How brave and smart is this girl?

[SpringchickenGoldBrass]

Astoundingly. I wish I had had the nerve to do something like that in my teens.

Thank you for the link Vesuvia that is absolutely fascinating.

Dittany they were also lying to fellow in patients, probably building relationships with them (pretty impossible to avoid in an inpatient situation lasting more than a little while), who would potentially have been very upset/angry/let down and saddened by the "loss" when they left, never to return.

I raised these other situations not to say whether any of these are objectively right or wrong things to do - but to point out that lots of other people have done things similar to what this student has done and they are usually lauded as interesting experiments. While this individual gets accused of being unstable and attention seeking - labels which bother me as they are so often used against women that do things that others don't like.

I think that it's (obviously) perfectly OK for people to say they don't like what she did - and I can understand why - but not OK to question her mental health.

I can't be too impressed with anyone who makes an effort to mislead people, beyond the limits of an April Fool joke. She might even have got some valuable insights from this experiment, but I think it's too dishonest to be worth any praise.

I don't think the dishonesty is the issue. I think it's the difficulty of measuring whatever results there were. I don't even see it as an experiment; it's more like performance art.

(sardinequeen)- it was me who said narcissistic & attention seeking - i wasnt trying to make an Internet diagnosis of pathological narcisism etc.. or saying she is unstable or insane.
Perhaps I used the wrong words, didn't mean to say imply a clinical condtion at all (how could I know..) just that this is the kind of normal adolescent self- centeredness familiar to almost any parent of teenagers -e.g. not thinking about the potentially devasting impact of this on her BF's parents, their relationship with their DS, the emotional manipulation of her classmates and teachers etc...

It is part of the job of educators to help young people mature, go beyond their normal teenage narcism and think of others.

I dont see why a college-bound senior of whatever ethnic background shouldn't be taught and guided in how to conduct a decent experiment, and to understand and comply with ethical concerns in experimental design.

Whenever local uni students come into my DCs schools to do one day observations we get a letter home and the option to withdraw consent. I would be extremely pissed off if I found out the school had allowed my kids to be the subject of six month long, emotionally manipulative experiment without their and my consent.

SGB, yes alot of social science studies depend on the subjects not knowing (and being misled) about what the study is about, even though they have consented to be part of the experiment. That is why you have Ethics Committees, because such deception is not something to do lightly. It is an especially big deal if the subjects don't know they are being manipulated as part of an experiment at all, and it is a huge deal if they are under 18.

Experiments with human subjects have to break the basic ethical principle of viewing people as autonomous individuals, not as means to an end. So they have to do this very carefully.

I think the school Principal here undermined his professional relationship with parents, teachers and students, I think he failed in his duty of care to the students, and in his duty of care to the girl who did the project in allowing her to put herself in an unethical and potentially emotionally damaging situation with her peers, family and teachers. And he failed as an educator in not teaching the basics of experimental design and ethics.