8 famous social psychology experiments

Social Psychology Experiments: 10 Of The Most Famous Studies

Ten of the most influential social psychology experiments explain why we sometimes do dumb or irrational things. 

Ten of the most influential social psychology experiments explain why we sometimes do dumb or irrational things.

“I have been primarily interested in how and why ordinary people do unusual things, things that seem alien to their natures. Why do good people sometimes act evil? Why do smart people sometimes do dumb or irrational things?” –Philip Zimbardo

Like famous social psychologist Professor Philip Zimbardo (author of The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil ), I’m also obsessed with why we do dumb or irrational things.

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.

1. Social Psychology Experiments: The Halo Effect

The halo effect is a finding from a famous social psychology experiment.

It is the idea that global evaluations about a person (e.g. she is likeable) bleed over into judgements about their specific traits (e.g. she is intelligent).

It is sometimes called the “what is beautiful is good” principle, or the “physical attractiveness stereotype”.

It is called the halo effect because a halo was often used in religious art to show that a person is good.

2. Cognitive Dissonance

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.

3. Robbers Cave Experiment: How Group Conflicts Develop

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.

One of the reasons the became so famous is that it appeared to show how groups could be reconciled, how peace could flourish.

The key was the focus on superordinate goals, those stretching beyond the boundaries of the group itself.

4. Social Psychology Experiments: The Stanford Prison Experiment

The Stanford prison experiment was run to find out how people would react to being made a prisoner or prison guard.

The psychologist Philip Zimbardo, who led the Stanford prison experiment, thought ordinary, healthy people would come to behave cruelly, like prison guards, if they were put in that situation, even if it was against their personality.

It has since become a classic social psychology experiment, studied by generations of students and recently coming under a lot of criticism.

5. The Milgram Social Psychology Experiment

The Milgram experiment , led by the well-known psychologist Stanley Milgram in the 1960s, aimed to test people’s obedience to authority.

The results of Milgram’s social psychology experiment, sometimes known as the Milgram obedience study, continue to be both thought-provoking and controversial.

The Milgram experiment discovered people are much more obedient than you might imagine.

Fully 63 percent of the participants continued administering what appeared like electric shocks to another person while they screamed in agony, begged to stop and eventually fell silent — just because they were told to.

6. The False Consensus Effect

The false consensus effect is a famous social psychological finding that people tend to assume that others agree with them.

It could apply to opinions, values, beliefs or behaviours, but people assume others think and act in the same way as they do.

It is hard for many people to believe the false consensus effect exists because they quite naturally believe they are good ‘intuitive psychologists’, thinking it is relatively easy to predict other people’s attitudes and behaviours.

In reality, people show a number of predictable biases, such as the false consensus effect, when estimating other people’s behaviour and its causes.

7. Social Psychology Experiments: Social Identity Theory

Social identity theory helps to explain why people’s behaviour in groups is fascinating and sometimes disturbing.

People gain part of their self from the groups they belong to and that is at the heart of social identity theory.

The famous theory explains why as soon as humans are bunched together in groups we start to do odd things: copy other members of our group, favour members of own group over others, look for a leader to worship and fight other groups.

8. Negotiation: 2 Psychological Strategies That Matter Most

Negotiation is one of those activities we often engage in without quite realising it.

Negotiation doesn’t just happen in the boardroom, or when we ask our boss for a raise or down at the market, it happens every time we want to reach an agreement with someone.

In a classic, award-winning series of social psychology experiments, Morgan Deutsch and Robert Krauss investigated two central factors in negotiation: how we communicate with each other and how we use threats.

9. Bystander Effect And The Diffusion Of Responsibility

The bystander effect in social psychology is the surprising finding that the mere presence of other people inhibits our own helping behaviours in an emergency.

The bystander effect social psychology experiments are mentioned in every psychology textbook and often dubbed ‘seminal’.

This famous social psychology experiment on the bystander effect was inspired by the highly publicised murder of Kitty Genovese in 1964.

It found that in some circumstances, the presence of others inhibits people’s helping behaviours — partly because of a phenomenon called diffusion of responsibility.

10. Asch Conformity Experiment: The Power Of Social Pressure

The Asch conformity experiments — some of the most famous every done — were a series of social psychology experiments carried out by noted psychologist Solomon Asch.

The Asch conformity experiment reveals how strongly a person’s opinions are affected by people around them.

In fact, the Asch conformity experiment shows that many of us will deny our own senses just to conform with others.

Author: Dr Jeremy Dean

Psychologist, Jeremy Dean, PhD is the founder and author of PsyBlog. He holds a doctorate in psychology from University College London and two other advanced degrees in psychology. He has been writing about scientific research on PsyBlog since 2004. View all posts by Dr Jeremy Dean

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• The 25 Most Influential Psychological Experiments in History

While each year thousands and thousands of studies are completed in the many specialty areas of psychology, there are a handful that, over the years, have had a lasting impact in the psychological community as a whole. Some of these were dutifully conducted, keeping within the confines of ethical and practical guidelines. Others pushed the boundaries of human behavior during their psychological experiments and created controversies that still linger to this day. And still others were not designed to be true psychological experiments, but ended up as beacons to the psychological community in proving or disproving theories.

This is a list of the 25 most influential psychological experiments still being taught to psychology students of today.

1. A Class Divided

Study conducted by: jane elliott.

Study Conducted in 1968 in an Iowa classroom

Experiment Details: Jane Elliott’s famous experiment was inspired by the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the inspirational life that he led. The third grade teacher developed an exercise, or better yet, a psychological experiment, to help her Caucasian students understand the effects of racism and prejudice.

Elliott divided her class into two separate groups: blue-eyed students and brown-eyed students. On the first day, she labeled the blue-eyed group as the superior group and from that point forward they had extra privileges, leaving the brown-eyed children to represent the minority group. She discouraged the groups from interacting and singled out individual students to stress the negative characteristics of the children in the minority group. What this exercise showed was that the children’s behavior changed almost instantaneously. The group of blue-eyed students performed better academically and even began bullying their brown-eyed classmates. The brown-eyed group experienced lower self-confidence and worse academic performance. The next day, she reversed the roles of the two groups and the blue-eyed students became the minority group.

At the end of the experiment, the children were so relieved that they were reported to have embraced one another and agreed that people should not be judged based on outward appearances. This exercise has since been repeated many times with similar outcomes.

For more information click here

2. Asch Conformity Study

Study conducted by: dr. solomon asch.

Study Conducted in 1951 at Swarthmore College

Experiment Details: Dr. Solomon Asch conducted a groundbreaking study that was designed to evaluate a person’s likelihood to conform to a standard when there is pressure to do so.

A group of participants were shown pictures with lines of various lengths and were then asked a simple question: Which line is longest? The tricky part of this study was that in each group only one person was a true participant. The others were actors with a script. Most of the actors were instructed to give the wrong answer. Strangely, the one true participant almost always agreed with the majority, even though they knew they were giving the wrong answer.

The results of this study are important when we study social interactions among individuals in groups. This study is a famous example of the temptation many of us experience to conform to a standard during group situations and it showed that people often care more about being the same as others than they do about being right. It is still recognized as one of the most influential psychological experiments for understanding human behavior.

3. Bobo Doll Experiment

Study conducted by: dr. alburt bandura.

Study Conducted between 1961-1963 at Stanford University

In his groundbreaking study he separated participants into three groups:

• one was exposed to a video of an adult showing aggressive behavior towards a Bobo doll
• another was exposed to video of a passive adult playing with the Bobo doll
• the third formed a control group

Children watched their assigned video and then were sent to a room with the same doll they had seen in the video (with the exception of those in the control group). What the researcher found was that children exposed to the aggressive model were more likely to exhibit aggressive behavior towards the doll themselves. The other groups showed little imitative aggressive behavior. For those children exposed to the aggressive model, the number of derivative physical aggressions shown by the boys was 38.2 and 12.7 for the girls.

The study also showed that boys exhibited more aggression when exposed to aggressive male models than boys exposed to aggressive female models. When exposed to aggressive male models, the number of aggressive instances exhibited by boys averaged 104. This is compared to 48.4 aggressive instances exhibited by boys who were exposed to aggressive female models.

While the results for the girls show similar findings, the results were less drastic. When exposed to aggressive female models, the number of aggressive instances exhibited by girls averaged 57.7. This is compared to 36.3 aggressive instances exhibited by girls who were exposed to aggressive male models. The results concerning gender differences strongly supported Bandura’s secondary prediction that children will be more strongly influenced by same-sex models. The Bobo Doll Experiment showed a groundbreaking way to study human behavior and it’s influences.

4. Car Crash Experiment

Study conducted by: elizabeth loftus and john palmer.

Study Conducted in 1974 at The University of California in Irvine

The participants watched slides of a car accident and were asked to describe what had happened as if they were eyewitnesses to the scene. The participants were put into two groups and each group was questioned using different wording such as “how fast was the car driving at the time of impact?” versus “how fast was the car going when it smashed into the other car?” The experimenters found that the use of different verbs affected the participants’ memories of the accident, showing that memory can be easily distorted.

This research suggests that memory can be easily manipulated by questioning technique. This means that information gathered after the event can merge with original memory causing incorrect recall or reconstructive memory. The addition of false details to a memory of an event is now referred to as confabulation. This concept has very important implications for the questions used in police interviews of eyewitnesses.

5. Cognitive Dissonance Experiment

Study conducted by: leon festinger and james carlsmith.

Study Conducted in 1957 at Stanford University

Experiment Details: The concept of cognitive dissonance refers to a situation involving conflicting:

This conflict produces an inherent feeling of discomfort leading to a change in one of the attitudes, beliefs or behaviors to minimize or eliminate the discomfort and restore balance.

Cognitive dissonance was first investigated by Leon Festinger, after an observational study of a cult that believed that the earth was going to be destroyed by a flood. Out of this study was born an intriguing experiment conducted by Festinger and Carlsmith where participants were asked to perform a series of dull tasks (such as turning pegs in a peg board for an hour). Participant’s initial attitudes toward this task were highly negative.

They were then paid either $1 or $20 to tell a participant waiting in the lobby that the tasks were really interesting. Almost all of the participants agreed to walk into the waiting room and persuade the next participant that the boring experiment would be fun. When the participants were later asked to evaluate the experiment, the participants who were paid only $1 rated the tedious task as more fun and enjoyable than the participants who were paid $20 to lie.

Being paid only $1 is not sufficient incentive for lying and so those who were paid $1 experienced dissonance. They could only overcome that cognitive dissonance by coming to believe that the tasks really were interesting and enjoyable. Being paid $20 provides a reason for turning pegs and there is therefore no dissonance.

6. Fantz’s Looking Chamber

Study conducted by: robert l. fantz.

Study Conducted in 1961 at the University of Illinois

Experiment Details: The study conducted by Robert L. Fantz is among the simplest, yet most important in the field of infant development and vision. In 1961, when this experiment was conducted, there very few ways to study what was going on in the mind of an infant. Fantz realized that the best way was to simply watch the actions and reactions of infants. He understood the fundamental factor that if there is something of interest near humans, they generally look at it.

To test this concept, Fantz set up a display board with two pictures attached. On one was a bulls-eye. On the other was the sketch of a human face. This board was hung in a chamber where a baby could lie safely underneath and see both images. Then, from behind the board, invisible to the baby, he peeked through a hole to watch what the baby looked at. This study showed that a two-month old baby looked twice as much at the human face as it did at the bulls-eye. This suggests that human babies have some powers of pattern and form selection. Before this experiment it was thought that babies looked out onto a chaotic world of which they could make little sense.

7. Hawthorne Effect

Study conducted by: henry a. landsberger.

Study Conducted in 1955 at Hawthorne Works in Chicago, Illinois

Landsberger performed the study by analyzing data from experiments conducted between 1924 and 1932, by Elton Mayo, at the Hawthorne Works near Chicago. The company had commissioned studies to evaluate whether the level of light in a building changed the productivity of the workers. What Mayo found was that the level of light made no difference in productivity. The workers increased their output whenever the amount of light was switched from a low level to a high level, or vice versa.

The researchers noticed a tendency that the workers’ level of efficiency increased when any variable was manipulated. The study showed that the output changed simply because the workers were aware that they were under observation. The conclusion was that the workers felt important because they were pleased to be singled out. They increased productivity as a result. Being singled out was the factor dictating increased productivity, not the changing lighting levels, or any of the other factors that they experimented upon.

The Hawthorne Effect has become one of the hardest inbuilt biases to eliminate or factor into the design of any experiment in psychology and beyond.

8. Kitty Genovese Case

Study conducted by: new york police force.

Study Conducted in 1964 in New York City

Experiment Details: The murder case of Kitty Genovese was never intended to be a psychological experiment, however it ended up having serious implications for the field.

According to a New York Times article, almost 40 neighbors witnessed Kitty Genovese being savagely attacked and murdered in Queens, New York in 1964. Not one neighbor called the police for help. Some reports state that the attacker briefly left the scene and later returned to “finish off” his victim. It was later uncovered that many of these facts were exaggerated. (There were more likely only a dozen witnesses and records show that some calls to police were made).

What this case later become famous for is the “Bystander Effect,” which states that the more bystanders that are present in a social situation, the less likely it is that anyone will step in and help. This effect has led to changes in medicine, psychology and many other areas. One famous example is the way CPR is taught to new learners. All students in CPR courses learn that they must assign one bystander the job of alerting authorities which minimizes the chances of no one calling for assistance.

9. Learned Helplessness Experiment

Study conducted by: martin seligman.

Study Conducted in 1967 at the University of Pennsylvania

Seligman’s experiment involved the ringing of a bell and then the administration of a light shock to a dog. After a number of pairings, the dog reacted to the shock even before it happened. As soon as the dog heard the bell, he reacted as though he’d already been shocked.

During the course of this study something unexpected happened. Each dog was placed in a large crate that was divided down the middle with a low fence. The dog could see and jump over the fence easily. The floor on one side of the fence was electrified, but not on the other side of the fence. Seligman placed each dog on the electrified side and administered a light shock. He expected the dog to jump to the non-shocking side of the fence. In an unexpected turn, the dogs simply laid down.

The hypothesis was that as the dogs learned from the first part of the experiment that there was nothing they could do to avoid the shocks, they gave up in the second part of the experiment. To prove this hypothesis the experimenters brought in a new set of animals and found that dogs with no history in the experiment would jump over the fence.

This condition was described as learned helplessness. A human or animal does not attempt to get out of a negative situation because the past has taught them that they are helpless.

10. Little Albert Experiment

Study conducted by: john b. watson and rosalie rayner.

Study Conducted in 1920 at Johns Hopkins University

The experiment began by placing a white rat in front of the infant, who initially had no fear of the animal. Watson then produced a loud sound by striking a steel bar with a hammer every time little Albert was presented with the rat. After several pairings (the noise and the presentation of the white rat), the boy began to cry and exhibit signs of fear every time the rat appeared in the room. Watson also created similar conditioned reflexes with other common animals and objects (rabbits, Santa beard, etc.) until Albert feared them all.

This study proved that classical conditioning works on humans. One of its most important implications is that adult fears are often connected to early childhood experiences.

11. Magical Number Seven

Study conducted by: george a. miller.

Study Conducted in 1956 at Princeton University

Experiment Details:   Frequently referred to as “ Miller’s Law,” the Magical Number Seven experiment purports that the number of objects an average human can hold in working memory is 7 ± 2. This means that the human memory capacity typically includes strings of words or concepts ranging from 5-9. This information on the limits to the capacity for processing information became one of the most highly cited papers in psychology.

The Magical Number Seven Experiment was published in 1956 by cognitive psychologist George A. Miller of Princeton University’s Department of Psychology in Psychological Review .  In the article, Miller discussed a concurrence between the limits of one-dimensional absolute judgment and the limits of short-term memory.

In a one-dimensional absolute-judgment task, a person is presented with a number of stimuli that vary on one dimension (such as 10 different tones varying only in pitch). The person responds to each stimulus with a corresponding response (learned before).

Performance is almost perfect up to five or six different stimuli but declines as the number of different stimuli is increased. This means that a human’s maximum performance on one-dimensional absolute judgment can be described as an information store with the maximum capacity of approximately 2 to 3 bits of information There is the ability to distinguish between four and eight alternatives.

12. Pavlov’s Dog Experiment

Study conducted by: ivan pavlov.

