design a baby to be HIV-resistant, but another to design the appearance and intelligence of a baby.

Thomas Splettstoesser/Wikimedia Commons  

In addition, designer babies also potentially call into question the very definition of human. 

3. Gene editing (GMO)

Moving on from human gene editing in CRISPR, we can examine the ethical issues with gene editing on other organisms, like plants. Gene editing includes any intervention in an organism’s genetics.

This intervention creates GMOs or genetically-modified organisms. This can result in benefits such as stronger, more drought-resistant crops, or crops that have higher yields per acre, among other things advantages.

Today, gene editing occurs across the world and it is conducted on both plants and animals, mostly in the pursuit of better food production. On animals, gene editing has been used to create pigs that are naturally very resistant to the porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome, or PRRS, improving animal welfare.

The gene-editing process for all organisms is overseen by various government agencies, depending on the country. However, the long-term effects of much gene editing are still unknown, and the potential for edited genes to enter the ‘wild’ and alter the environment in unforeseen ways may be high. 

4. Animal testing

Animal testing is one of the most controversial areas of scientific research on this list. Many people couldn’t care less, while others vehemently oppose it. For years, animal testing has been used to create newer and better pharmaceuticals and test consumer products such as makeup, shampoos, etc. 

At the end of the day, however, animal testing places the prevention of human suffering over the prevention of animal suffering. In certain cases, the ethical argument for animal testing may be easier, i.e. where it may lead to advances in preventing disease. In other cases, the argument is harder, as the development of a better lipstick is likely not worth the suffering of animals. 

On the one hand, you have human suffering and on the other, you have animal suffering. And we seem to have no problem with animal suffering as long as it is for a greater cause.

In introducing the subject, we’ve made it seem fairly cut and dry, but an increasing number of scientists are starting to question the relevance of continued animal testing at a time when AI and other tech are starting to be able to accurately model and predict biological interactions. A lot of animals are harmed in the creation of many chemicals and consumer products, and we must each ask ourselves, is it worth it? 

5. Human trials

The progression from animal testing to human testing or human trials occurs with most new medications. Human subject research is often necessary to get drugs to the final phase of regulatory approval. It serves as the final check of how a given medicine or chemical will interact with the human system. Yet, time and time again it has hurt, maimed, or killed individuals. And we have to ask ourselves again, at what point is this not worth it?

History may not be kind to the reputation of human trials, though scientists are making a constant effort to create safety standards in the process.

In 1947, it was discovered that German physicians conducted deadly experiments on concentration camp prisoners during WWII. Some were prosecuted as war criminals in the Nuremberg Trials, after which the Allies then established the Nuremberg Code, the first international document for voluntary human consent for research.

In today’s human testing, all patients must consent to the study. However, as long as human trials are conducted, there are people who are coerced to participate. For this reason, the ethics of the entire situation are still being hotly debated.

6. Weapons and military R&D

Military weapons development is another major crossroad between science and ethics. Take, for example, the development of the atomic bomb under the Manhattan Project during WWII. In many ways, the research conducted during these experiments furthered humanity’s understanding of atoms, molecules, and quantum theory. In other ways, this research eventually led to the deaths of thousands of people.

Military power and weapons technology poses an ethical dilemma largely due to the nature of humankind. There is the potential that failure to invest in a particularly deadly weapon, such as bioweapons, could allow these weapons to be developed and controlled only by people intent on evil.  Yet, once the weapons are developed by anyone, the genie is out of the bottle, and cannot be put back. This could potentially lead to their use by those wanting to commit harm anyway.

israel palacio/Unsplash  

7. Space colonization 

Since it seems like the Earth has seen better days, maybe it’s time to consider moving somewhere else, like Mars. Scientists suspect that there is water on Mars somewhere, and we know the planet also contains resources that may help us survive.

So, why not spend the money developing Mars as a colony?

The biggest ethical questions around Martian colonization are presented when you consider the potential of life on Mars or the potential of future life on Mars. We can’t state with absolute certainty that life could thrive on the planet. Moving people there could be harmful. And the cost of developing programs to colonize Mars is high –  surely the money could be used to help solve some of Earth’s current environmental problems? 

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The answers to these questions may have to do with how humanity should approach its ethical responsibility toward the Earth itself. If you believe humanity’s only ethical responsibility is to our planet, then colonization seems wasteful. If you believe that we need to explore all options, then space exploration makes sense, no matter how expensive. 

NASA/SAIC/Pat Rawlings/Wikimedia Commons  

Closing out this discussion of ethical dilemmas in science and technology we’re left again wondering – what is innovation and the betterment of humanity worth? The answer to that question will vary depending upon who you ask… but ask yourself, what is innovation worth?

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ABOUT THE EDITOR

Trevor English <p>Trevor is a civil engineer (B.S.) by trade and an accomplished writer with a passion for inspiring everyone with new and exciting technologies. He is also a published children&rsquo;s book author and the producer for the YouTube channel Concerning Reality.</p>

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The 7 most controversial psychological experiments of all time

Last updated on March 17th, 2023 at 04:59 am

Psychology is a fascinating field that seeks to understand the human mind and behavior. Psychologists have uncovered numerous insights into how we think, feel, and act through research, experiments, and observations.

However, not all psychological experiments have been met with widespread acceptance and approval. Some experiments have been so controversial that they have sparked ethical debates and even legal action.

From the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment to the controversial Milgram obedience study, let’s delve into the details of each experiment, examine the ethical considerations that arose, and discuss their lasting impact on psychology.

The Stanford Prison Experiment

Kickstarting our list is the controversial Stanford Prison Experiment. Dr. Philip Zimbardo conducted this experiment in 1971 to observe what would happen when you put good people in bad situations.

