Behavioral experiments are not evil by default. They’re just science doing what science
does best: To better understand how we behave, researchers sometimes have to conduct a test
or two. However, every once in a while, those tests
go so badly wrong that the end result seems more like a horror movie than a well thought-out
scientific experiment. Let’s take a look at some of the most terrifying
cases. 10. The Mouse Utopia From the 1950s to 1970s, animal behavior researcher
John Calhoun built artificial environments for rodents to study their behavior. In 1972, he attempted to create heaven for
eight mice … who promptly went and turned it into hell in a self-destructive pattern
called “the behavioral sink.” Calhoun designed the structure as an ultimate
utopia for a mouse: There were beautiful buildings, communal spaces, ample personal quarters and
an unlimited supply of food. He called his creation “Universe 25,”
and because it was indeed the 25th environment he had created, he had a pretty good idea
that things might not stay heavenly for too long. His hunch was correct, as the mice used their
paradise to procreate as rapidly as they could. By Day 560 of the experiment, the population
of Universe 25 reached a whopping 2,200 rodents, who proceeded to prove that even for animals,
hell is other people. Most mice spent every second of their lives
surrounded by hundreds of their kin. Apathy and annoyance were the prevailing moods,
as the mice hunched in the main squares, waiting to be fed and occasionally attacking each
other. Very few pregnancies were carried to term,
and females treated their litters as afterthoughts that were soon forgotten. The reason most of the mice were hunched up
in the common spaces was even creepier than their bored apathy. It was because the limited secluded spaces
were taken up by “The Beautiful Ones” — an elite class that formed within the
mouse society of Universe 25. Guarded by wildly territorial males that prevented
the rest of the population from entering the premises, these largely female populations
spent their entire existence grooming themselves, eating, and sleeping. The “common” mice seemed to accept this
state of affairs, to the point that when the inevitable violence started eating away the
population, the Beautiful Ones were spared from the massacre. However, at that point, they were so out of
touch with reality that they could not procreate, or care for their young, or even understand
basic social behavior. The whole population was doomed beyond the
point of restoration. 9. Operation Midnight Climax Between 1953 and 1964, the CIA dabbled with
a particularly unsavory behavioral project called Operation Midnight Climax. It was a top secret operation known only to
the highest command of the agency and its Technical Support Division, and its aim was
simple: Find out how to influence unwary people with drugs and induce mind control. The experiment was helmed by a multi-agency
veteran named George Hunter White, who decided to accomplish his goal by establishing CIA-sponsored
brothels in New York and San Francisco. There, government-funded prostitutes lured
thousands of unwitting men to nights of sordid sessions filled with sex, drugs, and booze,
while CIA operatives observed through two-way mirrors and recorded the mind-altering sessions. The absurd experiment was already so insane
that Time magazine would later note that the CIA “appeared to be experiencing its own
form of madness,” but it soon devolved into sheer lunacy, as they started accomplishing
the “mind control” part of their goal by … just using the compromising material
they gathered to blackmail the unsuspecting test subjects to do their bidding. All along, George Hunter White loomed over
everything like a strange, government-sponsored supervillain. He would watch the drugged-out sex sessions
while downing martinis, and heavily abused alcohol and drugs himself to get through his
mission. Despite all the mind-bending insanity involved
in the process, it appears that Operation Midnight Climax may have been a success in
its own, strange way. In 2013, a psychiatrist who had been examining
some old CIA documents discovered a hidden purpose for the experiment: They were also
experimenting on the prostitutes. By putting them under conditions that mimicked
field operations, the agency was testing them to see whether they’d make good field agents
or spies. 8. The Facial Expressions Experiment Before psychology got around to establishing
some basic ground rules about things like traumatizing people for the sake of science
and killing animals to see how people would react, we had researchers like Carney Landis. In 1924, he wanted to see if all humans make
