Human Rights at Home and Abroad: Past, Present, and Future

Danielle Miller, Bloomsburg University
Psychology Experiments: When Should They Stop?
Some Psychologists perform experiments without thought to their effects on the subject. One of
these experimenters is Psychologist John Money. He convinced a couple to have their son get a sex
change after a circumcision incident. After Bruce was turned into a girl, she was named Brenda and was
raised, dressed, and treated as a girl. Many psychological experiments have been performed in the past
and are still being performed today. Some experiments are helpful to an individual while other
experiments can hurt the patient‘s mental health. Experiments that cause lasting emotional and physical
stress to a subject, such as the one above, should not be carried out because they can lead to low self-
esteem, depression, and suicide.
According to Morton Hunt, the first psychological experiment was conducted in the seventh
century B.C. by the King of Egypt. The King wanted to know if his people were the first civilization to be
on the earth, so he initiated an experiment done on children and how they were raised. The King had
children put in isolation from infancy and gave them no instruction of language. He was certain that
whatever language the children grew up to speak was the language of the first civilization on earth (Hunt
1993, p.1). Even though the King‘s logic was somewhat correct in that language is made in the mind
(epsychlopedia), the morality of putting young children in solitude and not conversing with them was
wrong. This shows that the earliest people to record their findings had an interest in the human mind. And
tried to find out how the mind works by performing experiments. Psychologists have determined that
children who have had no affection from the people in their lives grow up to be antisocial, have learning
disabilities, and having extreme reactions to touch. There was also a case where two little girls lived
together in total isolation without parents. When these girls were found they spoke their own language
making it hard to help the children.
In Psychology the main goal when performing experimentations is to figure out what is going on
in the other person‘s mind. When becoming a psychologist a person already has a curiosity for how other
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