He took 24 male students and split them into two groups: prisoners and prison guards. The prisoners were stripped of their clothes and given smocks, while the guards were given uniforms and nightsticks.

The study was intended to last two weeks but shut down after six days due to the horrific conditions.

The ‘prisoners’ were constantly harassed and abused by the ‘guards.’ As a result, some even began to show signs of mental breakdowns due to psychological and physical abuse.

This study is still controversial today, with many people arguing that the participants should never have been put in such a position in the first place. However, it undeniably helped shape our understanding of how power can affect people’s behavior.

The Priming Experiment (Elderly Words Provoke Walking Slow)

Next on our list is a study conducted in 1998 by John Bargh. This experiment is often known as the ‘elderly words provoke walking slow’ study, which aimed to observe how subliminal messaging can affect behavior.

They had two groups complete a word association task to do this. One group was given words related to the elderly (for example, ‘wrinkled,’ ‘grey,’ and ‘bingo’), while they gave others neutral words.

The participants were then asked to walk down a hallway, with the researchers timing how long it took them to reach the end.

Unsurprisingly, those in the first group who had been exposed to words related to the elderly walked down the hall significantly slower than those in the second group.

This study was controversial at the time as it questioned how much control we have over our behavior.

At the time, many people were worried that if advertisers and others could influence our behavior in such a way, we would no longer be able to make our own decisions.

However, this was mainly so controversial because it was later debunked. A different lab led by Stephane Doyen could not produce the same results.

While there’s a lot of hearsay and rumors, social priming is a controversial phenomenon that can have dangerous consequences.

Bargh’s original experiment was flawed, inconsistent, lacked thoroughness, biased, and subject to equipment errors.

Even today, it’s still unclear exactly how much subliminal messaging can influence our behavior. 

The Milgram Experiment

Another well-known and controversial experiment is the Milgram experiment conducted in 1961 by Stanley Milgram. This study observed how far people would go in obeying an authority figure, even if it meant harming another person.

Not coincidently, this experiment took place three months after the trial of Adolf Eichmann had started in Jerusalem. 

This iconic experiment attempted to break down the effects of genocide psychologically and see whether Eichmann and others like him were ‘following orders’ during the Holocaust or were evil beings.

He recruited participants and told them they were participating in a study about memory and learning.

They were then paired with another participant, who was an actor, and the test subjects were told to shock them whenever they got an answer wrong.

The shocks were fake, but the actors pretended to be in pain. Even pre-recorded electrical shock sounds were played through the room to ensure the shock seemed authentic.

The actors were strapped to the chair, and the participant was told that this was to ensure the actors could not leave, no matter how bad it got.

The participants were also given a real electric shock before the test to provide them with an idea of what the actors would be going through.

And so the test commenced.

The test was simple. Lists of pairs of words were given and recalled by the participant and the actor.

The participant would then provide a list of four possible answers, and the actor would use a button to identify which sequence of words was correct.

If they were wrong, they would receive an electric shock, and the voltage would be turned up by 15 volts, with the max being 450 volts.

Of course, as the voltage was increased, the actors would pretend to be in more pain. In later versions of the experiment, some actors would even beg for mercy or plead that they had a heart condition. But still, the shocks continued.

Whenever the participant started to show signs that they wanted to stop the experiment, or at least not carry on, the experimenters replied with these statements, in this order of severity.

• Please continue  or  Please go on.
• The experiment requires that you continue.
• It is absolutely essential that you continue.
• You have no other choice; you  must  go on.

They would move on to the next if the first statement didn’t work. The experiment would stop if the participant didn’t continue after the fourth prompt.

As the test was run, 65% of the participants made it to the final 450-volt mark, all participants making it to at least the 300-volt mark, showcasing that people will go to great lengths to obey authority figures.

This study was controversial because it showed how easily people could be coerced into harming others, even if they don’t want to. It also raised ethical concerns about the use of deception in research.

Despite these concerns, the Milgram experiment is still considered a critical study, providing insight into how people respond to authority figures.

The ‘Little Albert’ Experiment

One of the most controversial psychological experiments of all time is the ‘Little Albert’ experiment , conducted by John Watson and Rosalie Rayner in 1920. This study aimed to observe how fear could be conditioned in a child.

To do this, they used a nine-month-old boy who was called Albert. He was exposed to several animals, including rats, rabbits, and dogs. Each time he saw them, he was given a slight shock.

After some time, Albert began to show signs of fear whenever he saw any of the animals, even if he wasn’t shocked. This showed that fear can be conditioned in children and doesn’t happen naturally.

The ‘Little Albert’ experiment was controversial because it showed how easy it is to manipulate a child’s emotions. It also raised ethical concerns about the use of animals in research.

Despite these concerns, the ‘Little Albert’ experiment is still considered a critical study, as it provides insight into how fear is learned, enabling us to understand better and treat anxiety disorders.

The Facebook Emotion Experiment

One of the most recent and controversial psychological experiments is the Facebook emotion experiment , conducted by a team of researchers from Cornell University in 2014. This study aimed to observe how social media can affect our emotions.

To do this, they manipulated the news feeds of over 700,000 Facebook users, showing some users positive content and others negative content. They then monitored how these users responded emotionally.

The study results showed that those exposed to positive content were more likely to post positive content themselves, and vice versa for those exposed to negative content.

This study was controversial because it showed that social media could impact our emotions. It also raised ethical concerns about the manipulation of people’s news feeds.

Despite these concerns, the Facebook emotion experiment is still considered an important study, providing insight into how social media can affect our moods and behaviors.

You can see how these controversial psychological experiments have shaped our understanding of the human mind.

While they may have raised some ethical concerns, they are still essential studiesproviding valuable insights into our thinking and behaviore.

Operation Midnight Climax

In the 1950s, the CIA ran what was known as ‘Operation Midnight Climax’ under the highly controversial MKULTRA program.

