The Guardian has an article about the "most bizarre tests ever conducted in name of scientific inquiry."
My favorite involved 10 soldiers who went on a supposedly routine airplane flight in California in the 1960s. After a while, the plane started falling and the pilot announced they were about to crash.
While the soldiers faced almost certain death, a steward handed out insurance forms and asked the men to complete them, explaining it was necessary for the army to be covered if they died.
Little did the soldiers know they were completely safe. It was merely an experiment to find out how extreme stress affects cognitive ability, the forms serving as the test. Once the final soldier had completed his form the pilot announced: "Just kidding about that emergency folks!"
A later attempt to repeat the experiment with a new group of unwitting volunteers was ruined by one of the previous soldiers, who had penned a warning on a sickbag.
Reader comment:
Alex Boese says: In a Nov. 1 post, "Cruel 1960s psychology experiments," you link to a Guardian article which was, in turn, summarizing an article in New Scientist. What the Guardian never mentioned is that I wrote the New Scientist article, and that I was excerpting from my book, Elephants on Acid. It's kind of frustrating to be sidelined like that by a major publication, since I really need all the publicity I can get. But these things happen.
