Identify two research projects that helped to motivate the establishment of protections for human subjects. Describe what each was and explain why it led to the need for protections.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment-a 2-week experiment that simulated the prison life of both prisoners and guards that ended in 6 days because of what the simulation was doing to college students who participated. Zimbardo wanted to learn how and why a prison-like situation influences behavior; however students took to their roles completely. Participants suffered considerable anguish and the experiment resulted in extreme stress and emotional turmoil (five of the participants had to be released early).
Stanley Milgram's experiments on obedience to authority sought to identify the conditions under which ordinary citizens would be obedient to authority figures' instructions to inflict pain on others. Milgram recruited ordinary citizens and asked subjects to deliver electric shocks (fake) to "students" supposedly learning a memory task. If the "student" answered incorrectly, the subject flipped a switch which would administer a shock which would increase with each wrong answer. Participants became very tense and some resisted as the shocks increased to "lethal" range, but many complied with authority in the situation.
Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment was a U.S. Public Health Service study of the "natural" course of syphilis that followed 399 low income African American men from the 1930s-1972 without providing them penicillin after it was discovered to be effective in treating the illness.