This is an ABC podcast.

The history of scientific research is littered with examples of unethical experiments.

The most infamous of these are pretty well known, like the horrific medical procedures,

Nazi doctors, carried out on prisoners during the Holocaust or the

Stanford Prison Experiment, where participants had to act as inmates or guards in a mock prison,

which they did to a terrifying degree. Both those examples led to ethical standards being introduced

in their respective fields of medicine

and psychology.

But we're going to take a closer look at the field of psychology over the next couple of episodes,

with a focus on some lesser-known studies.

I first heard about the monster study when researching a book on stuttering I wrote.

If you look at Harlow as an example,

the worst of those experiments were a device,

which he called the pit of despair.

It's a pretty horrifying attempt to prove a scientific theory.

And there they produce some really psychotic monkeys, some of whom could never be fixed.

This is All in the Mind. I'm Sana Khadar.

We're going to find out how we arrived at the ethics standards we have today and what it costs to get here.

In the case of the monster study, it has no validity, no use and should never have happened.

These study rewrote some of the fundamental principles of how psychologists work with abused

children, right? I mean, they were really important. They were really awful. And I'll say to people,

Harry Harlow takes you right to the line and says,

...