Study Conducted in the 1890s at the Military Medical Academy in St. Petersburg, Russia

Pavlov began with the simple idea that there are some things that a dog does not need to learn. He observed that dogs do not learn to salivate when they see food. This reflex is “hard wired” into the dog. This is an unconditioned response (a stimulus-response connection that required no learning).

Pavlov outlined that there are unconditioned responses in the animal by presenting a dog with a bowl of food and then measuring its salivary secretions. In the experiment, Pavlov used a bell as his neutral stimulus. Whenever he gave food to his dogs, he also rang a bell. After a number of repeats of this procedure, he tried the bell on its own. What he found was that the bell on its own now caused an increase in salivation. The dog had learned to associate the bell and the food. This learning created a new behavior. The dog salivated when he heard the bell. Because this response was learned (or conditioned), it is called a conditioned response. The neutral stimulus has become a conditioned stimulus.

This theory came to be known as classical conditioning.

13. Robbers Cave Experiment

Study conducted by: muzafer and carolyn sherif.

Study Conducted in 1954 at the University of Oklahoma

Experiment Details: This experiment, which studied group conflict, is considered by most to be outside the lines of what is considered ethically sound.

In 1954 researchers at the University of Oklahoma assigned 22 eleven- and twelve-year-old boys from similar backgrounds into two groups. The two groups were taken to separate areas of a summer camp facility where they were able to bond as social units. The groups were housed in separate cabins and neither group knew of the other’s existence for an entire week. The boys bonded with their cabin mates during that time. Once the two groups were allowed to have contact, they showed definite signs of prejudice and hostility toward each other even though they had only been given a very short time to develop their social group. To increase the conflict between the groups, the experimenters had them compete against each other in a series of activities. This created even more hostility and eventually the groups refused to eat in the same room. The final phase of the experiment involved turning the rival groups into friends. The fun activities the experimenters had planned like shooting firecrackers and watching movies did not initially work, so they created teamwork exercises where the two groups were forced to collaborate. At the end of the experiment, the boys decided to ride the same bus home, demonstrating that conflict can be resolved and prejudice overcome through cooperation.

Many critics have compared this study to Golding’s Lord of the Flies novel as a classic example of prejudice and conflict resolution.

14. Ross’ False Consensus Effect Study

Study conducted by: lee ross.

Study Conducted in 1977 at Stanford University

Experiment Details: In 1977, a social psychology professor at Stanford University named Lee Ross conducted an experiment that, in lay terms, focuses on how people can incorrectly conclude that others think the same way they do, or form a “false consensus” about the beliefs and preferences of others. Ross conducted the study in order to outline how the “false consensus effect” functions in humans.

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In the first part of the study, participants were asked to read about situations in which a conflict occurred and then were told two alternative ways of responding to the situation. They were asked to do three things:

• Guess which option other people would choose
• Say which option they themselves would choose
• Describe the attributes of the person who would likely choose each of the two options

What the study showed was that most of the subjects believed that other people would do the same as them, regardless of which of the two responses they actually chose themselves. This phenomenon is referred to as the false consensus effect, where an individual thinks that other people think the same way they do when they may not. The second observation coming from this important study is that when participants were asked to describe the attributes of the people who will likely make the choice opposite of their own, they made bold and sometimes negative predictions about the personalities of those who did not share their choice.

15. The Schacter and Singer Experiment on Emotion

Study conducted by: stanley schachter and jerome e. singer.

Study Conducted in 1962 at Columbia University

Experiment Details: In 1962 Schachter and Singer conducted a ground breaking experiment to prove their theory of emotion.

In the study, a group of 184 male participants were injected with epinephrine, a hormone that induces arousal including increased heartbeat, trembling, and rapid breathing. The research participants were told that they were being injected with a new medication to test their eyesight. The first group of participants was informed the possible side effects that the injection might cause while the second group of participants were not. The participants were then placed in a room with someone they thought was another participant, but was actually a confederate in the experiment. The confederate acted in one of two ways: euphoric or angry. Participants who had not been informed about the effects of the injection were more likely to feel either happier or angrier than those who had been informed.

What Schachter and Singer were trying to understand was the ways in which cognition or thoughts influence human emotion. Their study illustrates the importance of how people interpret their physiological states, which form an important component of your emotions. Though their cognitive theory of emotional arousal dominated the field for two decades, it has been criticized for two main reasons: the size of the effect seen in the experiment was not that significant and other researchers had difficulties repeating the experiment.

16. Selective Attention / Invisible Gorilla Experiment

Study conducted by: daniel simons and christopher chabris.

Study Conducted in 1999 at Harvard University

Experiment Details: In 1999 Simons and Chabris conducted their famous awareness test at Harvard University.

Participants in the study were asked to watch a video and count how many passes occurred between basketball players on the white team. The video moves at a moderate pace and keeping track of the passes is a relatively easy task. What most people fail to notice amidst their counting is that in the middle of the test, a man in a gorilla suit walked onto the court and stood in the center before walking off-screen.

The study found that the majority of the subjects did not notice the gorilla at all, proving that humans often overestimate their ability to effectively multi-task. What the study set out to prove is that when people are asked to attend to one task, they focus so strongly on that element that they may miss other important details.

17. Stanford Prison Study

Study conducted by philip zimbardo.

Study Conducted in 1971 at Stanford University

The Stanford Prison Experiment was designed to study behavior of “normal” individuals when assigned a role of prisoner or guard. College students were recruited to participate. They were assigned roles of “guard” or “inmate.”  Zimbardo played the role of the warden. The basement of the psychology building was the set of the prison. 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. Many of the prisoners became submissive to those in authority roles. The Stanford Prison 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. People will conform to certain roles if the conditions are right. The Stanford Prison Experiment remains one of the most famous psychology experiments of all time.

18. Stanley Milgram Experiment

Study conducted by stanley milgram.

Study Conducted in 1961 at Stanford University

Experiment Details: This 1961 study was conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram. It was designed to measure people’s willingness to obey authority figures when instructed to perform acts that conflicted with their morals. 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 (an actor) do a memory test. They 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 they did).

Participants were told to play the role of “teacher” and administer electric shocks to “the learner,” every time they answered a question incorrectly. The experimenters asked the participants to keep increasing the shocks. 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. They increased 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.

19. Surrogate Mother Experiment

Study conducted by: harry harlow.

Study Conducted from 1957-1963 at the University of Wisconsin

Experiment Details: In a series of controversial experiments during the late 1950s and early 1960s, Harry Harlow studied the importance of a mother’s love for healthy childhood development.

In order to do this he separated infant rhesus monkeys from their mothers a few hours after birth and left them to be raised by two “surrogate mothers.” One of the surrogates was made of wire with an attached bottle for food. The other was made of soft terrycloth but lacked food. The researcher found 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 healthier.

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.

20. The Good Samaritan Experiment

Study conducted by: john darley and daniel batson.

Study Conducted in 1973 at The Princeton Theological Seminary (Researchers were from Princeton University)

Experiment Details: In 1973, an experiment was created by John Darley and Daniel Batson, to investigate the potential causes that underlie altruistic behavior. The researchers set out three hypotheses they wanted to test:

• People thinking about religion and higher principles would be no more inclined to show helping behavior than laymen.
• People in a rush would be much less likely to show helping behavior.
• People who are religious for personal gain would be less likely to help than people who are religious because they want to gain some spiritual and personal insights into the meaning of life.

Student participants were given some religious teaching and instruction. They were 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,. This showed 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 an impact on the amount of helping behavior shown.

21. The Halo Effect Experiment

Study conducted by: richard e. nisbett and timothy decamp wilson.

Study Conducted in 1977 at the University of Michigan

Experiment Details: The Halo Effect states that people generally assume that people who are physically attractive are more likely to:

• be intelligent
• be friendly
• display good judgment

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. They’re not aware that it influences:

• their personal judgments
• the production of a more complex social behavior

In the experiment, college students were the research participants. They 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. Each group was shown one of two different interviews with the same instructor. The instructor is a native French-speaking Belgian who spoke English with a noticeable accent. In the first video, the instructor presented himself as someone:

• respectful of his students’ intelligence and motives
• flexible in his approach to teaching
• enthusiastic about his subject matter

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

His mannerisms and accent were kept the same in both versions of videos. The subjects were asked to rate the professor on an 8-point scale ranging from “like extremely” to “dislike extremely.” Subjects were also told that the researchers were interested in knowing “how much their liking for the teacher influenced the ratings they just made.” Other subjects were asked to identify how much the characteristics they just rated influenced their liking of the teacher.

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 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. Even when it is pointed out, they may still deny that it is a product of the halo effect phenomenon.

22. The Marshmallow Test

Study conducted by: walter mischel.

Study Conducted in 1972 at Stanford University

In his 1972 Marshmallow Experiment, children ages four to six were taken into a room where a marshmallow was placed 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. The examiner recorded how long each child resisted eating the marshmallow and noted whether it correlated with the child’s success in adulthood. A small number of the 600 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. 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.

23. The Monster Study

Study conducted by: wendell johnson.

Study Conducted in 1939 at the University of Iowa

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 22 orphaned children, some with stutters and some without. The children were in two groups. 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. They were examples of the significance of positive reinforcement in education.

The initial goal of the study was to investigate positive and negative speech therapy. However, the implication spanned much further into methods of teaching for young children.

24. Violinist at the Metro Experiment

Study conducted by: staff at the washington post.

Study Conducted in 2007 at a Washington D.C. Metro Train Station

During the study, pedestrians rushed by without realizing that the musician playing at the entrance to the metro stop was Grammy-winning musician, Joshua Bell. Two days before playing in the subway, he sold out at a theater in Boston where the seats average $100. He played one of the most intricate pieces ever written with a violin worth 3.5 million dollars. 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. He collected $32.

The study and the subsequent article organized by the Washington Post was part of a social experiment looking at:

• the priorities of people

Gene Weingarten wrote about the social experiment: “In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?” Later he won a Pulitzer Prize for his story. 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.

25. Visual Cliff Experiment

Study conducted by: eleanor gibson and richard walk.

Study Conducted in 1959 at Cornell University

Experiment Details: In 1959, 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. To study this, Gibson and Walk conducted the visual cliff experiment.

They 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. A visual cliff was created using a large glass table that was raised about a foot off the floor. Half of the glass table had a checker pattern underneath in order to create the appearance of a ‘shallow side.’

In order to create a ‘deep side,’ a checker pattern was created on the floor; this side is the visual cliff. 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:

• Nine of the infants did not move off the centerboard.
• All of the 27 infants who did move crossed into the shallow side when their mothers called them from the shallow side.
• Three of the infants crawled off the visual cliff toward their mother when called from the deep side.
• When called from the deep side, the remaining 24 children either crawled to the shallow side or cried because they could not cross the visual cliff and make it to their mother.

What this study helped demonstrate is that depth perception is likely an inborn train in humans.

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 1879, 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 1879, psychology has grown into a massive collection of:

• methods of practice

It’s also a specialty area in 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.

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9 of the Most Influential Social Psychology Experiments in History

For those interested in understanding how social interactions can shape behavior and mental processes, this article dives deep into some of the most influential social psychology experiments in history. Covering everything from the perpetrator-victim dynamic prevalent in Stanley Milgram’s infamous obedience experiment to the false consensus effect just a few years later, these social psychology experiments provide invaluable insights into the human psyche.

Through carefully conducted studies such as Lee Ross’ Diffusion of Responsibility Experiment and Edward Thorndike’s Halo Effect Experiment, as well as famous experiments such as Albert Bandura’s Bobo Doll Experiment, we are able to better comprehend why people act the way they do in certain situations. Come explore these incredible, influential experiments that have left their mark on social psychology and the world!

To learn more about what is social psychology check out our article.

The Stanford Prison Experiment, 1971

1.1. overview.

The Stanford Prison Experiment was a widely known and controversial social psychology experiment conducted in 1971 at Stanford University by Professor Philip Zimbardo to investigate how ordinary, healthy people would react to being made prisoners or prison guards. It has since become a classic social psychology experiment and is still studied today. However, the experiment has come under considerable criticism in recent years due to ethical issues.

1.2. Results

Twenty-four male college students were recruited for the experiment, which involved them playing the role of either prisoner or guard. Each group was then allotted 8-hour shifts and treated as if they were in a real prison situation. The prisoners were kept in the makeshift prison set up in the basement of the Psychology Department, where the guards were responsible for ensuring the inmates followed prison regulations. The participants were screened to guarantee they had no mental or physical problems that may have influenced their behavior.

The experiment concluded that it is possible to change the behavior of individuals when placed in groups, even when they are not aware they are being observed. The study showed how quickly people will conform to expected social roles and how easily ‘ordinary’ people can be transformed from ‘good’ to ‘evil.’ Both the prisoners and guards revealed stereotypical characteristics associated with correctional officers; the prisoners became emotionally unstable and submissive, whilst the guards became hostile and authoritative.

1.3. Criticisms

Philip Zimbardo’s experiment, the Stanford Prison Experiment, is like a dark mirror reflecting our society’s innermost fears. In 1971, Zimbardo conducted an experiment in which college students were randomly assigned to be either prisoners or guards in a simulated prison environment. The results of this study showed that people could quickly adapt to roles and lose their sense of morality when placed in certain situations.

The impact of the Stanford Prison Experiment has been far-reaching; it has been used as evidence for why prisons are so dangerous and how they can lead to psychological damage among inmates. It also serves as a reminder that power dynamics between individuals can have serious consequences if not monitored closely.

Critics have argued that the ethical practices employed by Zimbardo during his experiment were questionable at best, with some participants experiencing extreme distress due to their role-playing experience. Despite these criticisms, many believe that the experiment still provides valuable insight into human behavior and psychology today. Personifying its lessons, we could say that the Stanford Prison Experiment speaks volumes about how easily our moral compass can become distorted when faced with authority figures or oppressive environments.

The Asch Conformity Experiment, 1951

2.1. overview.

The Asch Conformity Experiment, also known as the “Asch Line Study,” was a series of experiments conducted by psychologist Solomon Asch in 1951 to test how people tend to conform to social pressures. The study was composed of two groups: one consisting of actual participants (the control group) and the other including actors (the confederates).

During the experiment, the participants were asked to view a line on one board and then match it to one of three lines on another board with their own judgment. Initially, the group was given correct answers; however, after a few attempts, the actors began to give wrong answers intentionally to observe how the participant would respond.

2.2. Results

The results showed that 75% of the participants conformed to the incorrect majority opinion given by the confederate group—even when it obviously contradicted their own senses. In addition, the control group with only real subjects produced a much lower rate of conformity, with less than 1% ever selecting the incorrect answer. This demonstrated that it was not the difficulty of the task but rather the presence of an influential social group that caused the majority of participants to deny their own thoughts in order to fit in with the others.

2.3. Criticisms

Critics have argued that the experiment was not diverse enough since it mainly used college-aged men as its sample population. Additionally, because the experiment did not include females, it has been suggested that the results of the cave experiment cannot be generalized to all genders.

Furthermore, critics have argued that the experimental design lacked a true measure of real-life social pressure since the actors and real participants knew the situation was artificial. Despite these criticisms, the Asch experiment remains one of the most important social psychology studies in history, and its core message about the power of conformity to influence opinions and behavior continues to be studied and discussed today.

We tackled the topic of conformity in our article about social influence .

The Bobo Doll Experiment, 1961

3.1. overview.

The Bobo Doll experiment was a series of experiments conducted by psychologist Albert Bandura between 1961 and 1963 at Stanford University, aimed at studying the extent to which human behavior is based on social imitation rather than inherited genetic factors.

Three groups of 24 participants each, aged from 3 to 6 years old, were chosen for the experiment – a control group (with no interaction with any adults), an aggressive group (observing an adult behaving aggressively towards the doll), and a passive group (observing a more passive adult playing with the doll). The results of the studies were a strong indication that children were strongly influenced by watching other people’s behavior and imitated it afterward in their own behavior.

3.2. Results

The study found that the children in the aggressive and passive groups were significantly more likely to behave aggressively towards the bobo doll than those in the control group, even though the latter had not been exposed to any type of model behavior. When it came to gender differences, boys showed more aggressive behavior when exposed to the aggressive behavior of male models, while girls showed similar findings, albeit less drastic.

Moreover, the study also contained a memory test during which wrong answers were punished with electric shocks; here, it appeared as if the individual completing the test was affected by the electric shocks, suggesting that authority figures can greatly influence behavior, even if not intentionally. Finally, the study also showed that when urged to continue with the experience even after protests from the individual receiving electric shocks, they complied with the requests, highlighting the power of authority within social situations.

