Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Nazi Germany Experiments



In our first tutorial we were asked what we would like to learn from social psychology. Among our list was to find out how people can suddenly confrom and perform acts in which they would not normally do. For example an array of acts in Nazi Germany. Back in year 11 i studied Nazi Germany at school and read about many experiments that were performed. Nazi Germany is a powerful example of many bad aspects within society; such as unethical experiments, discrimination and mass murder. Some of the experiments performed by the Nazi's such as the High Altitude Experiment, Malaria experiments and freezing experiments are described at the following link...
The Nazi's also experimented on twins, descriptions of the those experiments can be found at; http://www.remember.org/educate/medexp.html
Does anyone else have examples of human cruelty or any opinions on the Nazi experiments?

2 comments:

Belinda said...

Hi
Good topic, every time WWII came up at school I always found it really interesting. I think my understanding of how people could commit these kinds of crimes has definitely changed since I started studying psych. I remember first learning about it in high school and not being able to believe that so many seemingly normal people could go along with something so horrific. I think then I saw it almost as a problem which came down to ‘mass individual responsibility’ and really didn’t understand the importance of also considering the social context in which these acts occurred. As I learn more and more about social psych it seems at times social situations can have more control over us than I’d like to think!

Anonymous said...

You ever hear of The LSD Sterilization Plan of Nazi Germany? That'd be a bomb to drop on the press.