4

The Little Albert Experiment

John Watson established the entire psychological field of behaviorism by gallantly conducting experiments on babies. Evidently, getting an baby to work on back in the 20s was easy: You just grabbed one that belonged to one of the hospital's employees... an employee who, it should be noted, was not involved in the experiment. Apart from their relationship to the subject/lab rat, of course.

For this particular experiment, Watson took a baby named Albert and exposed him to rats, monkey masks and burning newspaper. Then he stopped fucking around and began the actual experiment.

Little Albert would be introduced to a series of fluffy white objects, such as a white rat, a white rabbit and a swatch of white fur. Initially, Albert possessed no fear of these things. During subsequent exposures to the same objects, Watson would hammer a steel bar, creating a terrifying racket. In time, whenever Albert saw anything white and fluffy he cried with fear. This is science.

Watson's goal was, of course, to see if it was possible to condition fear in an infant. You know, because prior to this infants were regarded as cold, unfeeling machines, incapable of emotion.

Working tirelessly alongside his assistants, he scared a child for 31 days before returning it to the hospital drenched in terrified excrement (evidently it was just a rental). Unfortunately, Watson spent the entire experiment scaring the shit out of Albert with the hammer of Thor and never got around to actually correcting any of the tremendous psychological damage he was causing, thereby dooming Albert to grow up as a man who pissed his pants at the sight of a cotton ball.

3

Curing the Gays... with SCIENCE!

In 1954, two scientists named James Olds and Peter Milner found the pleasure center of the brain, dubbing it "Engorgeopolis." [citation needed] They theorized that they could stimulate this area by administering an electric current, and tested their hypothesis by wiring up a rat's brain and providing the little guy with a lever to control the shocks. Soon the rat was banging on the lever up to 2,000 times an hour, missing work, skipping meals and losing its temper with the children.

In 1970, Robert Heath of Tulane University refined the Olds and Milner discovery to test his theory of reversing homosexual behavior through pleasure center stimulation. That's right, Heath wanted to zap the gay away. Unable to locate a readily available supply of gay rats for his experiment, Heath went ahead and found a homosexual male's brain to dig around in.

The subject, B-19, was hooked up just like the rat in the pleasure study. At first Heath administered controlled amounts of stimulation himself, but then handed the pleasure button off to B-19 and allowed the subject to be the lord of his own electric bonerjam.

And stimulate he did. In one three-hour session B-19 pressed the button 1500 times until. According to Heath, "he was experiencing an almost overwhelming euphoria and elation and had to be disconnected." At that point, we're amazed his dick hadn't burst into flames.

Heath's theory was that B-19's sex drive would be so jacked he'd have sex with anything, and for Jesus' sake, why not make it a girl? This being 1970, this was clearly the part of the experiment where you bring in the whore.

When introduced to the female prostitute, however, B-19 did nothing for an hour until the prostitute initiated a sexual encounter herself. Nevertheless, Heath called the experiment a success, having proven that with enough electric shocks directly to the brain, a gay man will have sex with a woman as long as he's locked in a room with her for an hour and can't leave.

And that's why there are no more homosexuals around today.

2

The "Monster" Study

1

Beneficial Brainwashing

In the 50s, a Scottish-American doctor by the name of Dr. Ewen Cameron believed he had discovered the cure for schizophrenia. His technique involved reprogramming the brain to think in healthy ways by having patients wear headphones playing supportive audio messages such as, "People like you and need you," "You have confidence in yourself" and "You are the master of magnetism."

Sounds rather nice, except Dr. Cameron often put these patients into a sedative coma with a powerful tranquilizer for weeks at a time, locking them in a place nurses came to call the "Zombie Room."

During that comatose state Dr. Cameron would administer "beneficial" electro-shocks, which we assume are related to "therapeutic" hammer punches to the face. His technique also destroyed whole sections of his patients' memory, many of whom were not even schizophrenics.

Oh, did we mention none of this was done with any kind of consent? At this point in the article, you should probably take that as a given.

Word of Cameron's experiments reached the CIA, who took one look at what he was doing and said, "This man is an unethical prick, we must have him." The CIA fired t-shirt guns loaded with cash at Dr. Cameron and eventually folded him into their MK-ULTRA project--you know, the one in which the government experimented on unwilling citizens in an effort to create brainwashed assassins.

Man, why couldn't they have just used orphans like everybody else?

For more scientists that should've been subjected to their own experiments, check out 9 Real Life Mad Scientists. Or check out Dr. Seanbaby's own frightening test, in A Terrifying Psychological Experiment (Using The Sims 3).

Or, visit the Cracked.com Top Picks to see what we're looking at instead of working.