the same facial expressions as a response to the same stimulus. Because he didn’t trust people to make their
expressions voluntarily in a “What face do you make when you’re happy” way, he
decided to induce those emotions for real. This would have been all well and good for
his test subjects when it came to things like physical pleasure, curiosity, happy anticipation
and laughter. Unfortunately, Landis wasn’t interested
in happiness. The emotions he wanted to research were pain,
disgust, fear, sadness and other negative ones, so his subjects found themselves sticking
their hands in buckets full of frogs, and receiving electrical shocks. As a final coup de grace, Landis took a mouse,
and told the subject that they now had to behead the poor rodent. Shockingly, quite a few people complied: Roughly
a third of the people who Landis presented with the task grabbed the rodent, and removed
its head as best they could. The others had to watch while Landis beheaded
the animal himself. Ultimately, all of those poor creatures had
to die in vain: All Landis found out was that different people express the same feelings
with a vast array of different facial expressions, which … kind of seems like a pretty obvious
discovery that probably didn’t require a bunch of people to tear the heads off animals. 7. The LSD Elephant In 1962, doctor Louis Jolyon West and his
colleagues at the University of Oklahoma wanted to see whether the then fairly new drug LSD
can induce violent behavior … on elephants. Why they were interested in this is anyone’s
guess, though it must be noted that West probably had ties with the CIA’s shady MKUltra program. The experiment’s subject was Tusko, the
prized bull elephant of the Oklahoma City Zoo. The intended goal was to see whether the drug
could cause “musth” — a condition where the animal’s testosterone production increases
and it becomes markedly aggressive. Unfortunately, no one involved thought to
do the math on precisely how much LSD an elephant could take, so they just settled on “a lot.” The three-ton Tusko was injected with a ridiculous
297 milligrams of the drug, which is over 30 times more than a human of the same weight
could safely receive. They say that an elephant never forgets, but
if Tusko’s first drug trip was a memorable one, he didn’t have the opportunity to remember
it for too long. After only five minutes, he trumpeted, fell
over, emptied his bowels and went into violent convulsions. The researchers tried to fix his massive overdose
by overdosing him again, this time with antipsychotics. When this didn’t help, West pumped poor
Tusko full of tranquilizers, which finally killed the animal. The whole process took one hour and 40 minutes. The study remains highly controversial, and
a great deal of it can probably be explained by the persistent rumors that Dr. West himself
was tripping on acid throughout the process. Although he attributed the elephant’s death
to LSD, others believe that the absurd chemical cocktail he pumped into Tusko was the real
culprit. In 1984, a psychologist named Ronald K. Siegel
actually proved this by repeating the experiment on two different elephants, using only LSD
this time. Both animals survived. 6. The UCLA Schizophrenia Experiment In the late 1980s, psychologists at the UCLA
set up a federally funded experiment that treated and monitored a group of schizophrenics
in order to better understand their condition. The problem was that their methods were slightly
less than ethical: First, they treated the patients as best they could, but in 1989,
the doctors wanted to see how patients would respond if they took them off their medication. The result was an unmitigated disaster. By 1990, one patient went from a well-adjusted
individual with a 3.8 college GPA to an emotional wreck who threatened his mother with a butcher
knife and attempted to hitchhike to Washington to assassinate the President Bush, who he
perceived as an alien spy. The next year, another subject committed suicide
by jumping off a UCLA building. The study was bombarded with lawsuits from
the subjects’ families and criticism from the government and mental health organizations. The Citizens for Responsible Care in Psychiatry
and Research organization described it as an experiment in cold-turkey withdrawal in
medication. A common complaint was that the consent forms
provided by the researchers were unclear and didn’t bother to mention that the vast majority
of schizophrenics relapse when taken off their medication, and that once the researchers
noticed that a patient’s mental health was deteriorating, it took them far too long to
put the subject back on medication. The doctors, on the other hand, complained
