Every Infamous Experiment That Went Wrong

Added: 2026-05-15

[00:00:00]The Stanford Prison Experiment. In August 1971, psychologist Philip Zimbardo converted the basement of Stanford University's psychology building into a mock prison. He recruited 24 college students, randomly assigned them as guards or prisoners, and planned to observe them for 2 weeks.

[00:00:17]The experiment lasted 6 days. The guards began imposing punishments within the first 36 hours, forcing prisoners to do push-ups, stripping them, placing bags over their heads, and using sleep deprivation as a control tool. Several prisoners had emotional breakdowns. One went on a hunger strike. The line between role play and reality dissolved so quickly that Zimbardo himself later admitted he had become absorbed in his role as prison superintendent. The experiment was shut down after a visiting researcher, Zimbardo's then girlfriend Christina Maslach, saw the conditions and told him what he was doing was wrong. The Stanford Prison Experiment became a landmark study in situational psychology, though later critics challenged its validity.

[00:00:56]Researchers discovered that Zimbardo had given the guards specific instructions to create an atmosphere of fear, meaning the cruelty may not have been as spontaneous as the study originally claimed. Universe 25. In 1968, behavioral researcher John Calhoun built a paradise for mice. The enclosure had unlimited food, unlimited water, comfortable nesting space, and no predators. The only thing it lacked was room to grow. Calhoun wanted to know what would happen to a society that had everything it needed except space. At first, the colony thrived. The population doubled every 55 days, and the mice organized into social groups with clear hierarchies. But once the population hit around 600, something began to break. Males on the periphery became aggressive and territorial.

[00:01:39]Others withdrew entirely, refusing to fight, mate, or interact with any other mouse. Calhoun called these withdrawn mice the beautiful ones. They did nothing but eat, sleep, and groom their own fur to a perfect shine while the colony collapsed around them. The population peaked at 2200, then began a free fall. Mothers abandoned their young, mating stopped almost entirely.

[00:01:59]By 1973, the last mice in Universe 25 died of old age, and the colony went extinct. Every physical need had been met, the mice simply lost the will to be mice. The Third Wave. In 1967, a high school history teacher in Palo Alto, California, named Ron Jones, tried to answer a question his students kept asking. How could ordinary Germans claim they did not know about the Holocaust?

[00:02:22]Jones decided to show them rather than tell them. He created a classroom movement called The Third Wave, complete with a motto, a salute, and a set of strict behavioral rules. Within 5 days, the experiment consumed the school.

[00:02:34]Students enforced discipline on each other, created membership cards, and began reporting classmates who refused to participate. A secret student police force formed organically. The movement grew from 30 students to over 200. Jones realized he had accidentally built something he could no longer control. On the fifth day, he called an assembly and told the students he had been manipulating them. He showed them footage of Nazi rallies and pointed out the parallels. According to Jones, he told them they would have made excellent Nazis. The speed of radicalization, 5 days from a classroom exercise to a functioning authoritarian movement, remains one of the most cited examples of how quickly ordinary people can be conditioned to obey. Starfish Prime.

[00:03:14]On July 9th, 1962, the United States detonated a 1.4 megaton thermonuclear warhead 250 miles above the Pacific Ocean. The test was called Starfish Prime, and the goal was to study what a nuclear explosion would do in the upper atmosphere. Scientists expected a bright flash and some atmospheric data. They did not expect to accidentally break Hawaii. The electromagnetic pulse generated by the blast was far larger than anyone had predicted. 900 miles away in Honolulu, 300 streetlights went dark simultaneously. Burglar alarms triggered across the islands. The telephone company's new microwave communication link between the Hawaiian Islands was knocked out. Hotels in Waikiki had been hosting rooftop rainbow bomb viewing parties for tourists, so thousands of civilians watched the sky turn neon purple and then watched their city go partially dark. The worst damage, however, was in orbit. The explosion injected high-energy electrons into the Van Allen radiation belts, creating an artificial radiation zone that persisted for years. Within months, the radiation had damaged or destroyed roughly 1/3 of all satellites in low-Earth orbit, including Telstar 1, the world's first communication satellite, which had been launched just 1 day before the test. The United States had accidentally demonstrated that a single nuclear weapon detonated in space could the infrastructure of the modern world. Biosphere 2. In 1991, eight scientists sealed themselves inside a 3-acre glass dome in the Arizona desert. Biosphere 2 contained a miniature ocean, a rainforest, a desert, and agricultural land, all designed to function as a completely self-sustaining ecosystem. The experiment was supposed to prove that humans could survive in a closed system, a proof of concept for future space colonies. The problems began almost immediately. The concrete structure was still curing, and the chemical process absorbed oxygen from the sealed atmosphere. Oxygen levels dropped from 21% to 14%, equivalent to living at an altitude of 17,000 ft. The crew became lethargic and disoriented.

