http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Pavlov

I remember learning about him in psychology class..and I was recently watching a video that briefly featured him and his dog experiments..and then his human experiments on children..this guy was a seriousily dicscusting human individual..seriousily disturbed and I think the wiki article and other information on him should also shed some light on the insane cruelty of his experiments...The guy was conditioning children into certain responces, treating them as you would a lab rat..why does academia look up to people like this?..and at what point is it ethical to conclude that the end might not necessarily justify the means?

The experiments conducted by Pavlov is just one example of unethical practices:

Unethical psychological experiments.

The Stanford and Milligram study are the two I remember from psychology class. Most, if not all of the results collected from the above experiments are still referred to today. Thank god they brought in ethical procedures. I realise the terrible effects these studies have on the participants, but is there any other way to achieve the same results and thus further knowledge in human psychology?

Much love,
Sally xx

Why do you consider milgram and stanford unethical?

And yeah pavlov seems to have been lacking a conscience

OK, trying to remember back to psychology class, like 8 years ago...

From what I remember, the experiments were showing the psychological reaction to authority. So putting people in a position where they have to submit to authority and then saying they can leave at any time, which would appear, to the participant, to be against the authority figures wishes? Seems like it is backing the participant into a corner, almost taking away the choice to leave, no?

Much love,
Sally xx

Participants in the milgram experiments did not had to submit to authority. Participants were actually leaving the experiment if they felt that the "exercise" was going beyond their moral constraints.

Those who decided to stay were those from whom conclusions could be drawn about certain tendencies (e.g. it's OK to torture someone as long as an authority tells me all is fine, please continue) that exist in the general population.

This is why I have grown fond of using S. pombe for research. I've never heard of an unethical yeast experiment.

Wait until it starts drooling at the sound of a bell.

I'm surprised nobody brought up White's monkey head transplant.
I know it's not psychology, but still... it's pretty damn terrible in the name of 'science', and somewhat relevant to the idea consciousness and religion.

These experiments make you wonder about the true nature of human behavior in the general population...

That is SO WEIRD, Fractal was talking to me about this today and I asked if he knew about the Russian guy who did head transplants on dogs (and one even lived for 29 days).

Weirdest synch ever... must be all the drugs I'm smoking.

The only promising thing about Pavlov is the theory of extinction. It gives me hope. Conditioning can spontaneously disappear, as with in the case of the dogs trapped when Pavolv's basement flooded. No matter how brainwashed (by advertising, reefer madness, you mane it) the world may seem, all it takes is a little water in the basement (hopefully not biblical flood ) ...

Yes, i remember that a little water caused simmilar 'de-conditioning' effects in new-orleans policemen.
Water is such a great panacea.

Funny, I was thinking about this same subject the last few days.

I was reading studies done on stress, aging, DHEA, cortisol and the like. Inevitably, most of what we know about the subject of stress killing you, and how it parallels the aging process directly, comes from extremely cruel tests done on rats, mice & monkeys.

Stuff like the fact that when you shock a rat randomly with a low voltage, but give them no way to anticipate the shock or control it, they can die within 2 days. Physically they are not damaged by the shocks. They die from an overdose of adrenaline and glucocorticoids produced by the adrenal gland.

All of these hormones and steroids are made from DHEA which is one of only a few chemicals that declines directly proportional to aging and disappears only a matter of days before death by aging. High levels of DHEA seem to have anti-aging properties and can even reverse malignant tumors.

The studies showed that giving the rats some release for their frustration (a piece of wood to gnaw on, another rat to attack, a wheel to run on etc.) mitigated some of the damage and prevented death. Also, flashing a red light before the shock or letting the rats pull a lever to lessen the intensity or frequency of the shocks drastically minimized the damage of the stress.

There were other sick studies like starving monkeys to death, as well. The stress of famine and catabolic metabolism tended to kill the monkeys before the actual starvation. Furthermore, giving completely non-nutritional artificially sweetened water to half the starving monkeys caused them to live longer, despite it not providing any sustenance. The idea that they were being fed was enough to stave off death for weeks.

Anyway.

These studies and the people who do them are reprehensible in my mind. Torturing animals is just wrong.

And yet, much of what we know about toxins, pathogens, allergens and more comes from this kind of thing. The idea that useful knowledge comes from unethical behaivior is a conundrum that is difficult to get past. I mean, the experiments of Josef Mengele are among the evilest things that anyone can think of. He made Hitler look like a cheerleader... but we still use the knowledge he discovered about things like hypothermia to this day.

Not using the knowledge seems wrong in that the people and animals that died would have suffered for nothing. But using the knowledge only encourages other sociopaths to follow the lead. And, even if some enlightened democracies decided to ban the most egregious examples of this, is anyone under any illusion that such studies wouldn't continue in countries where they still don't even value human life?

It seems to me that there are probably quite s few such experiments that have been conducted that never appear in any journals and are denied if anyone even asks about them. This is not to even get started with the forbidden conspiracy theories...

Not using knowledge that's already there would be unethical indeed, so we expect organisations like iata for instance, to learn from plane crashes. Not to deliberately cause deadly aircrashes, so that we can learn even more.

It seems that we sill have more to learn in the field of ethics than in any other field of science.