Human Experimentation

Human Experimentation Throughout the ages, many experiments have been performed on willing and unwilling participants. Some experiments happened to be non-harming, while others caused much distress, pain, and sometimes death to the subjects. Human experimentation today has greatly transitioned due to past experiences for the better of the participants. Some of the past experiments that brought upon the changes in laws and standards were the Little Albert Experiment, Stanford Prison Experiment, human vivisection, and the Tuskegee Experiments. Safety has become the major concept in the laws for human experimentation due because of many experiments in the fields of medical and psychological studies. With the standards in experimentation becoming stricter and safer, experiments and outcomes will only become better for our world, possibly coming up with cures or better understanding of the human body. The Little Albert Experiment was performed by John Watson. The experiment was a psychological experiment that was used to acknowledge classical conditioning in humans (Cicarelli and Meyer 11). Cicarelli, Meyer, and Milgram all believed that certain processes in an experiment would make a subject mentally change. Cicarelli and Meyer add on to this notion by stating “the experiment attempted to show that a child would become afraid of a non-fearful object if accompanied with an object that struck fear to the child” (11). Watson used a child named Albert, and he presented Albert with a white rat.
At first Albert was not afraid, and then Watson used a loud noise to scare the child. After a few repetitions of the act, Albert became afraid of the white rat without the noise accompanying its presence. Later, Watson presented Albert with other white animals and object, and Albert was afraid of all them. Overall, the experiment was a success given the thesis John Watson was attempting to prove.
Another great example of a psychology-based experiment was the Stanford Prison

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