Psychologists have long tried to penetrate our way of perceiving the world, to understand what motivates our behavior. They have made great progress in lifting that veil of mystery. In addition to providing us with material for stimulating party conversations, some of the most famous psychological experiments of the last century reveal surprising, universal truths about human nature.
In this Psychology-Online article, we discover you 11 interesting psychological experiments Famous historical and current events that could change the way we perceive the world. We will see social psychology experiments, with animals and with people.
Kohler and the chimpanzee experiment
Wolfgang Kohler studied the insight process by observing the behavior of chimpanzees in a problematic situation.
In the experimental situation, the animals were placed in a cage outside of which food, for example, a banana, was stored. There were other objects in the cage, such as sticks or boxes. The animals participating in the experiment were hungry, so they needed to get to the food. At first, the chimpanzee used sticks mainly for recreational activities; But suddenly, a relationship between cane and food developed in the hungry chimpanzee’s mind. The cane, from an object to play with, became a instrument through which it was possible to reach the banana put outside the cage. There has been a restructuring of the perceptual field: Kohler stressed that the emergence of the new behavior was not the result of random attempts according to a trial and error process. It is one of the first experiments on the intelligence of chimpanzees.
Image: YouTube
Harlow’s attachment experiment with macaques
In a scientific article (1959), Harry F. Harlow He described that he had separated small rhesus monkeys from their mothers at birth, and that he had raised them with the help of “puppet mothers”: in a series of experiments, the behavior of monkeys in two situations was compared:
- Little monkeys with a mother puppet without a bottle, but covered in a soft, fluffy and furry fabric.
- Little monkeys with a “puppet” mother who supplied food, but covered in wire.
The little monkeys showed a clear preference for the “hairy” mother, spending an average of fifteen hours a day attached to her, although they were fed exclusively by the “nursing” puppet mother. conclusions of harlow’s experiment: all experiments showed that the pleasure of contact caused attachment behaviorsbut not the food.
Image: Attachment Harlow Blogspot
The Strange Situation by Mary Ainsworth
Based on the attachment theory of Bowlby, Mary Ainsworth and colleagues (1978) have developed an experimental method, called Strange Situation, to assess individual differences in attachment security. The Strange Situation includes a series of brief laboratory episodes in a comfortable environment and the child’s behaviors are observed. Ainsworth and colleagues have paid particular attention to the child’s behavior at the time of reunion with the caregiver after a brief separation, thus identifying three different attachment patterns or styles, so called from that moment on. Types of attachment according to Mary Ainsworth:
- Secure attachment (63% of dyads examined)
- Anxious-resistant or ambivalent (16%)
- Avoidant (21%)
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Image: The Wall Street Journal
The Stanford Prison Experiment
In a famous 1971 experiment, known as Stanford Prison, Zimbardo and a team of collaborators reproduced a prison in the garages of Stanford University to study the behavior of subjects in a context of very particular and complex dynamics. Let’s see what it was like and reflections on the Stanford Prison Experiment. The participants (24 students) were randomly divided into two groups:
- “Prisoners”. The latter were locked in three cells in the basement of a University building for six days; They were asked to wear a white robe with a paper on top and a chain around their right ankle.
- “Guards”. The students who had the role of prison guards had to monitor the basement, choosing the most appropriate methods to maintain order, and have the “prisoners” perform various tasks; They were asked to wear dark glasses and uniforms, and never be violent towards participants in the opposite role. However, the situation deteriorated dramatically: The false police officers soon began to seriously mistreat and humiliate the “detainees”and that is why it was decided to interrupt the experiment.
Image: Tekcrispy
Jane Elliot’s Blue Eye Experiment
On April 5, 1968, in a small school in Riceville (Iowa), teacher Jane Elliott decided to give a object lesson on racism to 28 children of about eight years old through the blue eyes brown eyes experimentt.
“Children with brown eyes are the best,” the teacher began. “They are more beautiful and intelligent.” She wrote the word “melanin” on the board and explained that it was a substance that made people smart. Children with dark eyes have more, so they are smarter, while children with blue eyes are “left holding their own.”