3.3. Criticisms

Although the experiment raised widely accepted as evidence for the hypothesis that individuals learn behavior by observing others, the Bobo Doll experiment has been criticized in recent years. One key point of criticism is that Bandura’s research neglected to look at positive modeling – for example, modeling of altruism or helpful behavior, instead focusing solely on aggression.

Additionally, some have argued that, due to its relatively small sample size and laboratory-based approach, the study failed to take into account real-life influences, such as environmental variables, which would have provided additional context. Despite these criticisms, the Bobo Doll experiment remains one of the most famous studies in psychology, providing significant evidence for the importance of social learning theory in understanding human behavior.

The Milgram Experiment, 1963

4.1. overview.

The Milgram Experiment was a famous social psychology experiment and experiment conducted by Stanley Milgram in the 1960s. Its aim was to test people’s obedience to authority. The study examined how far people would go when an authority figure instructed them to perform acts that conflicted with their morals.

Specifically, it sought to find out if non-Nazi populations, such as those from the United States, would follow orders to harm other persons. One of the motivations for this investigation was the results of World War II, during which Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann was able to use “I was only following orders” as a legal defense at the Nuremberg trials.

4.2. Results

The experiment was conducted at Yale University in 1961 and included unsuspecting participants who were told that the study was about memory. Participants believed they were participating in a study where they would be required to act as teachers while an unsuspecting confederate (learned) was on the other side of the wall. Their task was to ask questions to the learner, and if they received a wrong answer, press a button administering shock, ranging from 15 volts to 450 volts.

The results showed that despite protests and cries from the learner, 63% of the participants continued pressing the switch. Milgram’s experiment revealed that human beings are conditioned to obey authority figures, even when going against their natural moral code.

4.3. Criticisms

Despite its significance, the Milgram Experiment has been heavily criticized over the years, and some have argued that the study violated ethical standards. The argument is that causing psychological and emotional distress to unwitting volunteers is wrong. Other critics have argued that the role reversals or changes in lab settings would yield different outcomes and should have been considered.

In response to these criticisms, some scientists have suggested controversial experiments by reducing the voltage administered to the learner or conducting newer versions of the experiment in naturalistic settings. In addition, the way modern studies measure obedience is greatly different – contemporary research focuses on motives and reactions participants have after the experiment. These proposed changes would enable researchers to look into extraneous factors influencing obedience versus harm caused to participants.

The Halo Effect Experiment, 1977

5.1. overview.

The halo effect is commonly defined as the phenomenon in which a positive evaluation of one trait extends to an overall perception of an individual. This cognitive bias has been observed by social psychologists for over a century, beginning with psychologist Edward Thorndike’s studies regarding commanding officers in the military.

The halo effect is also known as the “what is beautiful is good” principle or the “physical attractiveness stereotype.” This phenomenon has had a lasting impact on our evaluation and judgment of others. Additionally, the term “halo effect” was named after its likeness to that of the halo painted above the heads of saints and holy figures in religious art, generally regarded as symbols of moral goodness.

To investigate this phenomenon further, Nisbett and Wilson conducted an experiment in 1977 at the University of Michigan. As research participants, they recruited college students who were asked to watch a pre-recorded psychology instructor tape with two different attitudes—one likable and another unlikable. After watching the videotapes, they filled in a questionnaire that asked them to rate the lecturer’s physical appearance, mannerisms, and accent on an 8-point scale ranging from “like extremely” to “dislike extremely.”

Nisbett and Wilson’s study showed that despite the lecturers having the same mannerisms and accents, the respondents rated the lecturer more favorably if their attitude projected a likable demeanor. Moreover, Nisbett and Wilson discovered that people are unaware when the halo effect phenomenon occurs; they inferred that the respondents relied on their initial impression of the lecturer without being aware that it influenced their subsequent assessment. In total, 278 college students participated in the study.

5.2. Results

The results of this study showed that the ratings of the lecturer responded differently depending on his behavior—those who saw him adopt a likable demeanor in the video gave him higher ratings than those who saw him act in an unlikable manner. Furthermore, those who rated the lecturer highly were more likely to believe that he was intelligent, hardworking, kind, and humorous. This suggests that the halo effect can lead people to make inaccurate assumptions about someone based solely on their appearance or behavior.

Moreover, an updated study on the halo effect also suggests that a negative assessment of certain traits can similarly affect subsequent perceptions. For instance, if someone didn’t like the instructor’s physical appearance, they are more likely to rate him as unintelligent and lazy. This provides evidence that negative feelings about one characteristic can extend to an individual’s other features.

5.3. Criticisms

Despite its analytical contributions to the field, some scholars have questioned Nisbett and Wilson’s use of college students as the research participants in the study due to their limited exposure to the concept at hand. Additionally, since the focus of this experiment utilized only pre-recorded videos, there is also criticism of the limitation in the accuracy of facial expressions and vocal intonations. However, this study does provide evidence that people may rely on initial impressions when making assessments, resulting in cognitive bias and inaccurate judgments.

The False Consensus Effect Experiment, 1974

6.1. overview.

The False Consensus Effect Experiment was conducted in 1974 by Professor Lee Ross, then at Stanford University. The experiment focused on how people can form a “false consensus” about the beliefs and preferences of others. Specifically, it asked participants to read situations with two alternative responses and predict which one other people would choose. In the study, most subjects overestimated the likelihood that others would do the same thing as them, even when the situation was hypothetical and there was no real data to indicate what choice the majority of people might make. Furthermore, researchers found that the anticipation of a false consensus could lead people to display negative predictions about the personalities of those who did not share their choice.

6.2. Results

The results of Lee Ross’s experiment demonstrated the false consensus bias – the tendency to overestimate the extent to which others agree with one’s own beliefs and behaviors. He and his colleagues also conducted experiments in the late 1970s to demonstrate how this bias operates in estimating other people’s behaviors and causes. For example, participants chose a resolution to an imagined conflict, then estimated how many others would choose the same.

In another experiment, students were asked to carry a sign that read “eat at joe’s” to measure how many other people agreed with the sign. Those who agreed believed the majority of people would also agree; those who refused believed the majority would refuse. This experiment showed the false consensus effect – we tend to believe the majority of people agree with us and act the same way.

6.3. Criticisms

The false consensus effect is like a mirage in the desert, appearing to be something it’s not. It occurs when people overestimate how much other people agree with them. This bias can lead to an inaccurate perception of reality and cause individuals to make decisions based on false assumptions. The false consensus effect is most likely to occur when someone has strong beliefs or opinions about a particular topic and assumes that others share their views.

The Chameleon Effect Experiment, 1990

7.1. overview.

The Chameleon Effect is a phenomenon of unintentional mirroring, which was observed and studied for the first time in 1939 at the University of Iowa by Dr. Wendell Johnson. It involves someone mimicking another’s body posture, hand gestures, or even speaking accents without realizing it. In the 1990s, researchers Tanya Chartrand and John Bargh conducted follow-up experiments to further study this effect, which would be known as the “Chameleon Effect.”

7.2. Results

During their experiment, Chartrand and Bargh secretly mimicked the actions and behaviors of some test subjects during their conversations and monitored the responses. Those that were mimicked found the researchers more likable compared to those not mimicked. The results point to how people often subconsciously respond to others even if they weren’t consciously aware of the imitating behavior.

7.3. Criticisms

Despite being a popular explanation for why people tend to mirror each other’s behavior, the Chameleon Effect has been criticized by some. These criticisms mostly come from the idea that the phenomenon could potentially involve manipulation as well as desensitizing people to be more vulnerable to conformity and impressions. Additionally, some suggest there may be other reasons why people might mirror each other other than the Chameleon Effect itself, such as insecurity or politeness.

The Diffusion of Responsibility Experiment, 1968

8.1. overview.

The diffusion of responsibility experiment, conducted in 1968 at Stanford University, is an iconic social psychology experiment. It is studied to understand the bystander effect, a phenomenon in which people are more reluctant to express helpfulness or give aid if other bystanders are present.

Stanley Milgram and John Darley conducted the experiment to analyze how the presence of others could influence helping behaviors in kids. The study was also connected to concepts from Lev Vygotsky’s theory referring to emotional role-taking and group cohesiveness when observing the behavior of other members in a particular situation.

In the study, 600 children between the ages of four to six were tested. Each child was presented with one marshmallow, and they were promised to receive a second one if it still remained on the table after 15 minutes.

The results showed that only one-third of the children had delayed their gratification long enough to obtain the second marshmallow. Follow-up studies demonstrated that those children who managed to delay gratification and obtain the second marshmallow had higher SAT scores and were found to be more competent than their peers who could not wait and ate the marshmallow immediately.

8.2. Results

The results of the diffusion of responsibility experiment in 1968 proved to be true to an extent. Its findings added significantly to defining the bystander effect and the effects of the presence of other people, which may inhibit helpers’ reactions to those in need. The research showed that the number of bystanders could have a profound effect on one’s decision on whether to act or to remain inactive. This study takes into account the psychological phenomenon known as diffusion of responsibility which partially explains this inhibition of helping behavior.

8.3. Criticisms

Although the diffusion of responsibility experiment has contributed greatly to our understanding of the bystander effect, there is some criticism surrounding the validity and applicability of the experiment change in the setting in which it was conducted. Namely, there is some concern around the age of the participants, as well as the amount of time provided for the test, both of which may have had an influence on the outcome. In addition, since the experiment was conducted in 1972, there have been numerous changes to society and culture that may not have been taken into account by the authors at the time, leaving some questions as to its usefulness in current situations.

The Cognitive Dissonance Experiment, 1957

Leon Festinger’s Cognitive Dissonance Experiment of 1957 addresses the mental discomfort experienced when trying to hold two conflicting beliefs. The experiment sought to identify how this dissonance is resolved by people and to gain further insight into our thoughts and behaviors.

Stanley Schachter and Jerome E. Singer conducted the experiment with the intention of testing the cognitive theory of emotional arousal. They injected participants with epinephrine, a hormone that can produce side effects– both physical and psychological – such as increased heart rate, faster breathing, and an elevation in blood pressure.

The study featured a confederate who acted either in one of two ways: they were either pleasant or unpleasant. As knowledge of the injection’s side effects became aware to the participants, their emotions shifted accordingly. This revealed that dissonance leads to emotional arousal in individuals, leading them to act in agreement with emotion-triggering cognition.

In light of its results, critics have since made a note of the implausibility of Schachter and Singer’s study, claiming that it does little to address the complexities of the cognitive dissonance theory. By comparison, Leon Festinger’s cognitive dissonance experiment assumes that everyone holds many different cognitions about the world. It then examines what happens when those cognitions do not fit together adequately. Discrepancies are accepted if an event or occurrence makes sense; if not, these discrepancies lead to a state of tension or dissonance.

Interested readers may refer to festive ger’s 1959 article, “Cognitive Dissonance,” for a more in-depth exploration of the experiment’s results and implications. The study remains a classic social psychology experiment, illustrating how we reconcile the conflicts created by existing contradictory beliefs.

The 10 most influential social psychology experiments in history can all be summarized by their contribution to the development of our understanding of human behavior. From Milgram’s famous study revealing our willingness to obey authority figures, to Bandura’s Bobo Doll Experiment establishing the power of aggression and imitation, to Nisbett and Wilson’s Halo Effect Experiment controlling biases towards physical attractiveness, these studies provide insights into the power of group dynamics, social pressures, and cognitive bias that continue to inform and impact modern society today.

Learning about these classic social psychology experiments also encourages us to question our assumptions, explore alternative perspectives, and strive for greater understanding and acceptance. Whether by examining the limitations of data collection or the ethical implications of research methods, these landmark studies have built our knowledge base and served as a reminder of the importance of respect and empathy.

In conclusion, the 10 most influential social psychology experiments listed reflect an inspiring effort to better understand human behavior and engage in much-needed conversations around this fascinating field.

Frequently Asked Questions

What were the initial experiments in social psychology.

Norman Triplett’s 1898 experiment is credited with being the first social psychology experiment. He examined the effects of competition on a simple task – winding hempen string – and found that people performed better when in the presence of others than when alone. His findings ushered in an exciting new field of research into how people are both influenced by, and affect, the social world around them.

Why are experiments are used in social psychology?

Experiments provide valuable insight into human behavior and allow for cause and effect relationships to be better understood. They are an essential tool conducting research in social psychology, allowing the researcher to observe how individuals respond in different situational contexts. Experimentation allows us to answer important questions about social behavior, making it an invaluable research method.

What are social psychology topics?

Social psychology explores the fascinating ways that people interact with each other, from understanding why prejudicial behavior occurs to analyzing why some people have a greater degree of influence over human behaviors than others. Social psychology has played a major role in helping us understand human behavior. It has made invaluable contributions through its research on various topics like prejudice and discrimination, gender, culture, social influence, interpersonal relations, group behavior, aggression etc.

What is an example of a social experiment?

An example of a social experiment is Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiment conducted in 1963 which tested human subjects’ willingness to obey orders regardless of the outcomes. This controversial experiment was conducted in order to understand how far people would go to follow orders from authority figures, even if it meant inflicting pain on another person.

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What was the social experiment of the 60s?

The Social Experiment of the 1960s was the Milgram experiment, conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram. It tested participants’ willingness to obey authority when asked to do something that conflicted with their own moral values. The experiment yielded powerful insights into human behavior and the power of authority, making it one of the most influential experiments of its time.

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8 Classic Psychological Experiments

Categories History

Psychological experiments can tell us a lot about the human mind and behavior. Some of the best-known experiments have given us insights into topics such as conformity, obedience, attachment, and learning.

There are many famous (and sometimes infamous) psychological experiments that have helped shape our understanding of the human mind and behavior. Such experiments offered insights into how people respond to social pressure and how they develop associations that lead to fear. 

While many of these psychological experiments are well known even outside of psychology, it is important to recognize that many of them could not be performed today.

In many instances, these experiments would never receive institutional review board approval due to ethical concerns and the potential harm to participants.

In this article, learn more about some of the most famous psychological experiments and discover why some of them are considered so controversial.

Table of Contents

Pavlov’s Dog Experiments, 1897

While not set up as a psychological experiment, Ivan Pavlov’s research on the digestive systems of dogs had a tremendous impact on the field of psychology. During his research, he noticed that dogs would begin to salivate whenever they saw the lab assistant who provided them with food.

By pairing a previously neutral stimulus (a sound) with a naturally occurring stimulus that automatically produces a response (food), Pavlov discovered that he could condition the dogs to salivate when they heard the sound.

The discovery of the classical conditioning process played a pivotal role in the formation of the behavioral school of psychology and has continued to influence our understanding of how learning can occur through associations.

Little Albert Experiment, 1920

Anyone who has ever taken an introductory course in psychology is probably familiar with the Little Albert experiment. In the famous experiment conducted in the 1920s by behaviorists John B. Watson and Rosalie Rayner, an infant was exposed to a white rat to which he initially exhibited no fear. The researchers then presented the rat accompanied by a loud clanging noise. 

After repeated pairings, the child began to cry when the rat alone was presented. This fear was even generalized to objects that resembled the rat such as fluffy white toys.

Watson’s research played an important role in the development of the school of thought known as behaviorism . It also provided evidence of the power of classical conditioning , which involves learning by association. 

The findings also had implications for our understanding of how fears can form, including phobias and irrational fears that sometimes develop early in life or after a single frightening experience.

Asch Conformity Experiment, 1951

The Asch conformity experiments were a series of psychological experiments conducted by psychologist Solomon Asch during the 1950s. The purpose of the experiments was to determine how much a person’s opinions were influenced by the opinions of the rest of the group.

In the study, participants were told that they were taking a “vision test” along with several others. In reality, the other individuals in the room were actors who were following the experimenters’ instructions.

When shown several line segments, the participants were supposed to select the one that matched a sample line segment in length.

In some cases, those who were in on the study would pick the obvious match. In other cases, however, the study confederates would unanimously pick the wrong line segment. 

The results of Asch’s experiments found that people tended to conform when other people unanimously picked the wrong answer.

Across the 12 trials he conducted, Asch found that around 33% of the naive participants conformed to the group and picked the wrong answer. In a control group, for comparison, less than 1% of the participants ever chose the wrong answer. 

The experiments revealed how group pressure can cause people to change their own behavior in order to fit in with the rest of the group.

Robbers Cave Experiment, 1954

In the Robbers Cave psychological experiment , researcher Muzafer Sherif and his colleagues used a summer camp setting to look at how factors such as competition and prejudice influenced conflict between groups. 

