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unethical study:The Monster study - Coggle Diagram
unethical study:The Monster study
What we would change to make it an ethical study?
Informed consent of parents or guardians, and children
Change the experiment to involve only children with stutters and split them into the experiment and control group. The experiment group will get extra positive reinforcement from speech therapsists etc and the control group would not receive anything different to usual.
This way you can test the effect of positive reinforcement on stuttering to see if it is at all an environmental thing or if its only genetic i.e. testing nature vs nurture.
seek approval from the IRB, it needs extra approval especially as it is using protected groups
Protected group?
Children
Orphans
Institutionalized - in orphanage
economically and socially disadvantaged
What was the goal of this research study?
to see how both positive and negative responses to speakers would enhance or disrupt their language development with a particular interest in researching the development of stuttering.
What are the ethical violations that you see?
violation of human rights and dignity
harm inflicted wasn't resolved at experiment's end
included protected groups (which couldn't give consent)
children
orphans
Did the ethical violations result in any harm to the participants?
Immediate effects
Children's schoolwork fell off
Grew withdrawn and fractious
Ran away from the orphanage
refrained from talking, which caused social difficulties
Long term effect
refrain from talking
Unresolved psychological trauma which has led to emotional distress
Lower self-esteem
What are your thoughts/reactions regarding these ethical violations?
Causing kids to stutter, such as was done in the monster experiment is highly unethical as it could impact the children's future life in a way that could be highly detrimental. even if taking the efforts to reverse the effect (take away the stuttering) kids could be emotionally affected by what they went through and it can lower their self-esteem (as happened to the children in the study)
I think that doing an experiment without consent should never be done, even when no potential negative effect is predicted.
During the post-Darwin's Evolution era, people were more willing to sacrifice ethics as it seemed that only thru science would mankind survive. They also erroneously believed that survival was only for the fittest.These false ideas led them to disrespect vulnerable people.