[00:05:12]Crop yields plummeted. Cockroaches and ants exploded in population while pollinators died off. After months of declining health, project management made the decision to secretly pump outside oxygen into the dome. When this was revealed publicly, it invalidated the central premise of the entire experiment. Biosphere 2 had cost over $200 million and was supposed to demonstrate that humanity could build a self-sustaining world. Instead, it demonstrated that we could not even keep eight people alive under glass for 2 years without cheating. Chernobyl Reactor 4. On April 26th, 1986, operators at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Soviet Ukraine began a safety test on reactor number four. The test was designed to determine whether the reactor's turbines could generate enough power to keep coolant pumps running during a brief electrical outage. It was considered a routine procedure. It was scheduled for the night shift. A series of operator errors compounded a fundamental design flaw in the RBMK reactor. The operators had disabled multiple safety systems to run the test and allowed the reactor to drop to dangerously low power levels. When they attempted to recover by withdrawing control rods, the reactor became unstable. At 1:23 a.m., they pressed the AZ-5 emergency shutdown button and the reactor's design betrayed them. The graphite tips of the control rods briefly increased the nuclear reaction instead of stopping it. The resulting power surge was catastrophic. The reactor output spiked to roughly 100 times its normal capacity in a fraction of a second. The fuel rods ruptured, the coolant flashed to steam, and two explosions blew the 1,000-ton reactor lid through the roof of the building.

[00:06:46]The explosion and subsequent fire released 400 times more radioactive material than the Hiroshima bomb. The safety test designed to prevent a disaster caused the worst nuclear accident in history. The Monster Study.

[00:06:58]In 1939, University of Iowa speech pathologist Wendell Johnson sent a graduate student to an orphanage in Davenport, Iowa with a hypothesis that stuttering was not biological, but learned. To prove it, they divided 22 orphan children into two groups. One group received positive speech therapy with encouragement and praise. The other group was told repeatedly that they were developing a stutter. The children in the negative group had been speaking normally. After months of being told their speech was defective, many of them began to exhibit anxiety, self-consciousness, and genuine speech problems. Several developed lifelong psychological damage. The researchers never told the children the truth, that there had never been anything wrong with their speech. The The was hidden for decades. Johnson's colleagues at the University of Iowa reportedly called it the monster study because of the ethical violations involved. It was not made public until a journalist uncovered the records in 2001. In 2007, the state of Iowa settled a lawsuit with six of the surviving orphans for $925,000.

[00:07:59]The children who had been told they were broken spent their lives believing it.

[00:08:03]The ape and the child. In 1931, psychologist Winthrop Kellogg brought a 7-month-old chimpanzee named Gua into his home to be raised alongside his 9-month-old son Donald. The goal was simple, to determine whether a chimpanzee raised in a human environment would develop human behaviors. Kellogg dressed both infants in the same clothes, fed them the same food, and subjected them to the same developmental tests. For the first few months, Gua outperformed Donald in nearly every physical and cognitive test. She learned to respond to commands faster, use tools sooner, and navigate obstacles more efficiently. The experiment appeared to be a success. Then it started going in the wrong direction. Donald began imitating Gua. Instead of learning words, the boy started communicating through chimpanzee-like vocalizations, barks, grunts, and pants. At 19 months old, Donald's language development had fallen significantly behind normal children his age, and he had adopted the chimp's food-begging gestures. Kellogg terminated the experiment after 9 months. The child had not humanized the ape. The ape had partially dehumanized the child. The Milgram experiment. In 1961, psychologist Stanley Milgram at Yale University recruited ordinary people for what he told them was a study about learning and memory. Each participant was seated in front of a control panel with a dial marked in 15-volt increments going up to 450 volts. The final settings on the dial were labeled danger, tokens, severe shock, and simply 30. The participant was told to administer an electric shock to a learner in the next room every time the learner gave a wrong answer. The shocks were not real. The learner was an actor, but the participants did not know that. As the voltage increased, the actor screamed, begged to stop, complained of a heart condition, and eventually went completely silent. 65% of participants continued all the way to the maximum 450 V shock. When they hesitated, the experimenter in the lab coat simply told them, "The experiment requires that you continue." That sentence was enough. Milgram had set out to understand how Holocaust perpetrators could claim they were following orders.

[00:10:02]He found the answer sitting in a psychology lab in New Haven. Most people will inflict what they believe is lethal pain on a stranger if someone in a position of authority tells them to. The Tuskegee Syphilis Study In 1932, the United States Public Health Service began a study on 600 African-American men in Macon County, Alabama. 399 of the men had syphilis.

[00:10:23]201 did not. None of the infected men were told they had the disease. They were told they were being treated for bad blood. The study was designed to observe the full natural progression of untreated syphilis in black men. The researchers provided no actual treatment, only placebos, aspirin, and diagnostic spinal taps that the men were told were therapeutic. In 1947, penicillin became the standard cure for syphilis. The researchers did not administer it. They actively prevented the men from receiving treatment elsewhere, including intercepting draft notices that would have sent the men to military doctors who would have diagnosed and treated them. The study ran for 40 years. It ended only in 1972 when a whistleblower named Peter Buxtun leaked the details to the Associated Press. By that point, 28 men had died directly from syphilis. 100 had died from related complications. 40 of their wives had been infected, and 19 children had been born with congenital syphilis.