that they were literally unable to give their part of the story: Although the patients could
freely discuss the experiment, confidentiality laws prevented the researchers themselves
from doing so in detail. 5. Hofling hospital experiment The Hofling hospital experiment was a 1966
study that involved a fake doctor, a fake drug and 22 very real, unwitting nurses. The “doctor” would call each nurse during
their night shift at a hospital, and ask them to check if they had a certain drug. After the nurse found the drug (in actuality,
just sugar pills in a bottle) and replied affirmatively, the doctor would ask them to
administer a gross, dangerous overdose to a patient called “Mr. Jones.” Although this would require the doctor to
sign an authorization form, the doctor said he was in a terrible hurry, so he’d drop
by later and sign the paperwork. Everything about the experiment was rigged
for the drug not to be administered. If the nurse would inject it to a patient,
she’d have to break no less than three hospital rules: Nurses were not allowed to accept instructions
over the phone. The amount of drug the doctor ordered was
double the maximum limit stated in the instructions of the box. Also, the medicine itself was unauthorized
and not on the ward stock list. Despite all of these rules and precautions,
the results were chilling: 21 out of the 22 test subjects were easily goaded into carrying
out the instructions and “overdosing” the patient at the orders of a random voice
on the phone. 4. Sigmund Freud’s nose treatment Emma Eckstein was one of Sigmund Freud’s
early patients, who came to him to seek treatment for her anxiety. Unfortunately, among her assorted symptoms
was a tendency to get nosebleeds, and unknown to her, Freud had a massive fixation about
noses, which he closely associated with genitalia. There are many versions of the story between
Eckstein and Freud, and some aspects of it were strange enough that Freud’s descendants
prefer to keep some of their correspondence hidden from the public. Here’s the part of the story most people
seem to agree on: Though Freud considered Eckstein’s nasal issues entirely psychogenic
in nature, he nevertheless decided to experiment a bit and fixated his attentions on the nose. Freud took his patient to Wilhelm Fliess,
an otolaryngologist who had operated on his own nose in the past, and had Fliess operate
on Eckstein’s nose. The operation was a dramatic failure that
nearly killed the patient. Eckstein’s nose (and eventually, mouth)
hemorrhaged even worse than before, and eventually started smelling and went septic. The frightened Freud called in surgeons from
Vienna, who eventually managed to clean out the nose … and discovered a 20-inch piece
of infected gauze that had been left inside the nasal cavity. Eckstein took the whole situation surprisingly
well, even gently mocking the shocked Freud when he escaped the operating room to recharge
with a stiff shot of cognac. On the other hand, Freud’s coping mechanisms
were less than refined. In a textbook example of what he himself would
later define as “denial,” he convinced himself that the whole situation was an honest
accident that could have happened to anyone. 3. The Stimoceiver experiment Jose Manuel Rodriguez Delgado was a Yale professor
in the 1960s, and his subject of expertise was as crazy as it gets. He was all about mind control, but unlike
some others on this list, he didn’t resort to drugs. Instead, he preferred brain chips. A peer-reviewed pioneer of the brain implant
technology, Delgado plied his trade at an age where ethical regulations were still largely
nonexistent, which enabled him to go full mad scientist in ways that rival (and occasionally
even surpass) modern technology. In 1965, he famously managed to stop a charging
bull mid-attack with a radio signal to an implant in its brain. He also created the “stimoceiver,” an
electrode device that could manipulate the brain to experience and display various emotions
on animals and humans alike. Unfortunately, when he actually tested it
on human subjects, said manipulation sometimes proved to be less than accurate. Over the years, Delgado installed his stimoceivers
on an estimated 25 subjects, mostly schizophrenics and epileptics at the State Hospital for Mental
Diseases in Howard, Rhode Island. He was as ethical about it as the circumstances
allowed, as everyone who received the chip took it willingly, and it was only used as
a last resort that he described as little more than a more humane alternative to lobotomy. However, the stimoceiver turned out to be
an unreliable tool for the human brain. Although Delgado could influence the patients’