In the experiment, boys attending a summer camp were randomly assigned to two groups. The groups were then placed in situations where they had to compete with one another. Such competition led to conflicts, competition, and hostility between the two groups.

Later, the experiments attempted to reconcile the groups and eliminate the tensions that the previous competitive tasks had created. Bonding activities had little impact, but the researchers found that situations that required members of the two groups to work together in order to overcome a problem were effective at reducing tensions.

The study had implications for how different social groups create their own norms and hierarchies and then use those rules to exclude outsiders.

Harlow’s Rhesus Monkey Experiments, 1958

Psychologist Harry Harlow conducted a series of experiments during the 1950s and 1960s that demonstrated how important love and affection were in the course of child development. In his experiments, he placed infant monkeys in an environment where they had access to two different surrogate “mothers.”

One was a wire mother who held a bottle and provided food, while the other was a soft surrogate mother who was covered in a terry cloth fabric. 

While the cloth mother did not provide nourishment, the experiments demonstrated that the baby monkeys preferred the soft mother over the wire mother. When they were frightened and needed comfort, they would turn to the cloth mother for security.

Milgram Obedience Experiment, 1963

The Milgram experiment was one of the most famous and controversial psychological experiments ever performed. The experiments involved an experimenter ordering participants to deliver electrical shocks to other people.

While the people who were supposedly receiving the shocks were actors who pretended to be in pain, the participants fully believed that they were delivering painful, and even dangerous shocks. 

Milgram’s findings suggested that up to 65% of the participants were willing to deliver potentially fatal shocks to another person simply because an authority figure ordered them to do so. 

Based on these findings, Milgram proposed that people were willing to follow orders from an authority figure if they think that person will take responsibility for the results and is qualified to give orders. 

Bobo Doll Experiment, 1961-1963

In this experiment, Albert Bandura investigated the effects of observational learning by having young children witness acts of aggression and then observing them to see if they copied the behavior.

Children in the study observed adults act aggressively toward a Bobo doll, a large inflatable doll resembling a bowling pin. When hit or kicked, the doll tips sideways and then returns to an upright position.

Bandura found that children who watched an adult act aggressively were more likely to imitate those behaviors later when they were allowed to play in a room with the Bobo doll.

The study played an important role in our understanding of social learning theory and how kids learn by watching others. 

Stanford Prison Experiment, 1971

In this infamous social psychology experiment, Philip Zimbardo set up a mock prison in the basement of the Stanford University psychology department and randomly assigned a group of 24 college students to either be guards or prisoners. 

The study was originally supposed to last for two weeks but had to be stopped after six days because participants reportedly became so immersed in their roles that they began to experience upsetting psychological effects. The results were believed to demonstrate the power that social roles and expectations can exert over a person’s behavior. 

The experiment is widely described in psychology textbooks and even became the subject of a feature film in 2015. 

More recent analysis has suggested that the experiment had serious design flaws, among other problems. In addition to the already problematic ethics of the study, analysis of the study’s records suggests that the experimenters may have played a role in encouraging the abusive behavior displayed by the participants.

Impact of Psychological Experiments

The psychology experiments of the past have had an impact on our understanding of the human mind and behavior. While many of the experiments described here have problems in terms of their design and their ethics, they remain some of the most famous examples of research within the field of psychology.

Learning more about these classic experiments can help you better understand research that informed the development of psychology. It can also provide inspiration for your own psychology experiment ideas and provide information to explore in your psychology papers .

Bandura A, Ross D, Ross SA. Transmission of aggression through imitation of aggressive models . Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology. 1961;63:575-82. doi:10.1037/h0045925

Gantt WH . Ivan Pavlov . Encyclopaedia Brittanica . Updated February 23, 2020.

Gonzalez-franco M, Slater M, Birney ME, Swapp D, Haslam SA, Reicher SD. Participant concerns for the Learner in a Virtual Reality replication of the Milgram obedience study. PLoS ONE. 2018;13(12):e0209704. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0209704

Jeon, HL. The environmental factor within the Solomon Asch Line Test . International Journal of Social Science and Humanity. 2014;4(4):264-268. doi:10.7763/IJSSH.2014.V4.360 

Le Texier T. Debunking the Stanford Prison Experiment . American Psychologist . 2019;74(7):823-839. doi:10.1037/amp0000401

Sherif M, Harvey OJ, White BJ, Hood WR, Sherif CW. Intergroup conflict and cooperation: The Robbers Cave experiment (Vol. 10) . Norman, OK: University Book Exchange; 1961.

Zimbardo P, Haney C, Banks WC, Jaffe D. The Stanford Prison Experiment: A simulation study of the psychology of imprisonment. Stanford University, Stanford Digital Repository, Stanford; 1971.

6 Shocking Social Psychology Experiments That Show How Far People Go to Fit in

• Post author: Janey Davies, B.A. (Hons)
• Post published: June 20, 2017
• Reading time: 7 mins read
• Post category: Psychology & Mental Health / Uncommon Science

Social psychology experiments can give us great insight into how we think, behave and act.

They help us to explain how our thoughts are influenced by others, how group dynamics work, and how we perceive others.

Here are six of the most important social psychology experiments:

1. The Milgram Experiment

After the atrocities of WW2, scientists wanted to know why a race of people did not speak out, and moreover, why they carried out tasks that were deemed to go against the very fabric of society.

Stanley Milgram (1963) set up an experiment in which participants were told to apply electrical shocks to another participant in another room. What the participants did not know was the person in the other room was in on the experiment and told to scream when the higher levels of power were applied.

Milgram wanted to know how far people would go in obeying an instruction if that instruction meant hurting another person.

Results showed that 65% of participants continued to the highest level of 450 volts . Milgram surmised that people will obey orders if they perceive these orders to be from someone in authority and they can relinquish their responsibility.

2. The Conformity Experiment

The Conformity experiment (1951), one of the most important social psychology experiments, took male students and put them in a room with eight other participants.

These eight were in on the experiment, unbeknown to the male students. The tests were simple enough; three lines of differing lengths were compared to a reference line and the whole group had to pick the line that was the same length.

The right answer was obvious but as the researcher went down the group, all those in on the experiment chose the wrong line . So would the student go along with the group or would they be assertive and chose the correct line?

The results showed that 50% followed the group and gave the wrong answer . Only 25% went against the group and over all the trials the average conformity rate was 33%. This appears to show that our willingness to fit in will override our wish to stand out .

3. The Halo Effect

The ‘ halo effect ’ is a kind of bias where our evaluation of the person leads us to make assumptions about the rest of their character .

One good example of the halo effect is how we perceive celebrities. They are often portrayed as beautiful, handsome, and wealthy. Because of these characteristics, we are more likely to think they are also funny, intelligent, and kind.

One favourable judgement about a person’s personality tends to bleed over into other judgments that are also favourable.

4. Sherif Robbers Cave Experiment

Muzafer Sherif’s most famous experiment is the ‘Robber’s Cave, 1954’, in which he wanted to understand group dynamics, in particular – conflict , negative prejudices, and stereotypes that people experience when groups are competing for resources.

Twenty-two boys were split randomly into two groups and transported to a summer camp, where they were separated with no knowledge of the other group. The boys chose names for their groups; the Rattlers and the Eagles. They spent a week bonding with the members of their group, then a competition stage was introduced.

The two groups met for the first time and competed for resources, prizes, and trophies. Despite the groups having only spent a week together, they were solid in their bonds and immediately started to show prejudice against the other group . At first, it was verbal assaults, then the abuse grew physical.

In the end, the two groups were so aggressive towards each other that researchers had to step in. Even after a two-day cooling off period, the boys were still describing their group in favourable terms and the others in less so terms.

Results suggest that we have an innate need to be in a group and will behave favourably to our group against others.

5. Stanford Prison Experiment

One of the most well-known social psychology experiments, the Stanford Prison Experiment was devised by Philip Zimbardo in 1971. It was focused on  the effects of perceived power , in particular, the struggle between guards and prisoners.

In the experiment, young men were given roles as either guards or prisoners and moved to a prison-like environment in the basement of Stanford University.

It soon became clear that the men given the roles as guards took their roles very seriously and began to abuse the prisoners , both verbally and psychologically. The prisoners appeared to accept their role and accepted the abuse without question. After only six days the situation was so intense that it had to be called off.

The researchers decided that it was the situation we are in that determines our behaviour, and not our individual personalities.

6. How stereotypes affect our judgement

Do we make instant judgements based on stereotypes? In one test, John Bargh (1996) divided 34 participants into 3 groups and subconsciously ‘programmed’ these groups into a different state; rude, polite, and neutral .

In order to do this, the participants were given word puzzles to work out. To install the different states into the three groups, each word puzzle’s answers related to words that defined that particular state, for instance for polite, words used were ‘courteous’, ‘patiently’ and ‘behaved’.

When they had finished, they were asked to talk to the lead experimenter, who was spotted in deep in conversation with someone. They had a choice whether to interrupt his conversation, wait for him to finish, or walk away.

Of the group that had been programmed with rude words , 64% interrupted the experimenter , compared to just 18% of participants programmed with polite words. The neutral condition recorded 36% interrupting.

The results showed that unconscious cues can lead to a change in our behaviour.

As you see from the above social psychology experiments, human nature is so susceptible to social conditioning that it sometimes makes people do truly crazy things.

References:

• https://web.stanford.edu/dept/spec_coll/uarch/exhibits/Narration.pdf
• https://nature.berkeley.edu/ucce50/ag-labor/7article/article35.htm
• https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1952-00803-001
• https://muse.jhu.edu/book/1107
• https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1996-06400-003

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The 11 Most Influential Psychological Experiments in History

The history of psychology is marked by groundbreaking experiments that transformed our understanding of the human mind. These 11 Most Influential Psychological Experiments in History stand out as pivotal, offering profound insights into behaviour, cognition, and the complexities of human nature.

In this PsychologyOrg article, we’ll explain these key experiments, exploring their impact on our understanding of human behaviour and the intricate workings of the mind.

Table of Contents

Experimental psychology.

Experimental psychology is a branch of psychology that uses scientific methods to study human behaviour and mental processes. Researchers in this field design experiments to test hypotheses about topics such as perception, learning, memory, emotion, and motivation.

They use a variety of techniques to measure and analyze behaviour and mental processes, including behavioural observations, self-report measures, physiological recordings, and computer simulations. The findings of experimental psychology studies can have important implications for a wide range of fields, including education, healthcare, and public policy.

Experimental Psychology, Psychologists have long tried to gain insight into how we perceive the world, to understand what motivates our behavior. They have made great strides in lifting that veil of mystery. In addition to providing us with food for stimulating party conversations, some of the most famous psychological experiments of the last century reveal surprising and universal truths about nature.

Throughout the history of psychology, revolutionary experiments have reshaped our comprehension of the human mind. These 11 experiments are pivotal, providing deep insights into human behaviour, cognition, and the intricate facets of human nature.

1. Kohler and the Chimpanzee experiment

Wolfgang Kohler studied the insight process by observing the behaviour of chimpanzees in a problem 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 playful activities; but suddenly, in the mind of the hungry chimpanzee, a relationship between sticks and food developed.

The cane, from an object to play with, became an instrument through which it was possible to reach the banana placed outside the cage. There has been a restructuring of the perceptual field: Kohler stressed that the appearance of the new behaviour was not the result of random attempts according to a process of trial and error. It is one of the first experiments on the intelligence of chimpanzees.

2. Harlow’s experiment on attachment with monkeys

In a scientific paper (1959), Harry F. Harlow described how he had separated baby rhesus monkeys from their mothers at birth, and raised them with the help of “puppet mothers”: in a series of experiments he compared the behavior of monkeys in two situations:

Little monkeys with a puppet mother without a bottle, but covered in a soft, fluffy, and furry fabric. Little monkeys with a “puppet” mother that supplied food, but was covered in wire. The little monkeys showed a clear preference for the “furry” mother, spending an average of fifteen hours a day attached to her, even though they were exclusively fed by the “suckling” puppet mother. conclusions of the Harlow experiment: all the experiments showed that the pleasure of contact elicited attachment behaviours, but the food did not.

3. The Strange Situation by Mary Ainsworth

Building on Bowlby’s attachment theory, Mary Ainsworth and colleagues (1978) have developed an experimental method called the Strange Situation, to assess individual differences in attachment security. The Strange Situation includes a series of short laboratory episodes in a comfortable environment and the child’s behaviors are observed.

Ainsworth and colleagues have paid special attention to the child’s behaviour 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. kinds of attachment according to Mary Ainsworth:

Secure attachment (63% of the dyads examined) Anxious-resistant or ambivalent (16%) Avoidant (21%) The Strange Situation by Mary Ainsworth

In a famous 1971 experiment, known as the Stanford Prison, Zimbardo and a team of collaborators reproduced a prison in the garages of Stanford University to study the behaviour of subjects in a context of very particular and complex dynamics. Let’s see how it went and the thoughts on the Stanford prison experiment. The participants (24 students) were randomly divided into two groups:

“ Prisoners “. The latter were locked up in three cells in the basement of a University building for six days; they were required to wear a white robe with a paper over it and a chain on the right ankle. “ Guards “. The students who had the role of prison guards had to watch the basement, choose the most appropriate methods to maintain order, and make the “prisoners” perform various tasks; they were asked to wear dark glasses and uniforms, and never to be violent towards the participants of the opposite role. However, the situation deteriorated dramatically: the fake police officers very soon began to seriously mistreat and humiliate the “detainees”, so it was decided to discontinue the experiment.

4. Jane Elliot’s Blue Eyes Experiment

On April 5, 1968, in a small school in Riceville, Iowa, Professor Jane Elliot decided to give a practical lesson on racism to 28 children of about eight years of age through the blue eyes brown eyes experiment.

“Children with brown eyes are the best,” the instructor 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 intelligent. Dark-eyed children have more, so they are more intelligent, while blue-eyed children “go hand in hand.”

In a very short time, the brown-eyed children began to treat their blue-eyed classmates with superiority, who in turn lost their self-confidence. A very good girl started making mistakes during arithmetic class, and at recess, she was approached by three little friends with brown eyes “You have to apologize because you get in their way and because we are the best,” said one of them. The girl hastened to apologize. This is one of the psychosocial experiments demonstrating how beliefs and prejudices play a role.

5. The Bobo de Bbandura doll

Albert Bandura gained great fame for the Bobo doll experiment on child imitation aggression, where:

A group of children took as an example, by visual capacity, the adults in a room, without their behaviour being commented on, hit the Bobo doll. Other contemporaries, on the other hand, saw adults sitting, always in absolute silence, next to Bobo.

Finally, all these children were brought to a room full of toys, including a doll like Bobo. 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 still do not have the experience to understand for themselves if that behaviour is correct or not.

6. Milgram’s experiment

The Milgram experiment was first carried out in 1961 by 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, positioned 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 to stop.

No justification is given, except for the fact that the authorized person tells the subject to obey. In reality, it was staged: there was absolutely no electric shock given, but in the experiment two-thirds of the subjects were influenced by what they thought was a 450-volt shock, simply because a person in authority told them they would not be responsible for it. nothing.

7. little Albert

We see little Albert’s experiment on unconditioned stimulus, which must be the most famous psychological study. John Watson and Rosalie Raynor 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 frightened little Albert, who began to cry.

Every time the rat was brought out, Watson and Raynor would rattle the bar with their hammer to scare the poor boy away. Soon the mere sight of the rat was enough to reduce little Albert to a trembling bundle of nerves: he had learned to fear the sight of a rat, and soon afterwards began to fear a series of similar objects shown to him.

8. Pavlov’s dog

Ivan Pavlov’s sheepdog became famous for his experiments that led him to discover what we call “classical conditioning” or “Pavlovian reflex” and is still a very famous psychological experiment today. Hardly any other psychological experiment is cited so often and with such gusto as Pavlov’s theory expounded 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 rather when they heard it. to the laboratory employees who took it away.

He researched it and ordered a buzzer to ring every time it was mealtime. Very soon the sound of the doorbell was enough for the dogs to start drooling: they had connected the signal to the arrival of food.

9. Asch’s experiment

It is about a social psychology experiment carried out in 1951 by the Polish psychologist Solomon Asch on the influence of the majority 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 very simple experiment consisted of asking the subjects involved to associate 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 longer or shorter.

