Three identical Strangers triplets adopted separately for psych research

This experiment involved even more people. Though the full details are not known, one of the junior researchers involved suggested that the study was looking at the impact of parenting style. This involved placing an intial child with the adoptive families to assess the parents first, then allocating the separated twins or triplets to families chosen on the basis of parenting style as observed through the first adoption. So as well as the parents and the twins/triplets being manipulated, an unknown number of other adopted children and possibly many more adoptive families were involved in the preselection of the families.

It highlights the need for robust independent ethical approval systems as researchers can get so tied up with their own perspective that they are unable to step back to see potential harm.

A little more recently in the 1980s, a friend was involved as a post doctoral researcher, with a then eminent professor of psychology at a prestigious institute, comparing problem solving in dementia with animal models. The researchers felt in order to make meaningful comparisons to the animal studies they needed to run elderly people with dementia through life sized mazes for food rewards. The research planning got to quite an advanced stage, even some apparently positive discussion with the ethics approval committee, before several of us managed to convince the researchers to stop, not unfortunately because of the ethical problems inherent, but because such research could generate career destroying publicity.

I guess here a number of us believe that the systems for ethical approval have not improved sufficiently since these bad old days, and that unethical research is still happening because of researchers' blinkered focus on their own lines of enquiry.
 
I think it shows we need many more prisons, where psychiatrists can be held until they have their brains examined, from the inside, and dissected, to find out what's wrong with them, and hopefully, with a bit of superglue and unskilled bodging, according to whatever wackjob theory is current that week, they'll become useful members of society and stop, just stop.

Before anyone jumps up and down saying that's unethical, this is the same profession that, recently, decided that removing parts of people's brains by wiggling a needle around was an interesting thing to try, just to find out what happened. Despite many previous attempts having shown that people didn't suddenly become useful members of society afterwards.
 
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