[00:11:17]In 1997, President Bill Clinton issued a formal apology on behalf of the United States government. The study remains the single most cited example of institutional medical racism in American history. Project MKUltra In 1953, the Central Intelligence Agency launched a top secret program to develop mind control techniques for use during the Cold War. Project MKUltra involved over 150 subprojects conducted at universities, hospitals, and prisons across the United States and Canada. The methods included hypnosis, sensory deprivation, isolation, electroshock therapy, and the administration of psychoactive drugs, most frequently LSD.

[00:11:55]Many of the subjects did not know they were part of an experiment. CIA operatives dosed unsuspecting civilians in bars, slipped LSD into the drinks of fellow agents, and administered the drug to mental patients and prisoners who had no capacity to consent. One subject, CIA biochemist Frank Olson, fell from a 13th floor hotel window in New York City just 9 days after being secretly dosed with LSD. His death was officially ruled a suicide, though his family has contested that conclusion for decades. When the program was finally shut down in 1973, CIA Director Richard Helms ordered all MKUltra files destroyed. A clerical error preserved roughly 20,000 documents that had been filed in the wrong location. Those surviving files revealed only a fraction of the program's scope.

[00:12:40]The full extent of what was done, and to how many people, will never be known because the agency burned the evidence.

[00:12:46]Project 4.1. On March 1st, 1954, the United States detonated the Castle Bravo hydrogen bomb at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. The bomb was expected to yield 6 megatons. It yielded 15, two and a half times the predicted power.

[00:13:02]The miscalculation turned a controlled test into an international incident. The fallout cloud drifted over inhabited atolls that the military had not evacuated. On Rongelap Atoll, 160 miles from the blast, residents reported white ash falling from the sky like snow.

[00:13:17]Children played in it. Within hours, the islanders began experiencing nausea, burns, and hair loss. The US military did not evacuate them for 3 days. Rather than treating the exposure as a crisis, the Atomic Energy Commission designated the affected populations as subjects of a medical study, Project 4.1. For decades, researchers tracked the islanders' health, documenting thyroid cancers, miscarriages, and birth defects, while providing minimal treatment. The Marshallese were not told they were subjects. They were not told what the ash was. They were studied like laboratory specimens by the government that had poisoned them. Harlow's Pit of Despair.

[00:13:53]In the 1950s, psychologist Harry Harlow at the University of Wisconsin began a series of experiments on infant rhesus monkeys to study the nature of love and attachment. His most famous experiment gave infant monkeys two artificial mothers, one made of bare wire that dispensed milk, and one wrapped in soft cloth that provided nothing but contact.

[00:14:13]The monkeys overwhelmingly chose the cloth mother, clinging to it for comfort, and only briefly visiting the wire mother to feed. That finding alone would have been a landmark study, but Harlow kept going. He built an isolation chamber he called the Pit of Despair, a vertical stainless steel enclosure where infant monkeys were kept in total isolation for periods of up to 1 year.

[00:14:33]The monkeys that emerged from isolation were psychologically destroyed. They could not socialize, could not mate, and when artificially inseminated, they ignored or attacked their own offspring.

[00:14:43]Harlow's work proved that maternal attachment was essential for psychological development. It also proved it by inflicting severe and irreversible psychological damage on hundreds of primates. The experiments became a catalyst for the modern animal rights movement and contributed directly to the establishment of institutional review boards for research ethics. The man who proved that love is a biological necessity did so by systematically denying it. Little Albert. In 1920, psychologist John B. Watson at Johns Hopkins University set out to prove that fear could be manufactured. He selected a 9-month-old infant known only as Albert B. Watson and placed a white laboratory rat in front of him. Albert showed no fear of the rat. He reached for it. Then Watson struck a steel bar with a hammer directly behind the baby's head. The loud noise terrified the infant. After several pairings of the rat with the noise, Albert began crying at the sight of the rat alone, even without the hammer strike. Within weeks, the conditioned fear had generalized.

[00:15:40]Albert became afraid of a rabbit, a dog, a fur coat, and a Santa Claus mask with white cotton batting. Watson had successfully demonstrated classical conditioning of emotional responses in a human being. He never deconditioned the child. Watson made no attempt to reverse the fears he had created. Albert was removed from the study by his mother, and Watson moved on to other work.

[00:16:00]Researchers spent decades trying to identify Little Albert. The most widely cited identification, a boy named Douglas Merritte, revealed that the child had been diagnosed with hydrocephalus and died at age six. If correct, Watson knowingly experimented on a neurologically impaired infant and left him with artificially implanted phobias he carried for the rest of his short life. If you enjoyed this video, subscribe for similar ones, and feel free to drop suggestions for the next video in the comments.