Over the years, social psychologists have explored these very questions by conducting experiments. The results of some of the best-known experiments remain relevant and often quite controversial to this day. Learn more about some of the most famous experiments in the history of social psychology. What do you do when you know you're right, but the rest of the group disagrees with you?
Do you bow to group pressure? In a series of famous experiments conducted during the s, psychologist Solomon Asch demonstrated that people would give the wrong answer on a test in order to fit in with the rest of the group. In Asch's famous conformity experiments, people were shown a line and then asked to select the line of a matching length from a group of three.
Asch also placed confederates in the group who would intentionally select the wrong lines. The results revealed that when other people picked the wrong line, participants were likely to conform and give the same answers as the rest of the group. While we might like to believe that we would resist group pressure especially when we know the group is wrong , Asch's results revealed that people are surprisingly susceptible to conformity. Not only did Asch's experiment teach us a great deal about the power of conformity, but it also inspired a whole host of additional research on how people conform and obey, including Milgram's infamous obedience experiments.
Does watching violence on television cause children to behave more aggressively? In a series of experiments conducted during the early s, psychologist Albert Bandura set out to investigate the impact of observed aggression on children's behavior. In one condition, the adult model behaved passively toward the doll, but in another condition, the adult would kick, punch, strike, and yell at the doll. The results revealed that children who watched the adult model behave violently toward the doll were more likely to imitate the aggressive behavior later on.
The debate over the degree to which violence on television, movies, gaming, and other media influences children's behavior continues to rage on today, so it perhaps comes as no surprise that Bandura's findings are still so relevant. The experiment has also helped inspire hundreds of additional studies exploring the impacts of observed aggression and violence.
During the early s, Philip Zimbardo set up a fake prison in the basement of the Stanford Psychology Department, recruited participants to play prisoners and guards, and played the role of the prison warden. The experiment was designed to look at the effect that a prison environment would have on behavior, but it quickly became one of the most famous and controversial experiments of all time.
The Stanford prison experiment was originally slated to last a full two weeks. It ended after just 6 days. Because the participants became so enmeshed in their assumed roles that the guards became almost sadistically abusive and the prisoners became anxious, depressed, and emotionally disturbed. While the Stanford prison experiment was designed to look at prison behavior, it has since become an emblem of how powerfully people are influenced by situations.
Part of the notoriety stems from the study's treatment of the participants. The subjects were placed in a situation that created considerable psychological distress. So much so that the study had to be halted less than halfway through the experiment.
The study has long been upheld as an example of how people yield to the situation, but critics have suggested that the participants' behavior may have been unduly influenced by Zimbardo himself in his capacity as the mock prison's "warden.
Following the trial of Adolph Eichmann for war crimes committed during World War II, psychologist Stanley Milgram wanted to better understand why people obey. Could we call them all accomplices? The results of his controversial obedience experiments were nothing short of astonishing and continue to be both thought-provoking and controversial today.
The answer quite often is because of other people — something social psychologists have comprehensively shown. Each of the 10 brilliant social psychology experiments below tells a unique, insightful story relevant to all our lives, every day. Click the link in each social psychology experiment to get the full description and explanation of each phenomenon. The halo effect is a finding from a classic social psychology experiment. It is the idea that global evaluations about a person e.
It is called the halo effect because a halo was often used in religious art to show that a person is good. Cognitive dissonance is the mental discomfort people feel when trying to hold two conflicting beliefs in their mind.
People resolve this discomfort by changing their thoughts to align with one of conflicting beliefs and rejecting the other. The study provides a central insight into the stories we tell ourselves about why we think and behave the way we do. The Robbers Cave experiment was a famous social psychology experiment on how prejudice and conflict emerged between two group of boys.
It shows how groups naturally develop their own cultures, status structures and boundaries — and then come into conflict with each other. For example, each country has its own culture, its government, legal system and it draws boundaries to differentiate itself from neighbouring countries.