Under this program, the CIA used prostitutes to lure men back to safe houses in New York and San Francisco, where they would be drugged without their knowledge (usually slipping them into drinks) and observed through one-way mirrors.

Such drugs included illegal chemicals, such as LSD.

Over the decade this program was run, the government was provided with information on how mind-altering drugs and narcotics affected the human mind and their uses. Additionally, it helped develop better surveillance equipment, and there are reports of sexual blackmail.

However, the operation was reportedly shut down in 1965, though some say it continued unofficially under different names.

The Monster Study

In concluding our list, we have one of the most traumatic and controversial studies ever, which became known as The Monster Study of 1939.

It started with two researchers, Wendall Johnson and Mary Tudor, who were deep-diving into how the process and outcomes of positive reinforcement work.

Tudor was interested in how stuttering could be lessened or even cured by providing positive reinforcement to those who spoke without issues.

Sounds reasonable for now.

To figure this out, Wendall and Johnson divided 22 orphaned children between six and nine with no history of speech problems into two groups.

The first group was constantly bombarded with positive feedback and praise for how excellent and fluent their speech was, regardless of what their speech was like.

However, the second group was treated a little differently. They would receive negative feedback and be punished, regardless of their speech fluency.

Things got so bad for this group that one girl even ran away from the orphanage where this was taking place, as reported by the New York Times at the time.

If you put yourself in that position and imagine what life must have been like as a six-year-old going through such trauma, and you have no understanding of why you’ll be quick to see how cruel and controversial this experiment was.

These children carried that trauma with them for the rest of their lives.

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2 thoughts on “the 7 most controversial psychological experiments of all time”.

Why was the Tuskegee Syphilis Study not on this list? That was extremely horrific and controversial that went on for 40 years!

Because it’s an article limited to psychological experiments, as per the title, perhaps

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Suppressing Science: Are We Overreacting to Controversial Findings?

By Association for Psychological Science October 11, 2023

Controversial research findings can lead to defensive reactions, including calls for censorship. New research has shown that people tend to exaggerate the potential of research findings to promote harmful actions and underestimate the support for constructive reactions. This tendency holds true across ideologies and demographic groups. The findings raise questions about the editorial guidelines of academic journals and the possible unwarranted suppression of scientific research.

Controversial research often sparks defensive reactions, sometimes even leading to calls for censorship, especially if the findings clash with established ideologies. However, a pair of studies published in the journal Psychological Science ,  by authors Cory J. Clark ( University of Pennsylvania ), Maja Graso ( University of Groningen ), Ilana Redstone ( University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign ), and Philip E. Tetlock ( University of Pennsylvania ), indicates that people tend to overestimate the risk that research findings will fuel public support for harmful actions.

Harmful actions related to research findings, according to the authors, can include censoring research, defunding related programs, and promoting bias against a community of people. Conversely, helpful reactions could include behaviors such as funding additional research, investing in programs, and offering educational resources. 

“With this set of studies, we learned that expectations about scientific consequences might have a negativity bias,” Clark told APS in an interview. “We found that participants consistently overestimated support for harmful behavioral reactions and consistently underestimated support for helpful behavioral reactions. And those more likely to overestimate harms tended to be more supportive of censoring scientific research.” 

Study Methodology and Key Findings

In their first study, Clark and colleagues had 983 online participants read an excerpt from the discussion sections of five real studies with findings that some people might perceive as controversial. Two of these excerpts highlighted findings that the researchers expected would be counter to the expectations of people with liberal views (“female protégés benefit more when they have male than female mentors,” and “there is an absence of evidence of racial discrimination against ethnic minorities in police shootings”). Two excerpts were expected to be surprising to more conservative people (“activating Christian concepts increases racial prejudice,” and “children with same-sex parents are no worse off than children with opposite-sex parents”).

The fifth excerpt was intended to be more ideologically neutral (“experiencing child sexual abuse does not cause severe and long-lasting psychological harm for all victims”). The researchers also included two versions of an excerpt from a fictitious study about ideological intolerance suggesting that either liberals or conservatives were less tolerant of ideological differences. 

After reading each excerpt, one-third of participants were asked to self-report which of the 10 actions they would support taking in response to each study’s findings. After reading about the mentorship study, for example, participants in the self-report group were asked if they would support discouraging early-career female researchers from approaching female mentors, conducting more research on the subject, and investing in mentorship development programs, among other reactions. The remaining two-thirds of participants were asked to estimate what percentage of U.S. adults they thought would support the various actions. 

Participants in the estimation group were found to consistently underestimate the percentage of people who would support helpful actions—for example, funding additional research and interventions designed to reduce child sexual abuse and political intolerance.

They also overestimated the percentage of adults who would support harmful actions like withdrawing support from a community or blocking groups of people from leadership positions. These harm estimations did not vary based on the findings’ perceived offensiveness, but participants were more likely to describe findings that they found more offensive as less comprehensible.  

There was some evidence that participants who were more conservative had a greater tendency to overestimate the percentage of people who would support harmful actions. In addition, more conservative and younger participants were more likely to support censoring research. Participants’ responses to the political intolerance study did not vary based on their own ideology, however. 

Honesty in Responses

Clark and colleagues further tested the honesty of these responses through a study of 882 participants. This time, participants in the self-report group were asked to identify which initiatives they would like the researchers to donate $100 to in response to three scientific findings. To encourage honesty, researchers informed participants that $100 would be donated to each cause that a majority of participants supported. Meanwhile, participants in the estimation group were told that the five participants with the most accurate estimates would receive $100 gift cards. 

Despite this additional financial motivation, participants’ responses largely mirrored those in the first study. A notable exception was that women were found to support censorship at a higher rate than men. 

