By: Maeve Brady
Psychology, it’s an amazing study of human behavior and cognitive functions, and, within this wide branch, there is so much to discover. That brings me to today’s topic, psychology experiments. More specifically speaking, notable psychology experiments. Now, you may have heard of popular experiments such as the Stanford Prison experiment and/or the Milgram experiment, which was an experiment with the intention of questioning people’s ability to adhere to an authority figure under who they assume to be someone in power. But, besides the most renowned ones, how about the ones barely anybody talks about? Are they considered notable or worthy? Today I will be explaining a very complex and appalling experiment, also known as the MK-ULTRA Project. I will try my best to explain all aspects of it and how it is notable to psychology.
First of all, what even was the MK-ULTRA Project? Well, the MK-ULTRA Project was a very bizarre experiment and the horrors of it run deep throughout history. The project was developed by the Central Intelligence Agency, also commonly known as the CIA. The CIA was a federal service tasked with enhancing national security through analyses of intelligence. Or in other words, the main foreign intelligence service of the United States. To be more specific, this experiment was primarily run by a chemist named Sidney Gottlieb, although Allen Dulles, the head of the CIA, agreed to let the procedures go through. This experiment was primarily based around the experimentation on humans and how they react.
This experiment had horrid intentions. In fact, the primary intentions of this experiment was to develop procedures, drugs, and/or some type of methods that would be capable of weakening an individual’s ability to resist, which would result in easier confessions due to this sort of “brainwashing” so that during an interrogation, they could easily get people to confess. It was a project just overall based around psychological torture on its participants. In order to figure this sort of “truth serum” out, experimenters would inject participants with drugs, usually this drug would be lysergic acid diethylamide, also known in the abbreviated form as LSD. They had hopes to discover at what point humans would break and essentially lose control of their cognitive abilities to adhere to authority figures. The ones that were experimented on varied from place to place.
Now, the majority of Gottlieb’s experiments were funded at universities and research centers, and others were conducted in American prisons and detention centers around the world. Typically, the ones being experimented on were people such as soldiers and most commonly prisoners. Prisoners were typically more popular because they were willing to operate in exchange for extra recreation time and were operated on. But, what makes this even more horrific is that many of the subjects had no idea they were going to get experimented on, and were unsuspecting people. And, adding on that fact, they tended to prey on the most vulnerable of people.
This experiment went on for a long duration of time, starting around November 18, 1953 and it was officially halted in around 1963 to 1973. This halt was due to the discovery by the CIA Inspector General staff of what was truly going on. Along with the discoveries of how dangerous and just morally wrong it was, as the subjects were given psychoactive drugs and other toxic chemicals.
Now, this experiment stemmed not only from new fascinations, but it also stemmed from fear and a continuation of the Nazi lead experiments through the duration of World War II. In 1933, Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany, and with his Nazi party helping him to suppress opinions and political enemies, he created a dictatorship. Due to previous hate of Jews along with Hitler using the Jews as scapegoats for Germany’s misfortunes after World War I, many Jews were persecuted. Eventually, this led to Jews being sent to concentration camps in an effort to exterminate them. During the 1940s, Nazi scientists worked in the concentration camps, which were usually filled to the brim with Jewish people, along with other camps containing the Roma people and other prisoners of war. In these camps, along with the starvation and other cruelties they brought to victims’ lives, they also did interrogation experiments.
To really give you a picture of how unethical some of these experiments were, we must discuss Operation Midnight Climax. Operation Midnight Climax was a notorious LSD experiment conducted by the CIA. In 1955, George White oversaw this experiment by first decorating a room to look homey and unsuspecting, then he let everything play out. Paid people would lure unsuspecting people to the scene and then they would be drugged by LSD as George White watched behind a two way mirror.
Now, the results of the experiment are hard to find. This is because in the 1970s, most of the evidence for the experiment was destroyed. Along with the fact that this experiment was kept secret for most of it due to the fear of peoples’ criticisms. Although there are similar experiments to this such as the Stargate Project, this project also focused on the study of psychic phenomena. Though similar to the MK-ULTRA Project, its results were dismissed and only proved that the methods were harmful, and killed many.
Thank you so much for following me along as I explain this intriguing experiment to you! I hope you also found this experiment intriguing and brought you a valuable critical thinking experiment!
For more information, please go to:
Plaid Line + PRIZM + Scottie News 