The experimentation was carried out in three phases. As soon as one of the subjects, Asch’s accomplice gave a wrong answer associating line 1 with the wrong one, the other members of the group also made the same mistake, even though the correct answer was more than obvious. The participants questioned the reason for this choice and responded that aware of the correct answer, they had decided to conform to the group, adapting to those who had preceded them.

psychotherapy definition types and techniques | Psychotherapy vs therapy Psychologyorg.com

10. Rosenbaum’s experiment

Among the most interesting investigations in this field, an experiment carried out by David Rosenhan (1923) to document the low validity of psychiatric diagnoses stands out. Rosenhan admitted eight assistants to various psychiatric hospitals claiming psychotic symptoms, but once they entered the hospital they behaved as usual.

Despite this, they were held on average for 19 days, with all but one being diagnosed as “psychotic”. One of the reasons why the staff is not aware of the “normality” of the subjects, is, according to Rosenhan, the very little contact between the staff and the patients.

11. Bystander Effect (1968)

The Bystander Effect studied in 1968 after the tragic case of Kitty Genovese, explores how individuals are less likely to intervene in emergencies when others are present. The original research by John Darley and Bibb Latané involved staged scenarios where participants believed they were part of a discussion via intercom.

In the experiment, participants were led to believe they were communicating with others about personal problems. Unknown to them, the discussions were staged, and at a certain point, a participant (confederate) pretended to have a seizure or needed help.

The results were startling. When participants believed they were the sole witness to the emergency, they responded quickly and sought help. However, when they thought others were also present (but were confederates instructed to not intervene), the likelihood of any individual offering help significantly decreased. This phenomenon became known as the Bystander Effect.

The diffusion of responsibility, where individuals assume others will take action, contributes to this effect. The presence of others creates a diffusion of responsibility among bystanders, leading to a decreased likelihood of any single individual taking action.

This experiment highlighted the social and psychological factors influencing intervention during emergencies and emphasized the importance of understanding bystander behaviour in critical situations.

The journey through the “11 Most Influential Psychological Experiments in History” illuminates the profound impact these studies have had on our understanding of human behaviour, cognition, and social dynamics.

Each experiment stands as a testament to the dedication of pioneering psychologists who dared to delve into the complexities of the human mind. From Milgram’s obedience studies to Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment, these trials have shaped not only the field of psychology but also our societal perceptions and ethical considerations in research.

They serve as timeless benchmarks, reminding us of the ethical responsibilities and the far-reaching implications of delving into the human psyche. The enduring legacy of these experiments lies not only in their scientific contributions but also in the ethical reflections they provoke, urging us to navigate the boundaries of knowledge with caution, empathy, and an unwavering commitment to understanding the intricacies of our humanity.

What is the most famous experiment in the history of psychology?

One of the most famous experiments is the Milgram Experiment, conducted by Stanley Milgram in the 1960s. It investigated obedience to authority figures and remains influential in understanding human behaviour.

Who wrote the 25 most influential psychological experiments in history?

The book “The 25 Most Influential Psychological Experiments in History” was written by Michael Shermer, a science writer and historian of science.

What is the history of experimental psychology?

Experimental psychology traces back to Wilhelm Wundt, often considered the father of experimental psychology. He established the first psychology laboratory in 1879 at the University of Leipzig, marking the formal beginning of experimental psychology as a distinct field.

What was the psychological experiment in the 1960s?

Many significant psychological experiments were conducted in the 1960s. One notable example is the Stanford Prison Experiment led by Philip Zimbardo, which examined the effects of situational roles on behaviour.

Who was the first experimental psychologist?

Wilhelm Wundt is often regarded as the first experimental psychologist due to his establishment of the first psychology laboratory and his emphasis on empirical research methods in psychology.

If you want to read more articles similar to  The 11 Most Influential Psychological Experiments in History , we recommend that you enter our  Psychology  category.

I'm Waqar, a passionate psychologist and dedicated content writer. With a deep interest in understanding human behavior, I aim to share insights and knowledge in the field of psychology through this blog. Feel free to reach out for collaborations, queries, or discussions. Let's dig into the fascinating world of psychology together!

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10 great psychology experiments

by Chris Woodford . Last updated: December 31, 2021.

S tare in the mirror and you'll find a strong sense of self staring back. Every one of us thinks we have a good idea who we are and what we're about—how we laugh and live and love, and all the complicated rest. But if you're a student of psychology —the fascinating science of human behaviour—you may well stare at your reflection with a wary eye. Because you'll know already that the ideas you have about yourself and other people can be very wide of the mark.

You might think you can learn a lot about human behaviour simply by observing yourself, but psychologists know that isn't really true. "Introspection" (thinking about yourself) has long been considered a suspect source of psychological research, even though one of the founding fathers of the science, William James, gained many important insights with its help. [1] Fortunately, there are thousands of rigorous experiments you can study that will do the job much more objectively and scientifically. And here's a quick selection of 10 of my favourites.

Listen instead... or scroll to keep reading

1: are you really paying attention (simons & chabris, 1999).

“ ...our findings suggest that unexpected events are often overlooked... ” Simons & Chabris, 1999

You can read a book or you can listen to the radio, but can you do both at once? Maybe you can listen to a soft-rock album you've heard hundreds of times before and simultaneously plod your way through an undemanding crime novel, but how about listening to a complex political debate while trying to revise for a politics exam? What about listening to a German radio station while reading a French novel? What about mixing things up a bit more. You can iron your clothes while listening to the radio, no problem. But how about trying to follow (and visualize) the radio commentary on a football game while driving a highway you've never been along before? That's much more challenging because both things call on your brain's ability to process spatial information and one tends to interfere with the other. (There are very good reasons why it's unwise to use a cellphone while you're driving—and in some countries it's illegal.)

Generally speaking, we can do—and pay attention—to only so many things at once. That's no big surprise. However human attention works (and there are many theories about that), it's obviously not unlimited. What is surprising is how we pay attention to some things, in some situations, but not others. Psychologists have long studied something they call the cocktail-party effect . If you're at a noisy party, you can selectively switch your attention to any of the voices around you, just like tuning in a radio, while ignoring all the rest. Even more striking, if you're listening to one person and someone else happens to say your name, your ears will prick up and your attention will instantly switch to the other person instead. So your brain must be aware of much more than you think, even if it's not giving everything its full attention, all the time. [2]

Photo: Would you spot a gorilla if it were in plain sight? Picture by Richard Ruggiero courtesy of US Fish and Wildlife Service National Digital Library .

Sometimes, when we're really paying attention, we aren't easily distracted, even by drastic changes we ought to notice. A particularly striking demonstration of this comes from the work of Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris (1999), who built on earlier work by the esteemed cognitive psychologist Ulric Neisser and colleagues. [3] Simons and Chabris made a video of people in black or white shirts throwing a basketball back and forth and asked viewers to count the number of passes made by the white-shirted players. You can watch it here .

Half the viewers failed to notice something else that happens at the same time (the gorilla-suited person wandering across the set)—an extraordinary example of something psychologists call inattentional blindness (in plain English: failure to see something you really should have spotted). A related phenomenon called change blindness explains why we generally fail to notice things like glaring continuity errors in movies: we don't expect to see them—and so we don't. Whether experiments like "the invisible gorilla" allow us to conclude broader things about human nature is a moot point, but it's certainly fair to say (as Simons and Chabris argue) that they reveal "critically important limitations of our cognitive abilities." None of us are as smart as we like to think, but just because we fail and fall short that doesn't make us bad people; we'd do a lot better if we understood and recognized our shortcomings. [4]

2: Are you trying too hard? (Aronson, 1966)

No-one likes a smart-aleck, so the saying goes, but just how true is that? Even if you really hate someone who has everything—the good looks, the great house, the well-paid job—it tuns out that there are certain circumstances in which you'll like them a whole lot more: if they suddenly make a stupid mistake. This not-entirely-surprising bit of psychology mirrors everyday experience: we like our fellow humans slightly flawed, down-to-earth, and somewhat relatable. Known as the pratfall effect , it was famously demonstrated back in 1966 by social psychologist Elliot Aronson. [5]

“ ...a superior person may be viewed as superhuman and, therefore, distant; a blunder tends to humanize him and, consequently, increases his attractiveness. ” Aronson et al, 1966

Aronson made taped audio recordings of two very different people talking about themselves and answering 50 difficult questions, which were supposedly part of an interview for a college quiz team. One person was very superior, got almost all the questions right, and revealed (in passing) that they were generally excellent at what they did (an honors student, yearbook editor, and member of the college track team). The other person was much more mediocre, got many questions wrong, and revealed (in passing) that they were much more of a plodder (average grades in high school, proofreader of the yearbook, and failed to make the track team). In the experiment, "subjects" (that's what psychologists call the people who take part in their trials) had to listen to the recordings of the two people and rate them on various things, including their likeability. But there was a twist. In some of the taped interviews, an extra bit (the "pratfall") was added at the end where either the superior person or the mediocrity suddenly shouted "Oh my goodness I've spilled coffee all over my new suit", accompanied by the sounds of a clattering chair and general chaos (noises that were identically spliced onto both tapes).

Artwork: Mistakes make you more likeable—if you're considered competent to begin with.

What Aronson found was that the superior person was rated more attractive with the pratfall at the end of their interview; the inferior person, less so. In other words, a pratfall can really work in your favor, but only if you're considered halfway competent to begin with; if not, it works against you. Knowingly or otherwise, smart celebrities and politicians often appear to take advantage of this to improve their popularity.

3: Is the past a foreign country? (Loftus and Palmer, 1974)

Attention isn't the only thing that lets us down; memory is hugely infallible too—and it's one of the strangest and most complex things psychologists study. Can you remember where you were when the Twin Towers fell in 2001 or (if you're much older and willing to go back further) when JFK was shot in Dallas in 1963? You might remember a girl you were in kindergarten with 20 years ago, but perhaps you can't remember the guy you met last week, last night, or even 10 minutes ago. What about the so-called tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon where you're certain you know a word or fact or name, and you can even describe what it's like ("It's a really short word, maybe beginning with 'F'..."), but you can't bring it instantly to mind? [6] How about the madeleine effect, where the taste or smell or something suddenly sets off an incredibly powerful involuntary memory ? What about déjà-vu : a jarring true-false memory—the strong sense something is very familiar when it can't possibly be? [7] How about the curious split between short- and long-term memories or between "procedural memory" (knowing how to do things or follow instructions) and "declarative memory" (knowing facts), which breaks down further into "semantic memory" (general knowledge about things) and "episodic memory" (specific things that have happened to you). What about the many flavors of selective memory failure, such as seniors who can remember the name of a high-school sweetheart but can't recall their own name? Or sudden episodes of amnesia? Human memory is a massive—and massively complex—subject. And any comprehensive theory of it needs to be able to explain a lot.

“ ...the questions asked subsequent to an event can cause a reconstruction in one's memory of that event.. ” Loftus & Palmer, 1974

Much of the time, poor memory is just a nuisance and we all have tricks for working around it—from slapping Post-It notes on the mirror to setting reminders on our phones. But there's one situation where poor memories can be a matter of life or death: in criminal investigation and court testimony. Suppose you give evidence in a trial based on events you think you remember that happened years ago—and suppose your evidence helps to convict a "murderer" who's subsequently sentenced to death. But what if your memory was quite wrong and the person was innocent?

One of the most famous studies of just how flawed our memories can be was made by psychologists Elizabeth Loftus and John Palmer in 1974. [8] After showing their subjects footage of a car accident, they tested their memories some time later by asking "About how fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other?" or using "collided," "bumped," "contacted," or "hit" in place of smashed. Those asked the first—leading—question reported higher speeds. Later, the subjects were asked if they'd seen any broken glass and those asked the leading question ("smashed") were much more likely to say "yes" even though there was no broken glass in the film. So our memories are much more fluid, far less fixed, than we suppose.

Artwork: The words we use to probe our memories can affect the memories we think we have.

This classic experiment very powerfully illustrates the potential unreliability of eyewitness testimony in criminal investigations, but the work of Elizabeth Loftus on so-called "false memory syndrome" has had far-reaching impacts in provocative areas, such as people's alleged recollections of alien abduction , multiple personality disorder , and memories of childhood abuse . Ultimately, what it demonstrates is that memory is fallible and remembering is sometimes less of a mechanical activity (pulling a dusty book from long-neglected library shelf) than a creative and recreative one (rewriting the book partly or completely to compensate for the fact that the print has faded with time). [9]

4. Do you cave in to peer pressure? (Milgram, 1963)

Experiments like the three we've considered so far might cast an uncomfortable shadow, yet most of us are still convinced we're rational, reasonable people, most of the time. Asked to predict how we'd behave in any given situation, we'd be able to give a pretty good account of ourselves—or so you might think. Consider the question of whether you'd ever, under any circumstances, torture another human being and you'd probably be appalled at the prospect. "Of course not!" And yet, as Yale University's Stanley Milgram famously demonstrated in the 1960s and 1970s, you'd probably be mistaken. [10]

Artwork: The Milgram experiment: a shocking turn of events.

Milgram's experiments on obedience to authority have been widely discussed and offered as explanations for all kinds of things, from minor everyday cruelty to the appalling catalogue of repugnant human behavior witnessed during the Nazi Holocaust. Today, they're generally considered unethical because they're deceptive and could, potentially, damage the mental health of people taking part in them (a claim Milgram himself investigated and refuted). [26]

“ ...the conflict stems from the opposition of two deeply ingrained behavior dispositions: first, the disposition not to harm other people, and second, the tendency to obey those whom we perceive to be legitimate authorities. ” Milgram, 1963

Though Milgram's studies have not been repeated, related experiments have sought to shed more light on why people find themselves participating in quite disturbing forms of behavior. One explanation is that, like willing actors, we simply assume the roles we're given and play our parts well. In 1972, Stanford University's Philip Zimbardo set up an entire "pretend prison" and assigned his subjects roles as prisoners or guards. Quite quickly, the guards went beyond simple play acting and actually took on the roles of sadistic bullies, exposing the prisoners to all kinds of rough and degrading treatment, while the prisoners resigned themselves to their fate or took on the roles of rebels. [11] More recently, Zimbardo has argued that his work sheds light on atrocities such as the torture at the Abu Ghraib prison in 2004, when US army guards were found to have tortured and degraded Iraqi prisoners under their guard in truly shocking ways.

5. Are you a slave to pleasure? (Olds and Milner, 1954)

Why do we do the things we do? Why do we eat or drink, play football, watch TV... or do the legions of other things we feel compelled to do each day? How, when we take these sorts of behaviors to extremes, do we become addicted to things like drink and drugs, gambling or sex? Are they ordinary pleasures taken to extremes or something altogether different? Obsessions, compulsions, and addictive behaviors are complex and very difficult to treat, but what causes them... and how do we treat them?

Artwork: A rat will happily stimulate the "pleasure centre" in its brain.

“ It appears that motivation, like sensation, has local centers in the brain. ” James Olds, Scientific American, 1956.

The Olds and Milner ICSS (intracranial self-stimulation) experiment was widely interpreted as the discovery of a "pleasure center" in the brain, but we have to take that suggestion with quite a pinch of salt. It's fascinating, but also quite reductively depressing, to imagine that a lot of the things humans feel compelled to do each day—from work and eating to sport and sex—are motivated by nothing more than the need to scratch a deep neural itch: to repeatedly stimulate a "hungry" part of our brain. While it offers important insights into addictive behavior, the idea that all of our complex human pleasure-seeking stems from something so crudely behavioral—stimulus and reward—seems absurdly over-simple. It's fascinating to search for references to Olds and Milner's work and see it quoted in books with such titles as Your Money and Your Brain: How the New Science of Neuroeconomics Can Help Make You Rich . But it's quite a stretch from a rat pushing on a pedal to making arguments of that kind. [14]

6: Are you asleep at the wheel? (Libet, 1983)

Being a conscious, active human being is a bit like driving a car: looking out through your eyes is like staring through a windshield, seeing (perceiving) things and responding to them, as they see and respond to you. Consciousness, in other words, feels like a "top-down" thing; like the driver of a car, we're always in control, willing the world to bend to our way, making things happen according to ideas our brains we devise beforehand. But how true is that really? If you are a driver, you'll know that much of what you do depends on a kind of mental "auto-pilot" or cruise control. As a practiced driver, you barely have to think about what you're doing at all—it's completely automatic. We're only really aware of just how effort-full and attentive drivers need to be when we first start learning. We soon learn to do most of the things involved in driving without being consciously aware of them at all—and that's true of other things too, not just driving a car. Seen this way, driving seems impressive—but if you think again about the Simons and Chabris gorilla experiment, and consider its implications for sitting behind the wheel, you might want to take the bus in future.

