Being a
psychology major, I get to hear about a lot of
good ones in a lot of
different fields.
There's the one where an
experimentor went out to a busy intersection and stood at the
corner of the
road. People would pull up to the
traffic light in their
vehicles and
stop, and the experimenter would just
stare at them. They wanted to see how
fast the person would
drive away from the
light if there was someone there
staring at them.
Then there's the "
Tea Room" experiment, where
psychologists wanted to learn about
male homosexual patterns. The
psychologist went to a
public restroom where he knew a lot of
gay action was goin' on. He'd note who went into the bathroom and for how long, etc, until they came out. He then followed them out to their
cars, copied down their
license plate number and found out where they lived. Then he disguised himself and went to the house of where these men having homosexual
encounters lived and asked to interview them about their
homosexual tendencies. Quite unethical, if you ask me.
And there's
Stanley Milgram's
obedience to authority experiment, where people thought they were
shocking another person to
death.