Experiment Details: One of the most widely cited experiments in the field of psychology is the Stanford Prison Experiment in which psychology professor Philip Zimbardo set out to study the assumption of roles in a contrived situation.
The basement of the psychology building was the set of the prison and great care was taken to make it look and feel as realistic as possible. The prison guards were told to run a prison for two weeks. They were told not to physically harm any of the inmates during the study. After a few days, the prison guards became very abusive verbally towards the inmates and many of the prisoners became submissive to those in authority roles.
The experiment inevitably had to be cancelled because some of the participants displayed troubling signs of breaking down mentally. Although the experiment was conducted very unethically, many psychologists believe that the findings showed how much human behavior is situational and that people will conform to certain roles if the conditions are right. The study was based on the premise that humans will inherently take direction from authority figures from very early in life.
Participants were told they were participating in a study on memory. They were asked to watch another person who was actually an actor do a memory test and were instructed to press a button that gave an electric shock each time the person got a wrong answer the actor did not actually receive the shocks, but pretended as if they did. The experimenters asked the participants to keep increasing the shocks and most of them obeyed even though the individual completing the memory test appeared to be in great pain.
Despite these protests, many participants continued the experiment when the authority figure urged them to, increasing the voltage after each wrong answer until some eventually administered what would be lethal electric shocks.
This experiment showed that humans are conditioned to obey authority and will usually do so even if it goes against their natural morals or common sense.
What the researcher found was that the baby monkeys spent much more time with the cloth mother than the wire mother, thereby proving that affection plays a greater role than sustenance when it comes to childhood development.
They also found that the monkeys that spent more time cuddling the soft mother grew up to be more healthy. This experiment showed that love, as demonstrated by physical body contact, is a more important aspect of the parent-child bond than the provision of basic needs. These findings also had implications in the attachment between fathers and their infants when the mother is the source of nourishment.
Experiment Details: In , an experiment was created by John Darley and Daniel Batson, to investigate the potential causes that underlie altruistic behavior. The experiment researchers set out three hypotheses they wanted to test:. Student participants were given some religious teaching and instruction and then were told to travel from one building to the next.
Between the two buildings was a man lying injured and appearing to be in dire need of assistance. The first variable being tested was the degree of urgency impressed upon the subjects, with some being told not to rush and others being informed that speed was of the essence. The results of the experiment were intriguing, with the haste of the subject proving to be the overriding factor. When the subject was in no hurry, nearly two-thirds of people stopped to lend assistance.
When the subject was in a rush, this dropped to one in ten. People who were on the way to deliver a speech about helping others were nearly twice as likely to help as those delivering other sermons, showing that the thoughts of the individual were a factor in determining helping behavior.
Religious beliefs did not appear to make much difference on the results; being religious for personal gain, or as part of a spiritual quest, did not appear to make much of a noticeable impact on the amount of helping behavior shown. Experiment Details: The Halo Effect states that people generally assume that people who are physically attractive are more likely to be intelligent, friendly, and display good judgment. In order to prove their theory Nisbett and DeCamp Wilson created a study to prove that people have little awareness of the nature of the Halo Effect, and that it influences their personal judgments, inferences and the production of a more complex social behavior.
In the experiment, college students were the research participants and were asked to evaluate a psychology instructor as they view him in a videotaped interview. The students were randomly assigned to one of two groups, and each group was shown one of two different interviews with the same instructor who is a native French-speaking Belgian who spoke English with a fairly noticeable accent. In the second interview, he presented himself as much more unlikable. He was cold and distrustful toward the students and was quite rigid in his teaching style.
After watching the videos, the subjects were asked to rate the lecturer on physical appearance, mannerisms and his accent, even though his mannerisms and accent were kept the same in both versions of videos. After responding to the questionnaire, the respondents were puzzled about their reactions to the videotapes and to the questionnaire items.