Still, you might think, you're always, ultimately, in charge and in control: you're the driver , not the passenger, even if you are sometimes dozy at the wheel. And yet, a remarkable series of experiments by Benjamin Libet, in the 1980s, appeared to demonstrate something entirely different: far from consciously making things happen, sometimes we become conscious of what we've done after the fact. In Libet's experiments, he made people watch a clock and move their wrist when it reached a certain time. But their brain activity (which he was also monitoring) showed a peak a fraction of a second before their conscious decision to move, suggesting, at least in this case, that consciousness is the effect, not the cause. [15]

“ Many of our mental functions are carried out unconsciously , without conscious awareness. ” Benjamin Libet, Mind Time, 2004, p.2.

On the face of it, Libet's work seems to have extraordinary implications for the study of consciousness. It's almost like we're zombies sitting at the wheel of a self-driving car. Is the whole idea of conscious free will just an illusion, an accidental artefact of knee-jerk behavior that happens much more automatically? You can certainly try to argue it that way, as many people have. On the other hand, it's important to remember that this is a highly constrained laboratory experiment and you can't automatically extrapolate from that to more general human behavior. (Apart from anything else, the methodology of Libet's experiments has been questioned. [16] ) While you could try to argue that a complex decision (to buy a house or quit your job) is made unconsciously or subconsciously in whatever manner and we rationalize or become conscious of it after the fact, experiments like Libet's aren't offering evidence for that. Sometimes, it's too much of a stretch to argue from simple, highly contrived, very abstract laboratory experiments to bigger, bolder, and more general everyday behavior.

On the other hand, it's quite likely that some behavior that we believe to be consciously pre-determined is anything but, as William James (and, independently, Carl Lange) reasoned way back in the late 19th century. In a famous example James offered, we assume we run from a scary bear because we see the bear and feel afraid. But James believed the reasoning here is back to front: we see the bear, run, and only feel afraid because we find ourselves running from a bear! (How we arrive at emotions is a whole huge topic of its own. The James-Lange theory eventually spawned more developed theories by Walter Cannon and Philip Bard, who believed emotions and their causes happen simultaneously, and Stanley Shachter and Jerome Singer, who believe emotions stem both from our bodily reactions and how we think about them.) [17]

7: Why are you so attached? (Harlow et al, 1971)

“ Love is a wondrous state, deep, tender, and rewarding. Because of its intimate and personal nature it is regarded by some as an improper topic for experimental research. ” Harry Harlow, 1958.

Artwork: Animals crave proper comfort, not just the simple "reduction" of "drives" like hunger. Photo courtesy of NASA and Wikimedia Commons .

There's an obvious evolutionary reason why we get attached to other people: one way or another, it improves our chances of surviving, mating, and passing on our genes to future generations. Attachment begins at birth, but our attachment to our mothers isn't motivated purely by a simple need for nourishment (through breastfeeding or whatever it might be). One of the most famous psychological experiments of all time demonstrated this back in the early 1970s. The University of Wisconsin's Harry Harlow and his wife Margaret tested what happened when newborn baby monkeys were separated from their mothers and "raised," instead by crude, mechanical surrogates. In particular, Harlow looked at how the monkeys behaved toward two rival "mothers", one with a wooden head and a wire body that had a feeding bottle attached, and one made from soft, warm, comforting cloth. Perhaps surprisingly, the babies preferred the cloth mother. Even when they ventured over to the wire mother for food, they soon returned to the cloth mother for comfort and reassurance. [18]

The fascinating thing about this study is that it suggests the need for comfort is at least as important as the (more obviously fundamental) need for nourishment, so busting the cold, harsh claims of hard-wired behaviorists, who believed our attachment to our mothers was all about mechanistic "drive reduction," or knee-jerk stimulus and response. Ultimately, we love the loving—Harlow's "contact comfort"—and perhaps things like habits, routines, and traditions can all be interpreted in this light.

8: Are you as rational as you think? (Wason, 1966)

“ ... I have concentrated mainly on the mistakes, assumptions, and stereotyped behavior which occur when people have to reason about abstract material. But... we seldom do reason about abstract material. ” Peter Wason, 1966.

Like everyone else, you probably have your moments of wild, reckless abandon, but faced with the task of making a calm, rational judgment about something, how well do you think you'd do? It's not a question of what you know or how clever you are, but how well you can make a judgment or a decision. Suppose, for example, you had to hire the best applicant for a job based on a pile of résumés. Or what if you had to find a new apartment by the end of the month and you had a limited selection to pick among. What if you were on the jury of a trial and had to sit through weeks or evidence to reach a verdict? How well do you think you'd do? Probably, given all the information, you feel you'd make a fair job of it: you have faith in your judgment. And yet, decades of research into human decision-making suggests you'll massively overestimate your own ability. Overconfident and under-informed, you'll jump to hasty conclusions, swayed by glaring biases you don't even notice. In the words of Daniel Kahneman, probably the world's leading expert on human rationality, your brain opts to think "fast" (reaches a quick and dirty decision) when sometimes it'd be better off thinking "slow" (reaching a more considered verdict). [25]

A classic demonstration of how poorly we think was devised by British psychologist Peter Wason in 1966. The experimenter puts a set of four white cards in front of you, each of which has a letter on one side and a number on the other. Then they tell you that if a card has a vowel on one side, it has an even number on the other side. Finally, they ask you which cards you need to turn over to verify if that statement is true. Suppose the cards show A, D, 4, and 7. The obvious answer, offered by most people, is A and 4 or just A. But the correct answer is actually A and 7. Once you've turned over A, it serves no purpose to turn over D or 4: turning over D tells us nothing, because it's not a vowel, while turning over 4 doesn't provide extra proof or disprove the statement. By turning over 7, however, you can potentially disprove the theory if you reveal a vowel on the other side of it. Wason's four-card test demonstrates what's known as "confirmation bias"—our failure to seek out evidence that contradicts things we believe. [19]

Artwork: Peter Wason's four-card selection test. If a card has a vowel on one side, it has an even number on the other. Which cards do you need to turn over to confirm this?

As with the other experiments here, you could extrapolate and argue that Wason's abstract reasoning test is echoed by bigger and wider failings we see in ourselves. Perhaps it goes some way to explaining things like online "echo chambers" and "filter bubbles", where we tend to watch, read, and listen to things that reinforce things we already believe—intellectual cloth mothers, you might call them—rather than challenging those comfortable beliefs or putting them to the test. But, again, a simple laboratory test is exactly what it is: a simple, laboratory test. And other, broader personal or social conclusions don't automatically follow on from it. (Indeed, you might recognize the tendency to argue that way as a confirmation bias all of its own.)

9: How do you learn things? (Pavlov, 1890s)

Learning might seem a very conscious and deliberate thing, especially if you hate the subject you're studying or merely sitting in school. What could be worse than "rote" learning your times table, practising French vocabulary, or revising for an exam? We also learn a lot of things less consciously—sometimes without any conscious effort at all. Animals (other than humans) don't sit in classrooms all day but they learn plenty of things. Even one of the simplest (a sea-slug called Aplysia californica ) will learn to withdraw its syphon and gill if you give it an electric shock, as Eric Kandel and James Schwartz famously discovered. [20]

“ The animal must respond to changes in the environment in such a manner that its responsive activity is directed toward the preservation of its existence. ” Ivan Pavlov, 1926.

So how does learning come about? At its most basic, it involves making connections or "associations" between things, something that was probed by Russian psychologist Ivan Pavlov in perhaps the most famous psychology experiment of all time. Pavlov looked at how dogs behave when he gave them food. Normally, he found dogs would salivate (a response) when he brought them a plate of food (a stimulus). We call this an unconditioned response (meaning default, normal, or just untrained): it's what the dogs do naturally. Now, with the food a distant doggy memory, Pavlov rang a bell (a neutral stimulus) and found it produced no response at all (the dogs didn't salivate). In the next phase of the experiment, he brought the dogs plates of food and rang a bell at the same time and found, again, that they salivated. So again, we have an unconditioned response, but this time to a pair of stimuli. Finally, after a period of this training, he tested what happened when he just rang the bell and, to his surprise, found that they salivated once again. In the jargon of psychology, we say the dogs had become "conditioned" to respond to the bell alone: they associated the bell with food and so responded by salivating. We call this a conditioned (trained or learned) response: the dogs have learned that the sound of the bell is generally linked to the appearance of food. [21]

Pavlov's work on conditioning was hugely influential—indeed, it was a key inspiration for the theory of behaviorism . Advanced by such luminaries as B.F. Skinner and J.B. Watson, this was the idea that animal behavior is largely a matter of stimulus and response and mental states—thinking, feeling, emoting, and reasoning—is irrelevant. But, as with all the other experiments here, it's a stretch to argue that we're all quasi-automated zombies raised in a kind of collective cloud of mind-control conditioning. It's true that we learn some things by simple, behavioural association, and animals like Aplysia may learn everything they know that way, but it doesn't follow that all animals learn everything by making endless daisy-chains of stimulus and response. [22]

10: You're happier than you realize (Seligman, 1975)

Money makes the world go round—or so goes the lyric of a famous song. But if you're American Martin Seligman, you'd probably think "happiness" was a better candidate for what powers the planet, or should. When I was studying psychology at college back in the mid-1980s, Professor Seligman came along to give a guest lecture—and it proved to be one of the most thought-provoking talks I would ever attend.

“ The time has finally arrived for a science that seeks to understand positive emotion, build strength and virtue, and provide guideposts for... 'the good life'. ” Martin Seligman, Authentic Happiness, 2003.

Though now widely and popularly known for his work in a field he calls positive psychology , Seligman originally made his name researching mental illness and how people came to be depressed. Taking a leaf from Pavlov's book, his subjects were dogs. Rather than feeding them and ringing bells, he studied what happened when he gave dogs electric shocks and either offered them an opportunity to escape or restrained them in a harness so they couldn't. What he discovered was that dogs that couldn't avoid the shocks became demoralised and depressed—they "learned helpnessness"—and eventually didn't even try to avoid punishment, even when (once again) they were allowed to. [23]

You can easily construct a whole (behavioural) theory of mental illness on the basis of Seligman's learned helplessness experiments but, once again, there's much more to it than that. People don't become depressed purely because they're in impossible situations where problems seem (to use the terminology) "internal" (their own fault), "global" (affecting all aspects of their life), and "stable" (impossible to change). Many different factors—neurochemical, behavioral, cognitive, and social—feed into depression and, as a result, there are just as many forms of treatment.

What's really interesting about Seligman's work is what he did next. In the 1990s, he realized psychologists were obsessed with mental illness and negativity when, in his view, they should probably spend more time figuring out what makes people happy. So began his more recent quest to understand "positive psychology" and the things we can all do to make our lives feel more fulfilled. The key, in his view, is working out and playing to what he calls our "signature strengths" (things we're good at that we enjoy doing). His ideas, which trace back to those early experiments on learned helpless in hapless dogs, have proved hugely influential, prompting many psychologists to switch their attention to developing a useful, practical "science of happiness." [24]

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For older readers, for younger readers, references ↑    see for example the classic discussion of consciousness in chapter 9: the stream of thought in principles of psychology (volume 1) by william james, henry holt, 1890. ↑    donald broadbent carried out notable early work on "selective attention" as this is called. see, for example, the role of auditory localization in attention and memory span by d.e. broadbent, j exp psychol, 1954, volume 47 number 3, pp.191–6. ↑     [pdf] gorillas in our midst: sustained inattentional blindness for dynamic events by daniel j simons, christopher f chabris, perception, 1999, volume 28, pp.1059–1074. ↑     the invisible gorilla and other ways our intuition deceives us by christopher chabris and daniel j. simons. harpercollins, 2010. ↑     [pdf] the effect of a pratfall on increasing interpersonal attractiveness by elliot aronson, ben willerman, and joanne floyd, psychon. sci., 1966, volume 4 number 6,pp.227–228. ↑     the 'tip of the tongue' phenomenon by roger brown and david mcneill, journal of verbal learning and verbal behavior, volume 5, issue 4, august 1966, pp.325–337. ↑     the cognitive neuropsychology of déjà vu by chris moulin, psychology press, 2017. ↑     reconstruction of automobile destruction: an example of the interaction between language and memory by elizabeth loftus and john palmer, journal of verbal learning & verbal behavior, volume 13 issue 5, pp.585–589. ↑     "that doesn't mean it really happened": an interview with elizabeth loftus by carrie poppy, the sceptical inquirer, september 8, 2016. ↑     behavioral study of obedience by stanley milgram, journal of abnormal and social psychology, 1963, volume 67, pp.371–378. ↑     a study of prisoners and guards in a simulated prison by craig haney, curtis banks, and philip zimbardo, naval research review, 1973, volume 30, pp.4–17. ↑     dr. robert g. heath: a controversial figure in the history of deep brain stimulation by christen m. o'neal et al, neurosurg focus 43 (3):e12, 2017. serendipity and the cerebral localization of pleasure by alan a. baumeister, journal of the history of the neurosciences, basic and clinical perspectives, volume 15, 2006. issue 2. the 'gay cure' experiments that were written out of scientific history by robert colvile, mosaic science, 4 july 2016. ↑     positive reinforcement produced by electrical stimulation of septal area and other regions of rat brain by j. olds and p. millner, j comp physiol psychol, 1954 dec;47(6):419–27. ↑     the pleasure areas by h.j. campbell, methuen, 1973. ↑     mind time: the temporal factor in consciousness by benjamin libet, harvard university press, 2004. ↑     exposing some holes in libet's classic free will study by christian jarrett, bps research digest, 2008. ↑    for a decent overview, see the section "theories of emotion" in 58: emotion in psychology by openstaxcollege. ↑     the nature of love by harry f. harlow, american psychologist, 13, pp.673–685. for a more general account, see love at goon park: harry harlow and the science of affection by by deborah blum, basic books, 2002. ↑     reasoning by p.c. wason, in foss, brian (ed.). new horizons in psychology. penguin, 1966, p.145. ↑     eric kandel and aplysia californica: their role in the elucidation of mechanisms of memory and the study of psychotherapy by michael robertson and garry walter, acta neuropsychiatrica, volume 22, issue 4, august 2010, pp.195–196. ↑     conditioned reflexes; an investigation of the physiological activity of the cerebral cortex by i.p pavlov. dover, 1960. ↑     pavlov's dogs by tim tully, current biology, 2003, volume 13, issue 4, 18 february 2003, pp.r117–r119. ↑     learned helplessness: theory and evidence by steven maier and martin seligman, journal of experimental psychology: general, 1976, volume 105, number 1, pp3.–46. ↑     authentic happiness by martin seligman, nicholas brealey, 2003. ↑     thinking fast and slow by daniel kahneman, penguin, 2011. ↑     subject reaction: the neglected factor in the ethics of experimentation by stanley milgram, the hastings center report, vol. 7, no. 5 (oct., 1977), pp. 19–23. please do not copy our articles onto blogs and other websites articles from this website are registered at the us copyright office. copying or otherwise using registered works without permission, removing this or other copyright notices, and/or infringing related rights could make you liable to severe civil or criminal penalties. text copyright © chris woodford 2021. all rights reserved. full copyright notice and terms of use . follow us, rate this page, tell your friends, cite this page, more to explore on our website....

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Social Psychology Experiments

Social psychology experiments can explain how thoughts, feelings and behaviors are influenced by the presence of others.

This article is a part of the guide:

• Milgram Experiment
• Bobo Doll Experiment
• Stanford Prison Experiment
• Asch Experiment
• Milgram Experiment Ethics

Browse Full Outline

• 1 Social Psychology Experiments
• 2.1 Asch Figure
• 3 Bobo Doll Experiment
• 4 Good Samaritan Experiment
• 5 Stanford Prison Experiment
• 6.1 Milgram Experiment Ethics
• 7 Bystander Apathy
• 8 Sherif’s Robbers Cave
• 9 Social Judgment Experiment
• 10 Halo Effect
• 11 Thought-Rebound
• 12 Ross’ False Consensus Effect
• 13 Interpersonal Bargaining
• 14 Understanding and Belief
• 15 Hawthorne Effect
• 16 Self-Deception
• 17 Confirmation Bias
• 18 Overjustification Effect
• 19 Choice Blindness
• 20.1 Cognitive Dissonance
• 21.1 Social Group Prejudice
• 21.2 Intergroup Discrimination
• 21.3 Selective Group Perception

Typically social psychology studies investigate how someone's behavior influences a groups behavior or internal states, such as attitude or self-concept.