“Although people accurately predicted that helpful reactions were more supported than harmful ones, their deviation from accuracy was consistently in the negative direction: People overpredicted the costs and underpredicted the benefits,” Clark and colleagues wrote. 

Given that some academic journals have added harm-based criteria to their editorial guidelines, Clark would like to further explore how these findings may apply to editors’ and reviewers’ perceptions of scientific risk, as well as how harm risks can be estimated more accurately. 

“Our results suggest the possibility that these intuitions may be systematically biased toward overestimating harms,” Clark told APS. “Intuitions alone may be untrustworthy and lead to the unnecessary suppression of science.” 

Reference: “Harm Hypervigilance in Public Reactions to Scientific Evidence” by Cory J. Clark, Maja Graso, Ilana Redstone and Philip E. Tetlock, 1 June 2023, Psychological Science . DOI: 10.1177/09567976231168777

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3 comments on "suppressing science: are we overreacting to controversial findings".

If it isn’t controversial, then it probably isn’t science. Science has always been an adversarial blood sport. However, in recent years, the quality of research has declined so much in some areas that people are wringing their hands over what they call the Crisis of Repeatability.

If the results or conclusions of a study seem off, it is incumbent on the peers to try to replicate the study, or design a different one, to see if they get the same results. Censorship is never the answer and one should wonder why anyone would call for that.

This is a reflection of the problem with recent graduates: https://news.yahoo.com/act-test-scores-us-students-040600305.html

I would hope that the journalists that form a microcosm of information of the sciences have a better understanding and honorable nature to report on findings that can help the success of their field and scientific knowledge I do get disappointed to read skewed individual opinion, but a person can tell the difference it’s just a waste of time.

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August 18, 2023

This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies . Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility:

fact-checked

peer-reviewed publication

trusted source

Public may overestimate pushback against controversial research findings

by Association for Psychological Science

Controversial research can put people on the defensive and may even lead to calls to censor findings that conflict with a particular ideological perspective. However, a pair of studies published in Psychological Science , by authors Cory J. Clark (University of Pennsylvania), Maja Graso (University of Groningen), Ilana Redstone (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign), and Philip E. Tetlock (University of Pennsylvania), suggest a tendency to overestimate the risk that research findings will fuel public support for harmful actions.

Harmful actions related to research findings, according to the authors, can include censoring research, defunding related programs, and promoting bias against a community of people. Conversely, helpful reactions could include behaviors such as funding additional research, investing in programs, and offering educational resources.

"With this set of studies, we learned that expectations about scientific consequences might have a negativity bias," Clark told APS in an interview. "We found that participants consistently overestimated support for harmful behavioral reactions and consistently underestimated support for helpful behavioral reactions. And those more likely to overestimate harms tended to be more supportive of censoring scientific research."

In their first study, Clark and colleagues had 983 online participants read an excerpt from the discussion sections of five real studies with findings that some people might perceive as controversial. Two of these excerpts highlighted findings that the researchers expected would be counter to the expectations of people with liberal views ("female protégés benefit more when they have male than female mentors," and "there is an absence of evidence of racial discrimination against ethnic minorities in police shootings").

Two excerpts were expected to be surprising to more conservative people ("activating Christian concepts increases racial prejudice," and "children with same-sex parents are no worse off than children with opposite-sex parents"). The fifth excerpt was intended to be more ideologically neutral ("experiencing child sexual abuse does not cause severe and long-lasting psychological harm for all victims"). The researchers also included two versions of an excerpt from a fictitious study about ideological intolerance suggesting that either liberals or conservatives were less tolerant of ideological differences.

After reading each excerpt, one third of participants were asked to self-report which of 10 actions they would support taking in response to each study's findings. After reading about the mentorship study, for example, participants in the self-report group were asked if they would support discouraging early-career female researchers from approaching female mentors, conducting more research on the subject, and investing in mentorship development programs, among other reactions. The remaining two thirds of participants were asked to estimate what percentage of U.S. adults they thought would support the various actions.

Participants in the estimation group were found to consistently underestimate the percentage of people who would support helpful actions—for example, funding additional research and interventions designed to reduce child sexual abuse and political intolerance. They also overestimated the percentage of adults who would support harmful actions like withdrawing support from a community or blocking groups of people from leadership positions. These harm estimations did not vary based on findings' perceived offensiveness, but participants were more likely to describe findings that they found more offensive as less comprehensible.

There was some evidence that participants who were more conservative had a greater tendency to overestimate the percentage of people who would support harmful actions. In addition, more conservative and younger participants were more likely to support censoring research. Participants' responses to the political intolerance study did not vary based on their own ideology, however.

Clark and colleagues further tested the honesty of these responses through a study of 882 participants. This time, participants in the self-report group were asked to identify which initiatives they would like the researchers to donate $100 to in response to three scientific findings. To encourage honesty, researchers informed participants that $100 would be donated to each cause that a majority of participants supported. Meanwhile, participants in the estimation group were told that the five participants with the most accurate estimates would receive $100 gift cards.

Despite this additional financial motivation, participants' responses largely mirrored those in the first study. A notable exception was that women were found to support censorship at a higher rate than men.

"Although people accurately predicted that helpful reactions were more supported than harmful ones, their deviation from accuracy was consistently in the negative direction: People overpredicted the costs and underpredicted the benefits," Clark and colleagues wrote.

Given that some academic journals have added harm-based criteria to their editorial guidelines, Clark would like to further explore how these findings may apply to editors' and reviewers' perceptions of scientific risk, as well as how harm risks can be estimated more accurately.

"Our results suggest the possibility that these intuitions may be systematically biased toward overestimating harms," Clark told APS. "Intuitions alone may be untrustworthy and lead to the unnecessary suppression of science."

Journal information: Psychological Science

Provided by Association for Psychological Science

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Saturated fats and cardiovascular health: Current evidence and controversies

Affiliations.

