Unethical Experiments: When Scientists Really Should Have Stopped What They Were Doing Immediately

Scientists these days are generally obliged to abide by high ethical standards, requiring them to prevent harm and conduct experiments morally, for instance, seeking informed consent from experiment participants. But stricter guidelines and ethics boards are a relatively recent development, and were often built in response to ethically dubious and morally abhorrent experiments conducted in the past. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.

Little Albert

The Little Albert experiment – inspired by another horror show, Pavlov's dogs , which first demonstrated "classical conditioning" in canines – would not be conducted today.

In 1920, American psychologists John B Watson and Rosalie Rayner aimed to show that fear is a lear