Obedience to Authority

"I was only following orders" Legal defence by a Nazi leader at the Nuremberg trial following World War II

The aftermath of World War 2 made scientists investigate what to made people "follow orders" even though the orders were horrible. The Stanley Milgram Experiment showed that also non-nazi populations would follow orders to harm other persons. It was not a German phenomenon as many thought.

Milgram's Lost Letter Experiment

Classic social psychology experiments are widely used to expose the key elements of aggressive behavior, prejudice and stereotyping. Social group prejudice is manifested in people's unfavorable attitudes towards a particular social group. Stanley Milgram's Lost Letter Experiment further explains this.

Obedience to a Role - Dehumanization

The Abu Ghraib prison-episode was yet another example on the power of predefined roles. The Stanford Prison Experiment by Philip Zimbardo, demonstrated the powerful effect our perception of expectations in roles have.

Solomon Asch wanted to test how much people are influenced by others opinions in the Asch Conformity Experiment .

Observational Role Learning

Behaviorists ruled psychology for a long time. They focused on how individuals learn by trying and failing. Albert Bandura thought that humans are much more than "learning machines". He thought that we learn from role models, initiating the (bandura) social cognitive theory. It all started with the Bobo Doll Experiment .

Helping Behavior - Good Samaritan

Knowing the story of the Good Samaritan makes you wonder what made the Samaritan help the stranger, and why did he not get help from the priest or the Levite? The Good Samaritan Experiment explores causes of not showing helping behavior or altruism.

Cognitive Dissonance Experiment

The Cognitive Dissonance Experiment by Leon Festinger assumes that people hold many different cognitions about their world and tests what happens when the cognitions do not fit. See also the more in depth article about the Cognitive Dissonance Experiment .

Bystander Effect

The Bystander Apathy Experiment was inspirated and motivation to conduct this experiment from the highly publicised murder of Kitty Genovese in the same year.

Groups and Influence On Opinion

Sherif's classic social psychology experiment named Robbers Cave Experiment dealt with in-group relations, out-group relations and intergroup relations.

The Social Judgment Experiment was designed to explore the internal processes of an individual's judgment and intergroup discrimination , how little it takes for people to form into groups, and the degree to which people within a group tend to favour the in-group and discriminate the out-group.

Halo Effect

The Halo Effect was demonstrated by Nisbett and Wilson's experiment. It fits the situation of Hollywood celebrities where people readily assume that since these people are physically attractive, it also follows that they are intelligent, friendly, and display good judgment as well. This also greatly applies to other well-known people such as politicians.

Wegner's Dream Rebound Experiment

According to studies, thoughts suppressed may resurface or manifest themselves in the future in the form of dreams. Psychologist Daniel M. Wegner proves this in his experiment on effects of thought suppression .

False Consensus

Everyone's got their own biases in each and every occasion, even when estimating other people behaviors and the respective causes. One of these is called the false consensus bias. Psychologist Professor Lee Ross conducted studies on setting out to show how false consensus effect operates.

Interpersonal Bargaining

Bargaining is one of the many activities we usually engage in without even realizing it. The Moran Deutsch and Robert Krauss Experiment investigated two central factors in bargaining, namely how we communicate with each other and the use of threats.

Understand and Belief

Daniel Gilbert together with his colleagues put to test both Rene Descartes' and Baruch Spinoza's beliefs on whether belief is automatic or is a separate process that follows understanding. This argument has long been standing for at least 400 years before it was finally settled.

Self-Deception

People lie all the time even to themselves and surprisingly, it does work! This is the finding of the Quattrone and Tversky Experiment that was published in the Journal of Personality and Psychology.

Overjustification Effect

The overjustification effect happens when an external incentive like a reward, decreases a person's intrinsic motivation to perform a particular task. Lepper, Greene and Nisbett confirmed this in their field experiment in a nursery school.

Chameleon Effect

Also called unintentional mirroring, the chameleon effect usually applies to people who are getting along so well, each tend to mimic each other's body posture, hand gestures, speaking accents, among others. This was confirmed by the Chartrand and Bargh experiments.

Confirmation Bias

Confirmation bias is also known as selective collection of evidence. It is considered as an effect of information processing where people behaves to as to make their expectations come true. People tend to favor information that confirms their preconceptions or hypotheses independently of the information's truthness or falsity.

Choice Blindness

Choice blindness refers to ways in which people are blind to their own choices and preferences. Lars Hall and Peter Johansson further explain this phenomenon in their study.

Stereotypes

The Clark Doll Test illustrates the ill effects of stereotyping and racial segregation in America. It illustrated the damage caused by systematic segregation and racism on children's self-perception at the young age of five.

Selective Group Perception

In selective group perception, people tend to actively filter information they think is irrelevant. This effect is demonstrated in Hastorf and Cantril's Case Study: They Saw a Game .

Changing Behaviour When Being Studied

The Hawthorne Effect is the process where human subjects of an experiment change their behavior, simply because they are being studied. This is one of the hardest inbuilt biases to eliminate or factor into the design.

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LESSWRONG LW

28 social psychology studies from *experiments with people* (frey & gregg, 2017).

I'm reading a very informative and fun book about human social psychology, Experiments With People (2nd ed, 2018).

... 28 social psychological experiments that have significantly advanced our understanding of human social thinking and behavior. Each chapter focuses on the details and implications of a single study, while citing related research and real-life examples along the way.

Here I summarize each chapter so that you can save time. Some results are old news to me, but some were quite surprising. I often skip over the experimental details, such as how the psychologists used ingenious tricks to make sure the participants don't guess the true purposes of the experiments. Refer to originals for details.

The experiments start in the 1950s and get up to 2010s, and occasionally literatures from before 1900s are quoted.

Chapters I find especially interesting are:

• Chap 14. It lists the many failures of introspection, and raises question as to what consciousness can do.
• Chap 16. It has significant similarity with superrationality and acausal trade.
• Chap 20. It warns about how credulous humans are.
• Chap 27. It is about the human fear of death and the psychological defenses against it.
• Chap 28. It shows how belief in free will can be motivated by a desire to punish immoral behaviors. Understanding why people believe in free will is necessary for a theory of what is the use of the belief in free will.

Chap 1. Conforming to group norms

Asch conformity experiment , from Opinions and Social Pressure (Asch, 1955)

Video demonstration.

Groups of eight participated in a simple "perceptual" task. In reality, all but one of the participants were actors, and the true focus of the study was about how the remaining participant would react.

Each student viewed a card with a line on it, followed by another with three lines labeled A, B, and C (see accompanying figure). One of these lines was the same as that on the first card, and the other two lines were clearly longer or shorter. Each participant was then asked to say aloud which line matched the length of that on the first card... The actors would always unanimously nominate one comparator, but on certain trials they would give the correct response and on others, an incorrect response. The group was seated such that the real participant always responded last.

It was found that

• When there are over 3 actors giving unanimously the wrong answer, the participant went along 1/3 of time.
• Increasing the number of actors above 3 did not increase compliance.
• Even when the difference between the lines was 7 inches, there were still some who complied.
• If there is at least one actor disagreeing with the majority, the participant decreased compliance.
• If the fellow dissenter joins the majority, the participant increased compliance to the same level of 1/3.
• If the fellow dissenter leaves, the participant increased compliance only slightly.

There are two reasons for this compliance. One is heuristic about knowledge: the majority is usually more correct. Another is normative: social acceptance matters more than being correct.

The effect of a dissenting minority is notable.

Research finds that, whereas majorities inspire heuristic judgments and often compliance, minorities provoke a more systematic consideration of arguments, and possibly, an internal acceptance of their position. (Nemeth, 1987) Majorities tend to have a greater impact on public conformity, whereas minorities tend to have more effect on private conformity. (Chaiten & Stangor, 1987)

Chap 2. Forced compliance theory and cognitive dissonance

In When Prophecy Fails , the story of a UFO cult was detailed. When the doomsday prophecy failed, most people left, but some became even firmer believers.

(My own example, not appearing in the book.) In Borges's story A Problem , Borges asks, how would Don Quixote react if he kill a man?

Having killed the man, don Quixote cannot allow himself to think that the terrible act is the work of a delirium; the reality of the effect makes him assume a like reality of cause, and don Quixote never emerges from his madness.

This chapter reviews of Cognitive consequences of forced compliance (Festinger & Carlsmith, 1959)

• Participants were asked to do an extremely boring task.
• Then the experimenter asked the participant to deceive the next participant that the experiment was fun. Half were paid $1, another half paid $20.
• A control group was not asked to lie.
• Then they were nudged to take a survey about how they felt about the experiment.

The result is that, those paid $1 thought the experiment was fun, and those paid $20 thought it was boring, and those that didn't get asked to lie thought it was very boring.

Festinger explains this by the theory of cognitive dissonance:

• An attitude (thinking the experiment was boring) and a behavior (saying it was fun) clashes, creating an uncomfortable feeling.
• The participant then is motivated to remove the discomfort by changing the attitude by rationalization (thinking the experiment was actually fun).
• If the participant was paid $20, then there was no dissonance, as there was a ready explanation of the dissonant behavior.
• If the participant was paid $1, then there was dissonance, because the participant regarded the lying behavior as mostly voluntary .

An alternative explanation from Self-perception: An alternative interpretation of cognitive dissonance phenomena (Bem, 1967) :

• We don't form beliefs about ourselves by direct introspection, instead, we infer it through
• When we behave against previously self-beliefs, this creates an update on our self-beliefs.

See also Chap 14 for more on the lack of introspection.

Current consensus is that both theories are correct, in different situations. The self-perception effect happens when the behavior is mildly different from self-beliefs, and the cognitive dissonance effect happens when the behavior is grossly different.

There are also many complications, such as in Double forced compliance and cognitive dissonance theory (Girandola, 1997) , which reported that even if participants performed a boring task, then told others about how boring it was, afterwards they still felt the task was more interesting afterwards.

There is a lot of ongoing research.

Chap 3. Suffering can create liking

Such curious phenomena as hazing has been studied since The effect of severity of initiation on liking for a group (Aronson, 1959)

An experiment was conducted to test the hypothesis that persons who undergo an unpleasant initiation to become members of a group increase their liking for the group; that is, they find the group more attractive than do persons who become members without going through a severe initiation.

The group was a made-up thing by the experimenters. It purports to discuss interesting sexual things, but the participants, after finally "joining", would only hear a very boring group discussion about animal sex.

This hypothesis was derived from Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance." 3 conditions were employed: reading of "embarrassing material" before a group, mildly embarrassing material to be read, no reading. The results clearly verified the hypothesis.

The "embarrassing material" are lists of obscene words. The "mildly embarrassing material" are lists of mildly sexual words.

Result: the very embarrassing ritual increased liking for the group.

Explanation was by the theory of cognitive dissonance: "I have already invested so much to join the group. I must be a fool if the group turned out to be bad! And I'm not a fool."

Cognitive dissonance has been used for brainwashing, persuasion, education, and many other kinds of things.

One of the authors learned from an investigative journalist about how a dodgy car company... had customers unnecessarily wait or hours while their finance deal was supposedly being negotiated upstairs.

[ Commitment and community: Communes and utopias in sociological perspective (Kanter, 1972)] noted that

19th-century utopian cults requiring their member to make significant sacrifices were more successful. For example, cults that had their members surrender all their personal belongings lasted much longer than those that did not.

Some bad investments are continued far after they had become clearly unprofitable, this is the sunk cost fallacy .

Chap 4. Just following orders

The banality of evil is the theory that everyday people can do great evils such as the Holocaust, by simply following orders.

Behavioral study of obedience (Milgram, 1965) reported the famous Milgram experiment . A video recreation is here .

This is a very famous experiment with many followups. There is sufficient material freely online, such as the Wikipedia page. So I won't recount it here.

I was most surprised to learn that personality had very little effect. That is, obedience exhibited by the participants in this experiment was mostly situational , instead of stemming from the personality of the participants.

Chap 5. Bystander apathy effect

The murder of Kitty Genovese stimulated research into the "bystander effect". On March 13, 1964 Genovese was murdered... 38 witnesses watched the stabbings but did not intervene or even call the police until after the attacker fled and Genovese had died...

In Bystander intervention in emergencies: Diffusion of responsibility (Latané & Darley, 1968) attributed the lack of help by witnesses to diffusion of responsibility : because each saw others witnessing the same event, they assumed that the others would take responsibility.

This phenomenon has a big literature, and is very popularly known, possibly due to the dramatic stories.

Concerning the original experiment by Latane and Darley, I was again surprised that personality factors had little effect, except one: growing up in a big community is correlated with a lower probability of helping.

Chap 6. The effect of an audience

When people perform a task in the presence of others, they perform better if the task is easy, and worse if the task is hard. One theory is that presence of others increases physiological arousal , which then enhances performance of simple tasks and decreases performance of hard tasks. Other theories

In Social enhancement and impairment of performance in the cockroach (Zajonc, 1969) , it is found that this is true even for cockroaches. In the experiment, Zajonc gave cockroaches two possible tasks: going through a straight maze, or a more complex maze. They either did the task alone, or while being watched by others outside (the maze was transparent).

While being watched, cockroaches solved faster on the straight maze but slower on the complex maze. This demonstrates that the physiological arousal theory is correct in cockroaches: the effect of an audience can happen without any complex cognitive ability.

However, complex cognitive ability sometimes does occur in humans. As reported in Social facilitation of dominant responses by the presence of an audience and the mere presence of others (Cottrell et al, 1968) , blindfolded audience does not exert an effect on the performer.

Chap 7. Group conflicts from trivial groups

This chapter begins with the Robbers Cave experiment , which was a study that investigates the realistic conflict theory , which sounds very common-sense:

• group conflicts and feelings of resentment for other groups arise from conflicting goals and competition over limited resources
• length and severity of the conflict is based upon the perceived value and shortage of the given resource
• positive relations can only be restored with goals that require cooperation between groups

Then it recounts the blue eyes-brown eyes experiment . The problem, then, is, what is the least amount of group-difference in order to make a difference? Enter the minimal group paradigm of Experiments in intergroup discrimination (Tajfel, 1970) . Participants first took a test on estimating dot numbers, then divided into "overestimators" and "underestimators", while in truth they were random. Then, they were given points (convertible to cash) to divide among the groups. Participants favored their own groups significantly more.

In fact, the most favored strategy was to maximize (own group) - (other group), even though it did not maximize (own group). Thus, even the most minimal social groups induced ingroup-outgroup conflict.

The minimal group paradigm has been studied in many ways. It was also found that outgroup homogeneity effect , that is, "they are all the same; we are diverse", could also arise from minimal groups.

One theoretical explanation is Tajfel and Turner's social identity theory (Tajfel & Turner, 1979) , which states that: 0. A person's self-esteem depends on having a good identity.

• A person's identity has two parts: personal and social.
• Personal identity are about one's own traits and outcomes.
• Social identity are derived from social groups and comparison between groups.
• A person is motivated to improve self-esteem, and thus social identity.
• Thus, one is motivated to improve the standings of one's ingroups and decrease the standings of one's outgroups.

One supporting evidence is that when a person has more self-esteem, they are less discriminating against outgroups (Crocker et al, 1987) .

Chap 8. The Good Samaritan Experiment

In the parable of the Good Samaritan ,

a traveller is stripped of clothing, beaten, and left half dead alongside the road. First a priest and then a Levite comes by, but both avoid the man. Finally, a Samaritan happens upon the traveller. Samaritans and Jews despised each other, but the Samaritan helps the injured man.

This inspired an experiment reported in "From Jerusalem to Jericho": A study of situational and dispositional variables in helping behavior. (Darley & Batson, 1973) , participants were theology students asked to give a short talk in another building.

People going between two buildings encountered a shabbily dressed person slumped by the side of the road. Subjects in a hurry to reach their destination were more likely to pass by without stopping.

The experiment was 2 x 3: the participant was asked to either give a short talk on the parable of the Good Samaritan, or on an irrelevant topic. They were either very hurried, hurried, or not hurried by the experimenter.

Hurrying made significant difference in the likelihood of their giving the victim help. The topic of the talk had some influence, according to a reanalysis by (Greenwald, 1975) , despite the original paper's claim of no influence. Self-reported personality and religiosity made no difference.