• 1 Indiana University, Department of Applied Health Science, School of Public Health, 1025 East 7th Street, Suite 111, Bloomington, IN 47405, USA; Midwest Biomedical Research, 211 East Lake Street, Suite 3, Addison, IL 60101, USA. Electronic address: [email protected].
• 2 Midwest Biomedical Research, 211 East Lake Street, Suite 3, Addison, IL 60101, USA. Electronic address: [email protected].
• 3 Kasiska Division of Health Sciences, Idaho State University, 921 South 8th Avenue, Pocatello, ID 83209, USA. Electronic address: [email protected].
• PMID: 34649831
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jacl.2021.09.049

A diet high in saturated fatty acids (SFA) is a suspected contributor to atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD) risk, in large part because of an effect to raise the low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C) concentration. Most dietary guidance from health authorities advocates limiting intake of SFA, particularly for people with clinical ASCVD, dyslipidemia, or diabetes mellitus. However, recent reviews have highlighted controversies regarding SFA intake and cardiovascular health. This brief editorial commentary includes a discussion of the evidence regarding SFA intake and cardiovascular health, outlines gaps in the available evidence, and proposes tentative conclusions based on what is known today about SFA consumption and ASCVD risk. Results from observational studies demonstrate that dietary patterns with lower average intakes of SFA are associated with favorable cardiovascular outcomes. Additionally, although the number of randomized controlled trials testing the effects of reducing SFA intake on ASCVD outcomes is limited, the available evidence supports the view that replacing SFA with unsaturated fatty acids, particularly polyunsaturated fatty acids, may reduce ASCVD risk. Beyond raising LDL-C and atherogenic lipoprotein particle concentrations, higher intakes of SFA may influence pathways affecting inflammation, cardiac rhythm, hemostasis, apolipoprotein CIII production, and high-density lipoprotein function. However, the impacts of these effects on ASCVD risk remain uncertain. In the authors' view, the totality of the evidence supports the current recommendation to limit SFA intake to <10% of total daily energy for the general healthy population and further (e.g., to 5-6% of total daily energy) for patients with hypercholesterolemia.

Keywords: Atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease; Cardiovascular health; Cardiovascular outcomes; Dietary guidelines; Lipoprotein lipids; Saturated fatty acids.

Copyright © 2021. Published by Elsevier Inc.

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Declaration of Competing Interest KCM and MRD are employees of Midwest Biomedical Research, which has received research funding in the past 12 months from Beef Checkoff, General Mills, Hass Avocado Board, Matinas BioPharma, National Dairy Council, and PepsiCo. CFK has no disclosures.

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Six distinct types of depression identified in Stanford Medicine-led study

Brain imaging, known as functional MRI, combined with machine learning can predict a treatment response based on one’s depression “biotype.”

June 17, 2024 - By Rachel Tompa

Researchers have identified six subtypes of depression, paving the way toward personalized treatment. Damerfie -   stock.adobe.com

In the not-too-distant future, a screening assessment for depression could include a quick brain scan to identify the best treatment.

Brain imaging combined with machine learning can reveal subtypes of depression and anxiety, according to a new study led by researchers at Stanford Medicine. The study , published June 17 in the journal Nature Medicine , sorts depression into six biological subtypes, or “biotypes,” and identifies treatments that are more likely or less likely to work for three of these subtypes.

Better methods for matching patients with treatments are desperately needed, said the study’s senior author,  Leanne Williams , PhD, the Vincent V.C. Woo Professor, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, and the director of Stanford Medicine’s Center for Precision Mental Health and Wellness . Williams, who lost her partner to depression in 2015, has focused her work on pioneering the field of precision psychiatry .

Around 30% of people with depression have what’s known as treatment-resistant depression , meaning multiple kinds of medication or therapy have failed to improve their symptoms. And for up to two-thirds of people with depression, treatment fails to fully reverse their symptoms to healthy levels.  

That’s in part because there’s no good way to know which antidepressant or type of therapy could help a given patient. Medications are prescribed through a trial-and-error method, so it can take months or years to land on a drug that works — if it ever happens. And spending so long trying treatment after treatment, only to experience no relief, can worsen depression symptoms.

“The goal of our work is figuring out how we can get it right the first time,” Williams said. “It’s very frustrating to be in the field of depression and not have a better alternative to this one-size-fits-all approach.”

Biotypes predict treatment response

To better understand the biology underlying depression and anxiety, Williams and her colleagues assessed 801 study participants who were previously diagnosed with depression or anxiety using the imaging technology known as functional MRI, or fMRI, to measure brain activity. They scanned the volunteers’ brains at rest and when they were engaged in different tasks designed to test their cognitive and emotional functioning. The scientists narrowed in on regions of the brain, and the connections between them, that were already known to play a role in depression.

Using a machine learning approach known as cluster analysis to group the patients’ brain images, they identified six distinct patterns of activity in the brain regions they studied.

Leanne Williams

The scientists also randomly assigned 250 of the study participants to receive one of three commonly used antidepressants or behavioral talk therapy. Patients with one subtype, which is characterized by overactivity in cognitive regions of the brain, experienced the best response to the antidepressant venlafaxine (commonly known as Effexor) compared with those who have other biotypes. Those with another subtype, whose brains at rest had higher levels of activity among three regions associated with depression and problem-solving, had better alleviation of symptoms with behavioral talk therapy. And those with a third subtype, who had lower levels of activity at rest in the brain circuit that controls attention, were less likely to see improvement of their symptoms with talk therapy than those with other biotypes.

