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by Doodoo » May 1, 2022, 11:47 pm
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UNETHICAL HUMAN EXPERIMENTS
Triplets separated for science
Determining what development is innate versus acquired—“nature versus nurture”—has always fascinated researchers. As they share the same genetic makeup, twins have been the subject of many studies in this area. But it’s difficult to understand how triplets could be separated at birth—without their adoptive parents knowing—for the sole goal of being analyzed by a psychoanalyst with dubious ethics. This is what happened to Bobby Shafran, Eddy Galland, and David Kellman, three brothers who were the subject of a study in the 1960s by Dr. Peter Neubauer. The three brothers met by chance at university 19 years later. One of them, Eddy Galland, took his own life. The story of this experiment is told in the documentary Three Identical Strangers.
The Stanford Prison Experiment
In 1971, the American psychologist Philip Zimbardo wanted to demonstrate that certain social situations can induce behaviours that go against an individual’s personal values, especially in a prison environment. Eighteen subjects were selected and randomly separated into two categories: prisoners and guards. The subjects in the study quickly adapted to their roles and the guards developed authoritarian behaviours, despite nothing justifying their position of authority. The prisoners, on the other hand, accepted the cruel treatment despite being allowed to leave the study at any time. This study inspired the 2015 film The Stanford Prison Experiment
Slaves as guinea pigs
James Marion Sims, known as the father of gynecology and the inventor of the speculum (the cold, intrusive object used to observe the interior of the vagina), abused black slave women by conducting experiments on them in 19th-century United States. These women, who were operated on without anesthesia, could not refuse to be experimented on—the approval of their “owners” was sufficient.
The Monster Study
In 1939, 22 orphans in Iowa were subjected to an experiment on stuttering and language development. Divided into two groups, the children received different forms of therapy—positive and negative. While half of them were encouraged and congratulated for their fluency in speaking, the other half were humiliated for every little mistake in their speech.
Some of the children who received the negative reinforcement developed language difficulties and psychological scars that lasted their entire lives. The study was deemed so troubling that the peers of its author, Dr. Wendell Johnson, referred to it as the Monster Study. In 2007, seven of the subjects received financial compensation from the University of Iowa for the trauma they endured.
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M&M’s stands for Mars and Murrie
Ever wondered what M&M’s stands for? The answer is Mars and Murrie, referring to Forrest Mars (the son of the founder of Mars, Frank Mars) and Bruce Murrie (the son of longtime Hershey President William Murrie). The unlikely pair went into business together at the start of the Second World War in 1939. Nowadays, the brands are archrivals.
The idea for M&M’s came from Spain
To understand where the idea came from, we have to rewind a few years. Fed up with his father, Forrest Mars moved to Europe to set up his own business and, on a trip to Southern Spain (possibly accompanied by Rowntree who launched Smarties) he saw soldiers eating chocolate. At the time, warm weather was a problem for the chocolate industry, but these candies had sugar shells that prevented them from melting. This is where Mars got the ingenious idea from and the slogan “melts in your mouth, not in your hand”.