This week in psychology we discussed the ethics in research; I found this topic to be quite interesting and wanted to look more into it. We learned that the guidelines of psychological research with humans that the experimenter needs consent, use deception, and debrief them afterwards. Also the participants should be able to withdraw whenever, need confidentiality, and protection against harm. While searching the internet I found this web site: http://listverse.com/2008/09/07/top-10-unethical-psychological-experiments/. On this website it gave the top 10 unethical psychology experiments. Most of them were really interesting, but the one that stuck out to me the most is number one the, David Reimer case.

David Reimer was a baby boy was born in Canada and when he was brought in for circumcision his penis was burned off. This happen because the physicians used an electrocautery needle instead of a standard scalpel. When his parents visited psychologist John Money, he suggested that they do a sex change. They agreed, but what they didn’t know was that the doctor’s true intention was to prove that nurture, not nature, determined gender identity. Dr. Money selfishly used David as his own private case study. David was then named Brenda she acted like a stereotypical boy and had conflicting and confusing feelings. Her parents never informed her of the accident as an infant. Finally, her parents gave her the news of her true gender when she was fourteen years old and she decided to become David again. Dr. Money reported no more results besides claiming that the experiment had been a success, at the age of 38, David committed suicide.

This experiment broke many rules of ethics in psychology research. For started he never got any consent from the child nor the parents. Dr. Money was being very selfish and wanted to conduct a case study to prove a point. I feel that what he did was extremely wrong and hurtful to David. Which brings me to another rule that was broke in this experiment, protection against harm. What Dr. Money did was very harmful and hard on David and his family. I do not think that it matters if Dr. Money thinks that his results were successful because he has no right to change David into Brenda and make his own case study.