The biotypes and their response to behavioral therapy make sense based on what they know about these regions of the brain, said Jun Ma, MD, PhD, the Beth and George Vitoux Professor of Medicine at the University of Illinois Chicago and one of the authors of the study. The type of therapy used in their trial teaches patients skills to better address daily problems, so the high levels of activity in these brain regions may allow patients with that biotype to more readily adopt new skills. As for those with lower activity in the region associated with attention and engagement, Ma said it’s possible that pharmaceutical treatment to first address that lower activity could help those patients gain more from talk therapy.

“To our knowledge, this is the first time we’ve been able to demonstrate that depression can be explained by different disruptions to the functioning of the brain,” Williams said. “In essence, it’s a demonstration of a personalized medicine approach for mental health based on objective measures of brain function.”

In another recently published study , Williams and her team showed that using fMRI brain imaging improves their ability to identify individuals likely to respond to antidepressant treatment. In that study, the scientists focused on a subtype they call the cognitive biotype of depression, which affects more than a quarter of those with depression and is less likely to respond to standard antidepressants. By identifying those with the cognitive biotype using fMRI, the researchers accurately predicted the likelihood of remission in 63% of patients, compared with 36% accuracy without using brain imaging. That improved accuracy means that providers may be more likely to get the treatment right the first time. The scientists are now studying novel treatments for this biotype with the hope of finding more options for those who don’t respond to standard antidepressants.

Further explorations of depression

The different biotypes also correlate with differences in symptoms and task performance among the trial participants. Those with overactive cognitive regions of the brain, for example, had higher levels of anhedonia (inability to feel pleasure) than those with other biotypes; they also performed worse on executive function tasks. Those with the subtype that responded best to talk therapy also made errors on executive function tasks but performed well on cognitive tasks.

One of the six biotypes uncovered in the study showed no noticeable brain activity differences in the imaged regions from the activity of people without depression. Williams believes they likely haven’t explored the full range of brain biology underlying this disorder — their study focused on regions known to be involved in depression and anxiety, but there could be other types of dysfunction in this biotype that their imaging didn’t capture.

Williams and her team are expanding the imaging study to include more participants. She also wants to test more kinds of treatments in all six biotypes, including medicines that haven’t traditionally been used for depression.

Her colleague  Laura Hack , MD, PhD, an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, has begun using the imaging technique in her clinical practice at Stanford Medicine through an experimental protocol . The team also wants to establish easy-to-follow standards for the method so that other practicing psychiatrists can begin implementing it.

“To really move the field toward precision psychiatry, we need to identify treatments most likely to be effective for patients and get them on that treatment as soon as possible,” Ma said. “Having information on their brain function, in particular the validated signatures we evaluated in this study, would help inform more precise treatment and prescriptions for individuals.”

Researchers from Columbia University; Yale University School of Medicine; the University of California, Los Angeles; UC San Francisco; the University of Sydney; the University of Texas MD Anderson; and the University of Illinois Chicago also contributed to the study.

Datasets in the study were funded by the National Institutes of Health (grant numbers R01MH101496, UH2HL132368, U01MH109985 and U01MH136062) and by Brain Resource Ltd.

• Rachel Tompa Rachel Tompa is a freelance science writer.

About Stanford Medicine

Stanford Medicine is an integrated academic health system comprising the Stanford School of Medicine and adult and pediatric health care delivery systems. Together, they harness the full potential of biomedicine through collaborative research, education and clinical care for patients. For more information, please visit med.stanford.edu .

Hope amid crisis

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Utilizing ChatGPT as a scientific reasoning engine to differentiate conflicting evidence and summarize challenges in controversial clinical questions

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Shiyao Xie, Wenjing Zhao, Guanghui Deng, Guohua He, Na He, Zhenhua Lu, Weihua Hu, Mingming Zhao, Jian Du, Utilizing ChatGPT as a scientific reasoning engine to differentiate conflicting evidence and summarize challenges in controversial clinical questions, Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association , Volume 31, Issue 7, July 2024, Pages 1551–1560, https://doi.org/10.1093/jamia/ocae100

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Synthesizing and evaluating inconsistent medical evidence is essential in evidence-based medicine. This study aimed to employ ChatGPT as a sophisticated scientific reasoning engine to identify conflicting clinical evidence and summarize unresolved questions to inform further research.

We evaluated ChatGPT’s effectiveness in identifying conflicting evidence and investigated its principles of logical reasoning. An automated framework was developed to generate a PubMed dataset focused on controversial clinical topics. ChatGPT analyzed this dataset to identify consensus and controversy, and to formulate unsolved research questions. Expert evaluations were conducted 1) on the consensus and controversy for factual consistency, comprehensiveness, and potential harm and, 2) on the research questions for relevance, innovation, clarity, and specificity.

The gpt-4-1106-preview model achieved a 90% recall rate in detecting inconsistent claim pairs within a ternary assertions setup. Notably, without explicit reasoning prompts, ChatGPT provided sound reasoning for the assertions between claims and hypotheses, based on an analysis grounded in relevance, specificity, and certainty. ChatGPT’s conclusions of consensus and controversies in clinical literature were comprehensive and factually consistent. The research questions proposed by ChatGPT received high expert ratings.

Our experiment implies that, in evaluating the relationship between evidence and claims, ChatGPT considered more detailed information beyond a straightforward assessment of sentimental orientation. This ability to process intricate information and conduct scientific reasoning regarding sentiment is noteworthy, particularly as this pattern emerged without explicit guidance or directives in prompts, highlighting ChatGPT’s inherent logical reasoning capabilities.

This study demonstrated ChatGPT’s capacity to evaluate and interpret scientific claims. Such proficiency can be generalized to broader clinical research literature. ChatGPT effectively aids in facilitating clinical studies by proposing unresolved challenges based on analysis of existing studies. However, caution is advised as ChatGPT’s outputs are inferences drawn from the input literature and could be harmful to clinical practice.

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Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World

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• Cultural Issues and the 2024 Election

Immigration, gender identity, racial diversity and views of a changing society

Table of contents.

