posted
If I wanted to look into becoming a test subject for a science experiment to make $, how would I go about doing that? I live in Washington D.C. during my school breaks, so there's got to be experimenting going on, and I'm bipolar and have OCD, so I would imagine there might be some scientists looking for subjects that have one of those disorders.
Does anyone know how I would go about finding one of those tests? I'd want to research it before I agree to become a test subject, but before that I need to find a place that is looking for people like me.
posted
Come on down to my house. I'm currently researching just how much voltage blonde-haired young men who enjoy swing dancing can stand. I've hooked up an intriguing contraption that involves my toaster. If you live, I will pay you. If not, you will be unceremoniously dumped in the Ohio River.
posted
drop by a local university and look for flyers...particularly check out the psychology building main office...they will frequently know about any studies going on.
posted
Simple, find local medical schools, call them (or search their web pages) and sign up. They're ecstatic to get volunteers (and you can often get free medical tests out of the deals, too ).
Also, you might check out psychology departments, lots of easy money to be had filling out silly surveys and doing visual/auditory/memory tests and whatnot.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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posted
I've done a few studies before. It was a brain imaging study. But I want someone to study my synesthesia since it is fascinating as hell. I refuse to do a study that involves drugs though. No way. I suggest trying colleges around you and bulletin boards in science buildings.
Posts: 9942 | Registered: Mar 2003
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posted
CM, I don't know if it's kinky or not. It would behoove you to remember that I never stated what exactly was gonna be hooked up to the toaster contraption.
space opera
It's your elbow, you dirty-minded pervert!
Posts: 2578 | Registered: Apr 2004
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posted
Drugs don't have to be involved for psychology experiments to be as scary as hell. There are still people in New Haven who think they've killed someone. Fortunately, we have debriefing now, but sheesh...
posted
Contact any med school, hospital, pharmaceutical/biotech company in your area. They'll all jot you down on their lists or point you in the direction of someone who will. Do some comparision shopping Posts: 3243 | Registered: Apr 2002
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posted
How do you feel about Zimbardo's prison experiment, no false beliefs about murder, but talk about warped minds.
Posts: 3446 | Registered: Jul 2002
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posted
CM, out of interest, how did you decide on this line of work? Were you writing down a list of skills and came up with only "I have a body I don't particularly mind ruining?"
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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posted
Zimbardo, not a fan of that one either, but I don't dislike it near as much. The people running it seemed to actually have, you know, a concious about what they were doing and called it off. I mean bad stuff happened but they weren't doing the experiment because they thought it would happen, and they cut it off when it got out of hand, or when they realizied it got out of hand anyways.
posted
Lupus had good advice about checking a local university bulletin board. For some reason, these study places seem to favor university students (probably because they figure they need the cash)
a couple years ago my son picked up a flyer from a university bulletin board for a study for new medicine for acne (he has really bad acne). Since we couldn't afford a dermatoligist or the usual medicines for acne, this was really almost a God-send. He signed up, easily qualified, and was on the study for about 13 weeks. They paid for the doctor visits and the meds, plus a little cash.
He was sorry to go off of it because whatever it was sure worked for him! Best skin he had had in years..
posted
I've heard ads on a regular basis for companies seeking research subjects in the DC area. Can't remember the name, but that might be a good place to start.
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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quote:Drugs don't have to be involved for psychology experiments to be as scary as hell.
Boy, is that ever true.
When I was taking psych in college, we were required to participate in several studies (I guess the grad students needed guinea pigs ). Most of the studies were benign, but one of the studies I volunteered for, which offered payment for volunteering, was really upsetting to me, and I had to quit before it was finished.
It wasn't as scary as thinking I'd killed someone, and, to tell the truth, I don't even remember what the study was anymore. All I remember was being seated in a big uncomfortable wooden chair in the dark and being tilted in different directions. It was really disorienting.
Posts: 5771 | Registered: Nov 2000
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posted
Milgram's subjects were all informed of the true nature of the experiment once they had finished their task. When asked, most actually were glad they had participated.
The experiment also revealed an important phenomenon, one that had previously been only the subject of conjecture. The power of authority over peoples minds was shown to be far greater than anyone had anticipated. I would argue the knowledge gained is worth the relatively minor cost.
Posts: 1769 | Registered: Feb 2000
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posted
A couple of researchers took Milgram's protocol in a very real direction, disturbing in different ways. I remember reading about this when I took Social Psychology, but I've found only one reference to the experiment in my google search, but it matches my own memory. It's from a talk given at the General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association:
quote: That hypothesis would be consistent would the work of Charles Sheridan and Richard King, two would-be followers of Stanley Milgram who decided to carry his research one step further by administering real shocks instead of phony ones. As they describe it in an article that appeared in the "Proceedings of the American Psychological Association" in 1972,
"In this experiment the learner-victim was actually given shocks. A nonhuman subject--a cute, fluffy puppy--was substituted for the human learner-victim of Milgram's paradigm. In addition, shocks were amperage-limited and capable of creating responses such as running, howling, and yelping, without, however, doing the subject any serious harm ... The first of the three actual voltage levels produced foot flexion and occasional barks, the second level produced running and vocalization, and the final level resulted in continuous barking and howling.5
As in the original research, most of the human subjects experienced acute distress in this morally compromised setting. Although they had been told that the puppy was being trained to discriminate between flickering and steady lights, the experiment was in fact designed to give the dog a painful jolt no matter how he responded to the stimulus. Both the animal and the trainer were unknowingly caught in an insoluble predicament. Many tried to gently coax the puppy to escape the shock, to no avail; others shifted nervously from foot to foot, as if sympathizing with the animal whose paws were trapped on the electric grid. Some hyperventilated, gasping for air, or even began to cry. As in Milgram's experiments, however, those who protested were sternly reminded that they had no choice and must continue with the regimen of punishment. Having been informed at the outset that this was an "important" scientific investigation into the "critical fusion frequency" in canine vision, almost all surpressed their own better instincts and ultimately surrendered to authority.
