What is the most controversial topic in psychology?

Waking-Dreams

There are so many debates within the field of psychology but what, in your opinion, is one of the most controversial?

Is it the chemical imbalance hypothesis which many say causes depression?

Or perhaps the influence of parenting on children?

It may not be the hot topic it once was but my own has to be all the controversy around False Memory Syndrome, perhaps because of all the legal ramifications, where adults were going into therapy and coming out believing they had been sexually abused in childhood. The concept of ‘Repression’ has a lot to answer for.

SmallTeapot

Off the top of my head, the "Refrigerator Mother" Hypothesis of Autism would be high on my list.

A bit off point, but I believe the ways and means by which some studies were conducted in the past was also highly controversial - 10 Famous Psychological Experiments That Could Never Happen Today

Labarbapostiza

SmallTeapot wrote: »

A bit off point, but I believe the ways and means by which some studies were conducted in the past was also highly controversial - 10 Famous Psychological Experiments That Could Never Happen Today

Nothing as bad as the experiments of Canada's Donald Cameron. Wiki him.

He took money from the CIA to carry out experiments on his patients. Ostensibly the patients were in his care, but the "care" was the experiments the CIA wanted. Experiments with LSD were the tame end of the scale. He put people in comas for months, and used ECT to erase their memories. Some people never awoke from their comas.

I believe experiments like Zimbardo's Prison experiment are very legitimate. Zimbardo was asked to be an expert witness in the trial of soldiers involved in prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. He didn't want to do it, but was offered access to the evidence for his research, so he accepted. Things like video camera footage. He was amazed that the wardens in Abu Ghraib behaved exactly like the students in his experiment - like clockwork.

Without Zimbardo's initial experiment it would be impossible to tell if the barrel was bad, and not the apples. He also had something very interesting to say on psychology not being excusiology. He was an expert witness for the defence, in the abuse trials, but he believed the soldiers deserved to go to jail, even though if they had been in a different situation they would never have committed their crimes.

It's peculiar that Zimbardo and Miligram get singled out. Is the problem really with the disruptive results of the experiments, rather than the ethics of traumatising subjects in the course of an experiment. What they did is nothing in comparison to what Cameron did.

DM addict

Labarbapostiza wrote: »

Nothing as bad as the experiments of Canada's Donald Cameron. Wiki him.

He took money from the CIA to carry out experiments on his patients. Ostensibly the patients were in his care, but the "care" was the experiments the CIA wanted. Experiments with LSD were the tame end of the scale. He put people in comas for months, and used ECT to erase their memories. Some people never awoke from their comas.

I believe experiments like Zimbardo's Prison experiment are very legitimate. Zimbardo was asked to be an expert witness in the trial of soldiers involved in prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. He didn't want to do it, but was offered access to the evidence for his research, so he accepted. Things like video camera footage. He was amazed that the wardens in Abu Ghraib behaved exactly like the students in his experiment - like clockwork.

Without Zimbardo's initial experiment it would be impossible to tell if the barrel was bad, and not the apples. He also had something very interesting to say on psychology not being excusiology. He was an expert witness for the defence, in the abuse trials, but he believed the soldiers deserved to go to jail, even though if they had been in a different situation they would never have committed their crimes.

It's peculiar that Zimbardo and Miligram get singled out. Is the problem really with the disruptive results of the experiments, rather than the ethics of traumatising subjects in the course of an experiment. What they did is nothing in comparison to what Cameron did.

Oh I remember reading about that guy! He did some truly bonkers stuff.

I too find it a little odd how Milgram and Zimbardo are 'picked on' for being controversial. They were cleared by ethics boards of the time, and we did learn some important stuff from them.

My personal favourite in terms of WTF experiments is the LSD-fuelled nude group therapy for psychopaths. Read about it in Ronson's The Psychopath Test - apparently giving a bunch of psychopaths mind altering drugs and strapping them to each other naked in a small room for a couple of weeks is a good idea. http://knowledgenuts.com/2013/11/19/the-nude-lsd-therapy-that-made-psychopaths-worse/

Labarbapostiza

DM addict wrote: »

I too find it a little odd how Milgram and Zimbardo are 'picked on' for being controversial. They were cleared by ethics boards of the time, and we did learn some important stuff from them.

As I believe it, the Miligram and Zimbardo experience got the whole ethics board thing rolling. (there's another little interesting fact about Miligram and Zimbardo - they were both in the same class in their primary school). I believe Miligram and Zimbardo just ran the experiments by their university supervisors, who just gave the go-ahead, and there was no ethics board. The other person who had a huge impact on the regime was Timothy Leary. He was doing lots of "experiments" with LSD (when it was in fact legal), with his students. There wasn't really any oversight until after Leary.

The other peculiarity about Miligram's and Zimbardo's experiments, was they used white middle-class people. Had they used mental patients, black people, or prisoners, there wouldn't have been the concern. Far more hideous experiments were being carried out on these people at precisely the same time. In lots of cases far more extreme.

My personal favourite in terms of WTF experiments is the LSD-fuelled nude group
therapy for psychopaths. Read about it in Ronson's The Psychopath Test -
apparently giving a bunch of psychopaths mind altering drugs and strapping them
to each other naked in a small room for a couple of weeks is a good idea. http://knowledgenuts.com/2013/11/19/the-nude-lsd-therapy-that-made-psychopaths-worse/

Believe or not, there was a video documentary made of these "experiments". I haven't seen the whole thing, just clips. But it's as "good" or even better than you can imagine.

And with psychopaths, the whole ethics thing creates a problem. There is only one reliable clinical test for psychopathy, that O'Hare found through experiment. And that is a 50 volt shock and measuring the brain, through an electroencephalogram. Psychopaths respond differently. The shock is unpleasant, but it doesn't cause lasting harm. But it's not something any current ethics committee would allow. You couldn't do it in Ireland. But strangely what you can do in Ireland is administer ECT, without a patient's consent.