• Voters’ views about race and society, the impact of the legacy of slavery
• Most voters, but not all, view the nation’s diversity as a strength
• How should the country handle undocumented immigrants currently in the U.S.?
• Attitudes toward hearing other languages in public places
• Biden and Trump supporters’ views about discussing America’s historical successes, failures
• How does the U.S. compare with other countries?
• Views of women’s progress
• How much of a priority should marriage and children be?
• Abortion, IVF access and birth control
• Views of gender identity
• Voters’ attitudes toward use of gender-neutral pronouns
• Societal impact of more social acceptance of lesbian, gay, bisexual people
• Religion and government policy
• How much influence should the Bible have on the nation’s laws, if any?
• Views on the federal government’s role in promoting Christian values
• Most voters say it is not necessary to believe in God to be moral
• Is the justice system too tough on criminals, or not tough enough?
• Policing and law enforcement
• How Trump, Biden supporters view gun rights and ownership
• Views on the increasing number of guns in the U.S.
• Acknowledgments
• The American Trends Panel survey methodology

Pew Research Center conducted this study to understand voters’ political values related to cultural issues in the context of the 2024 election. For this analysis, we surveyed 8,709 adults, including 7,166 registered voters, from April 8 to 14, 2024. Everyone who took part in this survey is a member of the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories. Read more about the ATP’s methodology . 

Here are the questions used for the report and its methodology . 

The 2024 presidential campaign is taking place amid intense debates over such topics as immigration, growing racial and ethnic diversity in the United States, the changing American family, crime and reproductive issues.

These topics sometimes are grouped together as “culture war” or “woke” issues.

On most – but not all – of these topics, voters who support President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump have starkly different opinions. Yet in many cases, Biden and Trump supporters are themselves sharply divided.

Across more than 30 measures, some of the widest differences are on issues that have divided Americans for decades: the role of guns in society, as well as race and the legacy of slavery.

Yet, Biden and Trump supporters also have very different opinions across many other topics likely to be focal points in the campaign: gender identity and sexual orientation, crime and policing, reproductive issues, the influence of religion on society and the changes that have transformed life in the U.S. in recent decades.

A new survey by Pew Research Center of 8,709 adults – including 7,166 registered voters – conducted April 8-14, 2024, examines the political values of the Biden and Trump coalitions that underlie policy attitudes in many of these areas.

Jump to read about Biden and Trump supporters’ views on: Race and racial diversity | Immigration and language | American history | Gender and family | Gender identity and sexual orientation | Religion | Crime and policing | Guns

Among the major findings:

Enduring divisions on race and the legacy of slavery. Just 27% of registered voters who support Trump say the legacy of slavery affects the position of Black people in America today a great deal or fair amount; 73% say it has little or no impact.

Opinions among Biden supporters are nearly the opposite: 79% say slavery’s legacy still affects the position of Black people, while 20% say it has not too much or no effect.

Wide gaps on gender identity and same-sex marriage. While Americans have complex opinions on gender identity and transgender rights , a growing share of voters (65%) say that whether a person is a man or woman is determined by the sex they were assigned at birth. About a third (34%) say someone can be a man or woman, even if that differs from their sex at birth.

• Nearly all Trump supporters (90%) say gender is determined by sex at birth. By contrast, Biden supporters are more divided. About six-in-ten (59%) say gender can be different from sex at birth; 39% say gender is determined by sex at birth.
• Nearly a decade after the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage , Biden and Trump supporters have starkly different views of the impact of that historic ruling. Biden supporters are about five times as likely (57%) as Trump supporters (11%) to say legalization of same-sex marriage is good for society.

Most Trump voters now favor a “national effort to deport” all those in the U.S. illegally. Opposition to allowing undocumented immigrants to stay in the country legally if they meet certain requirements has risen in recent years, driven largely by Republican and Republican-leaning registered voters.

• Nearly two-thirds of Trump backers (63%) support a national effort to deport all those in the country illegally, compared with just 11% of Biden supporters.

Divided views of the criminal justice system. A majority of voters (61%) say the criminal justice system is generally “not tough enough on criminals.” Just 13% say the system is too tough, while 25% say it treats criminals about right.

• Trump supporters (81%) are about twice as likely as Biden supporters (40%) to say the criminal justice system is not tough enough on criminals.
• Yet, there are much narrower differences in several priorities for the police and law enforcement: Overwhelming majorities of Biden and Trump supporters say it is extremely or very important for police and law enforcement to keep communities safe and to treat people of all racial and ethnic groups equally.

The changing American family. The structure of American family is very different than it was 40 or 50 years ago . Biden and Trump supporters view these changes very differently:   

• Roughly three times as many Trump supporters as Biden supporters say society is better if people prioritize marriage and family (59% vs. 19%).
• And Trump supporters are far more likely to take a negative view of the nation’s falling birth rate: 47% say people having fewer children is a bad thing, compared with 23% of Biden supporters.

Divisions on abortion, more agreement on availability of contraceptives. Since the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision overturning Roe v. Wade, which guaranteed a right to abortion, support for legal abortion has ticked up in both parties.

• Today, 88% of Biden supporters say abortion should be legal in all or most cases; 38% of Trump supporters say the same.

By contrast, voters – including large majorities of both candidates’ supporters – overwhelmingly say the wide availability of birth control pills, condoms and other forms of contraception is good for society.

Broad support among voters for discussing America’s historical successes – and its flaws. The survey finds that while Biden and Trump supporters have profoundly different attitudes on many cultural issues, they mostly support the discussion of America’s historical successes, as well as its flaws.

• Nearly identical shares of Biden (74%) and Trump supporters (71%) say it is extremely or very important to have public discussions about the country’s historical successes and strengths.
• 78% of Biden supporters and 60% of Trump supporters say it is at least very important to have public discussions about the country’s failures and flaws.