level of aggression and even induce some uncontrolled movement in their limbs, he was (perhaps fortunately)
unable to play the human brain like a violin. Some otherwise prim and proper patients became
clearly aroused and started flirting with the researchers. Others became happy and chatty, but the results
could not necessarily be replicated. In one instance, a perfectly calm patient
suddenly became furious when her temporal lobe was stimulated. 2. The “Monster Study” The “Monster study” of 1939 was not originally
called as such. In fact, its only aim was to study stuttering
and other speech issues, but the brutal methods of Dr. Wendell Johnson and his staff gained
the experiment its nickname once the world found out about it in 2001. Dr. Johnson had a theory that stuttering was
a learned behavior that can be induced in children, and set out to test this by taking
22 orphans and dividing them into two groups. The control group were treated as regular
children. The 11 kids in the other group, on the other
hand, had it bad. For six months, Johnson and his staff constantly
harassed, belittled and baited them about their speech impediment, despite the fact
that only half of them showed any sign of stuttering. This negative therapy didn’t actually cause
any of the “stutterer” children to start stuttering, but many of them became extremely
sensitive about their speech, experienced loss of self-esteem, and developed lifelong
psychological problems. Perhaps recognizing the vast ethics issues
with the experiment, the University of Iowa kept it secret for decades until one of Johnson’s
underlings revealed the story to newspapers in 2001. The university has since issued an apology,
and the state settled the inevitable lawsuit by the surviving test subjects and their estates
by paying a compensation of $925,000 per plaintiff. 1. The Third Wave experiment What does it take for a regular person to
become a Nazi? In 1967, a 25-year-old social studies teacher
in Palo Alto, California conducted an experiment to figure out the answer, and found out to
his terror that it was, “Not a lot, really.” In an attempt to teach his 10th grade students
about the various events that led up to the Holocaust, Ron James decided to show his class
just how easy it was to be swept up by charismatic leaders and alluring ideologies. As a well-liked teacher, Jones decided to
make himself the figurehead of his demonstration. After informing the students that they were
about to do an improvised “non-threatening experiment”; he started to act more stern
than usual, and created a hardline set of rules that was to be obeyed in his classroom. He had meant it to be just a one-day thing,
but when he arrived in the classroom the next day, all the students were sitting neatly
at their desks and saluting him in unison. The bewildered, yet intrigued Jones decided
to continue the experiment a little longer. He informed the students that the ones willing
to participate would get an automatic ‘A’, but any attempts to overthrow him would be
awarded with an ‘F’. Those who would not play along would be banished
to the school library. Over the next couple of days, the class conformed
to Jones’ new system, which he called the Third Wave. He introduced Nazi-like hand salutes, even
more rigid discipline than before, and a strange project that aimed to “eliminate democracy.” The students constructed banners bearing the
movement’s logo and unity-inducing slogans such as “Strength Through Discipline.” Jones prohibited his students from gathering
in groups larger than two or three, and even declared that the rules of the Third Wave
also applied outside of school — and even at home. By Day 4, Jones understood that he’d lost
control of the experiment. The Third Wave had spread like wildfire within
school and now featured more members than he had students in the first place. Informants were snitching on other students
who had broken the movement’s rules, and the ensuing atmosphere of fear and uncertainty
had broken down all lines of communication within the student body. There was even an active resistance movement. Jones decided that the experiment had to end,
but wanted it to go out with a bang. He announced that the Third Wave was in fact
part of a larger national movement that was about to announce its presidential candidate,
and asked everyone to attend a rally at the auditorium. When the newly-fascist students were all seated,
Jones unveiled a screen that only played static. After a few minutes of extremely uncomfortable
silence, Jones stated that the whole thing had been an experiment in planting the seeds
of fascism. Then, he made everyone watch a film about
Nazism.