The students had no idea why they gave one lecturer higher ratings. Most said that how much they liked the lecturer from what he said had not affected their evaluation of his individual characteristics at all. The interesting thing about this study is that people can understand the phenomenon, but they are unaware when it is occurring. Without realizing it, humans make judgments and even when it is pointed out, they may still deny that it is a product of the halo effect phenomenon.
Experiment Details: Walter Mischel of Stanford University set out to study whether deferred gratification can be an indicator of future success. In his Marshmallow Experiment children ages four to six were taken into a room where a marshmallow was placed on the table in front of them on a table.
Before leaving each of the children alone in the room, the experimenter informed them that they would receive a second marshmallow if the first one was still on the table after they returned in 15 minutes.
A small number of the children ate the marshmallow immediately and one-third delayed gratification long enough to receive the second marshmallow. In follow-up studies, Mischel found that those who deferred gratification were significantly more competent and received higher SAT scores than their peers, meaning that this characteristic likely remains with a person for life. While this study seems simplistic, the findings outline some of the foundational differences in individual traits that can predict success.
Experiment Details: The Monster Study received this negative title due to the unethical methods that were used to determine the effects of positive and negative speech therapy on children. Wendell Johnson of the University of Iowa selected twenty-two orphaned children, some with stutters and some without. The children were in two groups and the group of children with stutters was placed in positive speech therapy, where they were praised for their fluency.
The non-stutterers were placed in negative speech therapy, where they were disparaged for every mistake in grammar that they made. As a result of the experiment, some of the children who received negative speech therapy suffered psychological effects and retained speech problems for the rest of their lives, making them examples of the significance of positive reinforcement in education. While the initial goal of the study was to investigate positive and negative speech therapy, the implication spanned much further into methods of teaching for young children.
Experiment Details: An interesting study was conducted by the staff of the Washington Post to test how observant people are of what is going on around them.
He played one of the most intricate pieces ever written with a violin worth 3. In the 45 minutes the musician played his violin, only 6 people stopped and stayed for a while. Around 20 gave him money, but continued to walk their normal pace. The study and the subsequent article organized by the Washington Post was part of a social experiment looking at perception, taste and the priorities of people. Some of the questions the article addresses are: Do we perceive beauty?
Do we stop to appreciate it? Do we recognize the talent in an unexpected context? As it turns out, many of us are not nearly as perceptive to our environment as we might like to think. Experiment Details: In , psychologists Eleanor Gibson and Richard Walk set out to study depth perception in infants. They wanted to know if depth perception is a learned behavior or if it is something that we are born with. In order to study this, Gibson and Walk conducted the visual cliff experiment.
Gibson and Walk studied 36 infants between the ages of six and 14 months, all of whom could crawl. The infants were placed one at a time on a visual cliff, which is this device seen above. A visual cliff was created using a large glass table that was raised about a foot off the floor. Even though the glass table extends all the way across, the placement of the checker pattern on the floor creates the illusion of a sudden drop-off.
Researchers placed a foot-wide centerboard between the shallow side and the deep side. Gibson and Walk found the following:. Among these experiments and psychological tests, we see boundaries pushed and theories taking on a life of their own.
It is through the endless stream of psychological experimentation that we can see simple hypotheses become guiding theories for those in this field. The greater field of psychology became a formal field of experimental study in , when Wilhelm Wundt established the first laboratory dedicated solely to psychological research in Leipzig, Germany. Wundt was the first person to refer to himself as a psychologist. Since , psychology has grown into a massive collection of theories, concept, hypotheses, methods of practice and study and a specialty area within the field of healthcare.
None of this would have been possible without these and many other important psychological experiments that have stood the test of time. About Education: Psychology. Mental Floss. At the same time she volunteered as a rape crisis counselor, also in Philadelphia. After a few years in the field she accepted a teaching position at a local college where she currently teaches online psychology courses.
Kristen began writing in college and still enjoys her work as a writer, editor, professor and mother. The 25 Most Influential Psychological Experiments in History The field of psychology is a very broad field comprised of many smaller specialty areas. For more information click here 2. For more information click here 3. For more information click here 4.
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