In a very short time Brown-eyed children began to treat their blue-eyed peers superiorly., who in turn lost confidence in themselves. A very good girl began to make mistakes during arithmetic classes, and at recess three little friends with brown eyes approached her. “You have to apologize because you get in their way and because we are the best,” one said. The girl was quick to apologize. This is one of the psychosocial experiments that demonstrate how beliefs and prejudices influence.
Image: Medium
Bbandura’s Bobo doll
Albert Bandura He gained great fame for the Bobo doll experiment on childhood aggression by imitation, where:
- A group of children took as an example, due to their visual ability, the adults who in a room, without their behavior being commented, hit the Bobo doll.
- Other contemporaries, however, saw adults sitting, always in absolute silence, next to Bobo.
Finally, all of these children were taken to a room full of toys, including a Bobo-like doll. Of the 10 children who hit the doll, 8 were those who had seen it done before by an adult. This explains how if a model that we follow performs a certain action, we are tempted to imitate it and this happens especially in children who do not yet have the experience to understand for themselves whether that behavior is correct or not.
Image: YouTube
Milgram’s experiment
The Milgram experiment was first carried out in 1961 by the psychologist Stanley Milgram, as an investigation into the degree of our deference to authority. A subject is invited to give an electric shock to an individual playing the role of the student, placed behind a screen, when he does not answer a question correctly. An authorized person then tells the subject to gradually increase the intensity of the shock until the student screams in pain and begs the subject to stop. No justification is given except the fact that the authorized person tells the subject to obey. In reality, it was a staging: absolutely no electric shock was given, but in the experiment two-thirds of the subjects were influenced by what they thought was a 450-volt shocksimply because a person in authority told them that they would not be responsible for anything.
Image: Hypertextual
Little Albert
We see Little Albert’s experiment on the , which must be the most famous psychological study. John Watson and Rosalie Raynor They showed a white laboratory rat to a nine-month-old boy, little Albert. At first the boy showed no fear, but then Watson jumped up from behind and made him flinch with a sudden noise by hitting a metal bar with a hammer. Of course, the noise scared little Albert, who started crying. Each time the rat was removed, Watson and Raynor would rattle the bar with the hammer to scare the poor child. Soon, the single sight of the rat was enough to reduce little Albert to a bundle of trembling nerves: I had learned to fear the sight of a ratand soon after he began to be afraid of a series of similar objects that were shown to him.
Image: YouTube
Pavlov’s dog
The shepherd dog Ivan Pavlov He became famous for his experiments that led him to discover what we call “classical conditioning” or “Pavlovian reflex” and remains a very famous psychological experiment today. Almost no other psychological experiment is cited as often and with as much pleasure as Pavlov’s theory presented in 1905: the Russian physiologist had been impressed by the fact that his dogs did not begin to drool at the sight of food, but when they heard to the laboratory employees who were taking him away. He investigated it and ordered a bell to ring every time it was meal time. Coming soon, the sound of the doorbell was enough to make the dogs start drooling: They had connected the signal to the arrival of the food.
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Asch’s experiment
This is a social psychology experiment carried out in 1951 by the Polish psychologist Solomon Ash about majority influence and social conformity.
The experiment is based on the idea that being part of a group is a sufficient condition to change a person’s actions, judgments and visual perceptions. The experiment, very simple, consisted of asking the subjects involved to associate a line 1 drawn on a white sheet with the corresponding one, choosing between three different lines A, B and C present on another sheet. Only one was identical to the other, while the other two were obviously longer or shorter. The experiment was developed in three phases. As soon as one of the subjects, Asch’s accomplice, gave an erroneous answer associating line 1 with the incorrect one, The other members of the group also made the same mistake., even though the correct answer was more than obvious. The participants, asked about the reason for this choice, responded that being aware of the correct answer, They had decided to conform to the group, adapting to those who had preceded them.
Rosenhan’s experiment
Among the most interesting investigations in this field, an experiment carried out by David Rosenhan (1923) to document the poor validity of psychiatric diagnoses. Rosenhan admitted eight attendants to various psychiatric hospitals citing psychotic symptoms, but once they entered the hospital they behaved normally. Despite this,…