8 Shockingly Unethical Experiments That Actually Happened

6. Facial Expressions Experiments

Whilst it might seem blindingly obvious to us that different emotions elicit different facial expressions, in 1924, a psychology graduate named Carney Landis at the University of Minnesota decided that what we needed was an experiment to test this. The aim was to see whether the facial expressions produced were consistent between different people, or whether we all had our own unique responses to emotions such as fear, disgust, shock, and joy.

Unfortunately, to produce these kinds of facial expressions, you have to actually shock, disgust, and terrify you test subjects.

Most the the stimuli were reasonable, if horrible, with subjects made to smell ammonia, look at pornography, and put their hands into a bucket of frogs, but the final disgusting stimulus was definitely a bridge too far, as the participants were told to behead a live rat. Only one third of the participants actually followed through with the instruction, but as so few of them knew how to behead a rat in a humane manner (it's not exactly the kind of thing taught in finishing schools), the whole experience was 10 times more disturbing than it was supposed to be.

An unexpected result of the experiment was to demonstrate that a lot of people will do almost anything if instructed by a scientist. It did not, however, prove that we have unique emotional facial expressions.