So, in this study, even though the object of torture wasn't human, the humans inflicting the pain didn't get to walk away with the knowledge that it had been a sham. They really did inflict the torture, often against their own nature.
Posts: 4344 | Registered: Mar 2003
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posted
Actually in the Milgram experment the "teachers" were never told that it was a sham. They walked about still believing that they had actually killed someone. Later debriefing subjects became protocol and they tried to track down all the former test subjects. They were never able to find them all. So it is safe to say that to this day there are still people who think they have committed murder and one wonders how difficult it would be for them to do it again.
Posts: 3446 | Registered: Jul 2002
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posted
nfl, That's incorrect. I don't know where you're getting your information from, but it's completely bogus. There was an extensive debriefing protocol in all versions of the Milgram experiment. After the initial run-through, when Milgram realized that most people would actually not stop at the lower end of the moderate scale and would instead go to the point that would cause death in an actual person, psychological counseling was also made available as part of the debriefing.
Hobbes, I'm probably wasting my time, but what about the Milgram experiment makes you hate it? I'm willing to bet that, while you most likely know more about it than nfl, you probably don't have some very important information concerning it.
Posts: 10177 | Registered: Apr 2001
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You're taken to a room with an "advisor" who describes to you the set-up of this basic experiment (the schock mechanism). You've met the person you'll be hitting with electricity, you're probably already a bit nervous, no one likes getting schocked and as a human being you've connected to the person in the other room.
Well time for the experiment, it's simple enough and at first it's probably just a bit unsetteling to here the reactions. There's far worse things than a little shock, and he agreed to this didn't he? But as time goes on you begin to realize that something isn't right, that there's more than just suprise and mild irretation in the next room. On and on you go, and it's gets worse, up to the point where you begin to wonder if you've killed the poor guy.
Finally either you can't take it anymore or the last voltage has been reached, and surprise, it was all an act! Don't you feel better? Well yes you do, the other man is fine, and it's a relief.
I've seen some of the recorded videos of the experiment, the people involved are so clearly under extreem stress it should be used in a textbook on the subject. Some break down crying! The extreme mental anguish undergone is enough for me to dislike the experiment, but then the fact that these people all of a sudden have revealed to them: oh, we were testing to see how much pain you were willing to cause to another human being, and you were willing to kill them.
I know about the follow up survey, but to me that sounds only midly more meaningful than asking high school guys if they're still virgins, who wants to admit that they're no longer comfortable with themselves? Or who would even know?
Then there's the fact that even if the orginal experimenters didn't know how much suffering the subjects would be in, ever subsequent variation (of which there's been many) did.
[EDIT: And the fact that they had to add psychological counsling to the end of the experiment should speak for itself, nice that they did it, but I'll never feel good about delibartly putting innocent subjects in a position tha they'll need it as a direct result of the study]
posted
Here's the breakdown from the original group's responses to a followup questionaire from a year later.
To the item, Now that I have read the report and all things considered ...
Defiant: 40% very glad to have participated, 43.8% glad to have participated, 15.3% neither sorry nor glad, .8% sorry to have participated, 0% very sorry to have participated
Obedient: 47.8% very glad, 35.7% glad, 14.8% neither sorry nor glad, .7% sorry, 1% very sorry
Totals: 43.5% very glad, 40.2% glad, 15.1% neither, .8% sorry, .5% very sorry.
Anecdotal remarks from subjects included "eye opening experience", "something I'd recommend other people go through", "changed the way I see the world", etc.
Subsequent studies followed the subjects over up to 5 years with periodic checks of mental health issues and found no significant effects in terms of negative mental health issue.
So, the subjects themselves said that they were overwhelmingly glad to participate, some even recommended it for other people, and testing them afterwards showed no ill effects, but you just know that it was wrong and that it must have bad effects on people.
All that aside, let's look at where the problem lies. As noted, prior to running the experiment Stanley Milgram and nearly all of the people who he consulted believed that very few people (usually expected to be sociopaths) would actually go all the way to end of the scale. When asked about the experiment, potential subject populations overwhelming deny that they would go anywhere near the end of the scale. And yet, around 60% of them do, and most of the others continue past the predicted point of stopping.
Whatever psychic trauma results from the Milgram experiment exists in potential for all these people. It comes from their self-deceptions being shattered by real world experience. The experimenters don't make them sick (I'm defining being willing to shock someone to death because someone in lab coats says that you should sick. You might disagree.). They are sick going in. What the Milgram experiment does is present them with a chance to reality test whether or not they are sick and most people find out that, in contradiction to their assumptions, they are in fact sick. This is in most cases regarded as a benficial thing, as evidenced by the responses to a followup questionaire, and it likely frees these people up to work on their sickness as opposed to continuing to deceive themselves. Furhermore, the insight this gives us into our psychological natures is invaluable and contrary to what even the leading psychologists of that time believed were true. If people read about the Milgram experiment and realized that it applied to them as opposed to forming defensive reactions to it ("I nor anyone I know would ever do anything like that."), I think that we'd see changes in some of our social structures.
edit: In response to your edit. In any sort of experiment, you try to minimize or handle potential harm. Having safeguards in place deosn't mean that you are harming people. It means that you think that there is a possibility that you could harm people. Also, it is quite possible to harm people during the course of an experiment and then fix that harm afterwards. It's an ethically trickier issue in a case without informed consent like this one, but the thing is, based on post-experimental evaluation, the expected risk of significant psychological harm was very low.
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