Voters are very positive about more open discussions of mental health. More than eight-in-ten voters (87%) say that more people openly discussing mental health and well-being is good for society. This includes large majorities of both Biden (94% good thing) and Trump supporters (79%).

Related: Who do Americans feel comfortable talking to about their mental health?

There is broad skepticism about the increased use of artificial intelligence (AI) in daily life. More than half of voters (55%) say this is bad for society, while 21% see this as a good thing (24% say it is neither good nor bad). There are only modest differences in these views between Trump supporters (59% say this is bad for society) and Biden supporters (51%).

Related: Growing public concern about the role of artificial intelligence in everyday life

Voters’ comfort level with some common – and less common – experiences

To some extent, voters’ political values are reflected in whether or not they’re comfortable with fairly common experiences.

A large share of voters (80%), including sizable majorities of Biden and Trump supporters, say they are comfortable with someone they don’t know saying they will keep them in their prayers.

Most women in opposite-sex marriages continue to take their husbands’ last names when they marry. Still, three-quarters of voters say they are comfortable with women not taking their husbands names.

Trump supporters are less comfortable than Biden supporters with women not taking their husbands’ last names. And among men who support the former president, 44% are uncomfortable with this practice, compared with 29% of women who support Trump.

There is a wider gap between Biden and Trump voters in comfort with people speaking a language other than English in public places in their communities. More than eight-in-ten Biden supporters (83%) are comfortable hearing languages other than English, compared with a narrow majority of Trump supporters (54%).

And, reflecting the wide divide between the two sides in opinions on transgender issues, just 20% of Trump supporters say they are comfortable with someone using “they/them” instead of “he” or “she” to describe themselves. More than three times as many Biden supporters (66%) – including 79% of Biden supporters under age 50 – say they are comfortable with the use of these gender-neutral pronouns.

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Americans’ Views of Government’s Role: Persistent Divisions and Areas of Agreement

6 facts about presidential and vice presidential debates, biden, trump are least-liked pair of major party presidential candidates in at least 3 decades, more than half of americans are following election news closely, and many are already worn out, americans have mixed views about how the news media cover biden’s, trump’s ages, most popular, report materials.

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Pew Research Center revises report about 'racial conspiracy theories' after backlash

The Pew Research Center has revised a report after it received criticism for saying a majority of Black Americans believe “racial conspiracy theories” about U.S. institutions. 

In the report released June 10 titled “Most Black Americans Believe Racial Conspiracy Theories About U.S. Institutions,” Pew detailed “the suspicions that Black adults might have about the actions of U.S. institutions based on their personal and collective historical experiences with racial discrimination.” Survey respondents highlighted issues such as discrimination in the medical field, incarceration, and guns and drugs in Black communities. 

The report’s initial title prompted swift backlash from critics who said “racial conspiracy theories” implied that Black Americans’ distrust of U.S. institutions is irrational and without historical context. The report made brief mention of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment , a medical scandal that fueled distrust in medical institutions. 

JustLeadershipUSA, a social justice organization, was one of the most vocal critics of the  report, calling it “ shockingly offensive ” for labeling Black Americans’ distrust over well-substantiated discrimination as conspiracy theories.

Two days later, Pew officials marked the report as being under revision and acknowledged that using the phrase “racial conspiracy theories” was not the best choice. 

“The comments were so thoughtful,” Neha Sahgal, vice president of research at Pew Research Center, said of the criticism. Sahgal said leaders at Pew “paid attention to what people were trying to tell us.”

“Upon reflection, we felt that this editorial shorthand detracted from the findings of this report, which we maintain are hugely important at this time in our country,” Sahgal said. “We have since revised the report. We have taken accountability for using a shorthand that was inappropriate.”

Pew released the revised report Saturday with a new title: “ Most Black Americans Believe U.S. Institutions Were Designed To Hold Black People Back .” The updated report includes a new headline, additional context and direct quotes from respondents.

“This is very important and an excellent update to correct those errors in the original version,” DeAnna Hoskins, president of JustLeadershipUSA, said. “But why didn’t you do that from the beginning?”

Before Pew’s acknowledgement and revisions, one person wrote in a post on X : “This new Pew report on Black belief in ‘conspiracy theories’ is interesting, but I take issue with the ‘CT’ label bc of how it lumps in well-substantiated truths alongside bunk like Q*Anon and flat earth.”

There are well-documented episodes of discrimination and targeting throughout the nation’s history, from the Tuskegee experiment to exclusion of Black Americans from New Deal programs and government targeting of civil rights and Black Power leaders under COINTELPRO .

“We have to ask: Why would the people at the Pew Research Center call the opinion of the vast majority of Black Americans—which is rooted in facts, history, and lived experience—a ‘conspiracy theory,’ when it is actually a reality?” Hoskins wrote in a statement on the organization’s website. 

In an interview with NBC News, Hoskins said  it was irresponsible of Pew to equate Black people’s concerns with conspiracy theories at such a politically turbulent time in the country.

“We’re talking about election fraud, we’re talking about QAnon — you were throwing us into that,” Hoskins said of Pew. 

The report states that most Black Americans believe U.S. institutions fall short “when it comes to treating Black people fairly.” More than 60% of Black Americans surveyed cited prison, political and economic systems as just some of the institutions intentionally designed to “hold Black people back, either a great deal or a fair amount.”

“Black Americans’ mistrust of U.S. institutions is informed by history, from slavery to the implementation of Jim Crow laws in the South, to the rise of mass incarceration and more,” the updated report states. “Several studies show that racial disparities in income , wealth , education , imprisonment and health outcomes persist to this day.”

Char Adams is a reporter for NBC BLK who writes about race.