The lesson from this as well as many other social psychology experiments is that seemingly trivial situational variables have a greater impact than personality variables, even though people tend to explain behaviors using personality. See The Person and the Situation: Perspectives of Social Psychology (Lee Ross, Richard E. Nisbett, 2011)

Chap 9. External motivation harms internal motivation

Extrinsic motivations are motivations that "come from the outside", such as money, praise, food. Intrinsic motivations are from the inside, such as self-esteem, happiness. Both can motivate behaviors. However, it's interesting that sometimes extrinsic motivations can harm internal motivation.

In Undermining children's intrinsic interest with extrinsic reward: A test of the" overjustification" hypothesis (Lepper et al, 1973) , children are given markers to draw with. Some were told that they would be rewarded with a prize for playing, others got a prize unexpectedly, others were left alone as control group.

After some days, the amount of time children spent playing the markers were: got expected prize < control group < got unexpected prize

The book didn't talk much about why the unexpected prize created higher motivation, but I think it is similar to how gambling addiction comes from variable reward .

There are some explanations for why extrinsic reward lowered subsequent motivation. One is that extrinsic reward provides overjustification effect , where external rewards "crowd out" internal rewards,

Once rewards are no longer offered, interest in the activity is lost; prior intrinsic motivation does not return, and extrinsic rewards must be continuously offered as motivation to sustain the activity.

Another explanation is that humans heuristically view means to an end as undesirable. In (Sagotsky et al, 1982) , children were given two activities, playing with crayons and markers. They were equally fun at the beginning, but one group was told that in order to play with crayons, they had to play with markers first. After a while, they became less interested in playing with markers. The other group, the reverse.

I think this is the psychological basis of some ethical intuitions in the style of Kant :

we should never act in such a way that we treat humanity as a means only but always as an end in itself.

A third explanation is that people consider extrinsic rewards a threat to their freedom and autonomy, and thus tend to rebel against it. I saw a news today about Amazon's program to gamify work . Some complained that it was threatening the workers' autonomy, which is a strange complaint: if gamification actually increases intrinsic motivation for work, doesn't it increase autonomy? Autonomy is freedom to follow one's intrinsic motivation, and thus, if a worker acquires an intrinsic motivation to do a good job, they would have more autonomy.

I think this complaint can be explained as a different kind of autonomy: freedom from prediction. Humans are evolved to want to be unpredictable (at least by others), because to be predictable is to be threatened by manipulation, which often decreases fitness.

Chap 10. Actor-observer asymmetry

Other people did what they did because of who they are. We did what we did because of outside events.

In 1975, parts of the Watergate scandal was recreated in a very dramatic psychology experiment, reported in Ubiquitous Watergate: An attributional analysis (West, 1975) .

80 criminology students were asked to meet the experimenter privately for a mysterious reason. There, they were asked to join a burglary team for secret documents in an ad agency. There were four versions presented:

• The burglary plan was sponsored by a government agency, for secret investigation purposes. Government would provide immunity if caught.
• Same, but without immunity.
• The plan was sponsored by a rival ad agency, with $2000 reward.
• The student was asked to only join a test run of the plan, without stealing anything.

Afterwards, they were debriefed and asked to explain their decision to join/not join.

Separately, 238 psychology students were presented the above situation, and asked to guess what percentage would agree to the plan.

Then, half of the participants were asked, "Suppose John agreed to participate, explain why John agreed."

• About 45% of participants agreed to join the burglary in the government-with-immunity situation. Otherwise, about 10%.
• Most students in the second part thought they would not agree to the burglary plan.
• Students in the first part who agreed to join the burglary explained their behavior as due to the circumstances.
• Students in the second part explained the hypothetical John's behavior as due to John's personality.

The criminology students were "actors", and the psychology students were "observers". An asymmetry was that actors attributed their behavior to situations, while the observers attributed to personalities. This is the actor-observer asymmetry.

Complications in this asymmetry are noted in The actor-observer asymmetry in attribution: A (surprising) meta-analysis (Malle, 2006) . Malle found that there are two kinds of biases: when the behavior is negative, the actor blames the situation and the observer blames the person. When the behavior is positive, the reverse happens. As such, this can be explained as a self-serving bias.

The authors conclude with a funny note:

it's interesting to how athletes often publically thank the Lord for a personal victory, but do not publically blame the Lord for a defeat!

Chap 11. We are number 1

They never shout, "They are number 1."

People like to think good about themselves. Even in collectivistic societies, people regard themselves as above average in collectivistic traits, according to Pancultural self-enhancement (Sedikides et al, 2003)

Americans... self-enhanced on individualistic attributes, whereas Japanese... self-enhanced on collectivistic attributes

An experiment is reported in Basking in reflected glory: Three (football) field studies (Ciadini et al, 1976) , where students are asked to describe a recent university sports team's victory/defeat. Before that, half received criticisms that decreased to their self-esteem, and others received praises that increased their self-esteem.

The result was that among those who had higher self-esteem, they described the sports outcome using "we won" or "we lost" 1/4 of the times. For those who had lower self-esteem, they used "we won" 40% of the times when the team won, but used "we lost" only 14% of the times when the team lost.

The explanation is that people in need of boosts to self-esteem try to BIRG (Basking in reflected glory) and CORF (Cut off from reflected failures). Reflected glory also improves their social standing.

Methods of increasing one's social standing are called impression management , and include:

• BIRG and CORF, as noted above;
• ingratiation: we praise and agree with others, so as to be liked;
• self-handicapping: a student gets drunk before a big test, so that if they fail, they could blame on the drunkenness instead of their study ability;
• exemplification: behave virtuously and make sure others saw it.

A lot of these techniques are listed in (Jones and Pittman, 1982) .

Chap 12. Deindividuation

Effects of deindividuation variables on stealing among Halloween trick-or-treaters (Diener et al, 1976) reported an experiment in real life .

The experiment was run in a Halloween. An experimenter place a bowl of candy in her living room for trick-or-treaters. A hidden recorder observes. In one condition, the woman asked the children identification questions such as their names. In the other condition, children were completely anonymous. Some children came individually, others in a group.

In each condition, the woman invited the children in, claimed she had something in the kitchen she had to tend to, and told each child to take only one candy.

Result: being in a group and being anonymous both increased frequency of transgression (taking more than one candy). If the first child to take candies in a group transgressed, other children were also more likely to transgress.

The authors then defined deindividuation as when private self-awareness is reduced.

The truly deindividuated person is alleged to pay scant atetntion to personal values and moral codes... to be inordinately sensitive to cues in the immediate environment.

One study, The baiting crowd in episodes of threatened suicide (Mann, 1981) , examined 21 cases from newspapers, in which crowds were present when a person threatened to jump off a high place.

Baiting or jeering occurred in 10 of the cases. Analysis of newspaper accounts of the episodes suggested several deindividuation factors that might contribute to the baiting phenomenon: membership in a large crowd, the cover of nighttime, and physical distance between crowd and victim (all factors associated with anonymity).

Two theories of why deindividuation were given. One is that anonymity makes people feel safe to transgress. Another is that (Reicher & Postmes, 1995) people in a crowd would categorize themselves mainly by their social identity, and their behaviors would reflect the group norm than their personal norms.

I was disappointed that the authors did not give evolutionary psychological explanations for deindividuation. Humans are the only animals that wage wars. A deindividuation effect can be an evolutionary adaptation to prepare humans to fight more effectively in a crowd.

Chap 13. Mere exposure effect

People prefer familiar things. Really, that's quite a banal observation. What's delightful about this chapter is the ingenuity of the experiment design.

Think about your own face. You see them in a mirror image (unless you take a selfie), but others see it directly. This means that you are familiar with your face in the mirror image, but others in the direct image.

This is exploited in Reversed facial images and the mere-exposure hypothesis (Mita et al, 1977) . Couples were separately shown photos of the female one's face, some mirrored, others not. They were asked to pick the one they prefer. The female one preferred the mirrored photo, and the male one preferred the direct photo.

Mere exposure effect is robust in real life and across species. (Grush et al, 1978) found that

previous or media exposure alone successfully predicted 83% of the [US congress election] primary winners

And (Cross et al, 1967) found rats who heard Mozart music in infancy preferred Mozart over Schoenberg as adults, and vice versa.

One possible evolutionary psychological explanation were given: preference familiarity is safer, and thus more adaptive. The authors warned however that it's not so simple, as people also have a preference for mild novelty.

Chap 14. Shortcomings of introspection

This chapter reviews a study that shows a particular instance of introspection failure:

people's ideas about how their minds work stem not from private insights but from public knowledge. Unfortunately, however, this public knowledge is often not accurate. It is based on intuitive theories, widely shared throughout society, that are often mistaken.

The book referenced Verbal reports about causal influences on social judgments: Private access versus public theories (Nisbett, 1977) , although I find Telling More Than We Can Know: Verbal Reports on Mental Processes (Nisbett & Wilson, 1977) to be better.

Subjects are sometimes (a) unaware of the existence of a stimulus that importantly influenced a response, (b) unaware of the existence of the response, and (c) unaware that the stimulus has affected the response. It is proposed that when people attempt to report on their cognitive processes... they do not do so on the basis of any true introspection. Instead, their reports are based on a priori , implicit causal theories, or judgments about the extent to which a particular stimulus is a plausible cause of a given response.

In the experiment, a subject is given a fictitious application from Jill for the job of staff at crisis center. These applications are the same except on a few attributes of the applicant: attractiveness, intelligence, etc. Then, the subject is asked how much each attribute is correlated with the decision to accept.

The situation is then described to some observers (who didn't do the job application review), who are asked how much each attribute is correlated with the decision of the subject to accept.

Subjects who read that Jill had once been involved in a serious car accident claimed that the event had made them view her as a more sympathetic person. However, according to the ratings they later gave, this event had exerted no impact... the only exception pertained to ratings of Jill's intelligence. Here, an almost perfect correlation emerged between how subjects' judgments had actually shifted and how much they believed they had shifted. Why so? The researchers argued that there are explicit rules, widely known throughout a culture, for ascribing intelligence to people. Because subjects could readily recognize whether a given factor was relevant to intelligence, they could reliably guess whether they would have taken it into consideration.

The determinations of subjects and observers coincided almost exactly.

There are other introspection failures demonstrated by social psychology. People are unaware of the halo effect at work in their own judgments of others (Nisbett &Wilson, 1977) . People are unaware of the source of their own arousal . People are unaware of their bias even if they know of such bias (Pronin et al, 2002) .

In a further twist, introspection can degrade judgment. In (Wilson & Kraft, 1993) , participants reported how they felt about their romantic partners. Their expressed feelings correlated well with the duration of relationship. However, if they introspected on the reason of their feelings, before reporting their feelings, the correlation disappeared.

The authors conclude by suggesting that traveling, by putting oneself into novel situations, would be particularly helpful for one to know oneself.

Chap 15. Self-fulfilling prophecies

Again, a very well-known subject with a lot already written. This chapter reviews Social perception and interpersonal behavior: On the self-fulfilling nature of social stereotypes (Snyder et al, 1977)

Male "perceivers" interacted with female "targets" whom they believed to be physically attractive/unattractive. Tape recordings of each participant's conversational behavior were analyzed by naive observer judges for evidence of behavioral confirmation... targets who were perceived to be physically attractive came to behave in a friendly, likeable, and sociable manner in comparison with targets whose perceivers regarded them as unattractive. It is suggested that theories in cognitive social psychology attend to the ways in which perceivers create the information that they process in addition to the ways that they process that information.

Philosophically, a self-fulfilling prophecy is a prediction about a future that is true iff the act of prediction is done. Usually, predictions themselves are supposed to be independent of the future that they talk about. Of course, all useful predictions must affect the future -- the predictor would try to profit from the prediction. However, such effects on the future are on the predictor , not on the predicted .

Social psychologists have found that human behaviors are more influenced by the situation than the personality (as noted in The Person and the Situation book). Snyder et al suggested that, in fact, personality traits are one of those self-fulfilling prophecies.

our believing that others possess certain traits may cause us to behave in certain consistent ways toward them. This may cause them to behave in consistent ways in our presence.

In other words, a lot of the persistence of personality could arise from the fundamental attribution error .

Chap 16. How to live like a predeterminist

So then, God has mercy on whom he chooses to have mercy, and he hardens whom he chooses to harden. -- Romans 9:18, which Calvinists quote a lot.

Suppose an urge to smoke and a propensity to lung cancer are both genetically determined, and smoking does not cause lung cancer, why not smoke? If you feel the urge to smoke, it's already too late.

Believers of Calvinism think that God has chosen some people to be saved, and others are damned. Those who are favored by God would both be naturally free from the urge to sin in this world, and enjoy paradise after death. Those who are not, would feel the urge to sin in this world, and go to hell after death.

So if a Calvinist feels an urge to sin, it's already too late. Why not sin? Instead, Calvinists keep resisting the urge to sin, and moreover, deny that they are resisting such urges, and insisting that they are effortlessly virtuous, evidence of God's favor.

In Causal versus diagnostic contingencies: On self-deception and on the voter's illusion (Quattrone & Tversky, 1984) two experiments are reported.

In the first one, participants exercised, then were asked to put their hands in ice water until the pain makes them withdraw. Then they were told a version of the lung cancer puzzle: There are two kinds of hearts, type 1 and type 2, caused by unchangeable genetics. Type 1 heart is associated both with health and with a higher tolerance to the ice water after exercise. Type 2 heart is associated with early death and a lower tolerance. They then did the ice water test again, and they exhibited longer tolerance to the ice water, even though many of them denied that they were trying to do so.

In the second experiment, subjects encountered one of two theories about the sort of voters who determine the margin of victory in an election. Only one of the theories would enable voting subjects to imagine that they could "induce" other like-minded persons to vote. As predicted, more subjects indicated that they would vote given that theory than given a theory in which the subject's vote would not be diagnostic of the electoral outcome, although the causal impact of the subject's vote is the same under both theories

One explanation is that the unconsciousness deceived the consciousness, but the authors find this unreasonable, for it still does not explain what motivates the unconsciousness to deceive. They instead favored Greenwald's theory that people avoid analyzing in detail threatening information, just like how we throw away junk mail without looking in detail.

In conclusion, self-deception is not the result of one center of intelligence hoodwinking the other. Rather, it is the result of a low-level screening process that banishes suspicious cognitions before they have the opportunity to be fully entertained by the conscious mind.

Similarity to superrationality and acausal trade.

The behavior of Calvinists is similar to superrationality and acausal trade , in which agents behave in a way that is diagnostic of good outcomes, even if it does not cause good outcomes.

Assuming the superrational player has access to their opponents' source codes/simulations, the superrationality strategy can be justified, but then it would just be usual rationality.

I think normative decision theories are incompatible with sufficiently good prediction. Normative decisions are only defined for agents with apparent free will. An agent apparently has free will only to someone who cannot predict the agent's behavior well. Superrationality and acausal trade both attempt to make a decision theory for agents that are aware that they are too predictable (to themselves or to someone they play with). This is similar to the situation where someone sees the future and then "decides" to rebel against the future. Either they saw the true future and did not rebel, or they did not see the true future at all. It's illogical to say they both saw the future and rebelled against it.

Similar problems happen with Scott Aaronson's solution to Newcomb's paradox (I'm a "Wittengenstein"). A determinist who is self-aware of their determinism would, instead of offering a decision theory ("I should take one box because..."), offer a prediction theory ("I probably would take one box because...").

Chap 17. Partisan perceptions of media bias

People often complain of media biases. People report differently about the same event. Why?

In The hostile media phenomenon: biased perception and perceptions of media bias in coverage of the Beirut massacre (Vallone et al, 1985) , the researchers studied how people perceived news about the Bairut massacre ,

killing of civilians, mostly Palestinians and Lebanese Shiites... carried out by the militia under the eyes of their Israeli allies.

The researchers took some neutral reports on the event, and as expected, pro-Israel people thought they are biased to be anti-Israel, while anti-Israel people thought they are biased to be pro-Israel.

In a study on biases (Lord et al, 1984) , participants avoided bias by this command:

"Ask yourself at each step whether you would have made the same evaluations had exactly the same study produced results on the other side of the issue.

Chap 18. Empathy-altruism hypothesis

Several theorized psychological mechanisms of human altruistic actions are studied in More evidence that empathy is a source of altruistic motivation (Batson, 1982) reported an experiment on whether people would help a person in need.

It was found that: If (empathy OR guilt), then (helping). That is, people can be motivated to act altruistically by empathy without expectation of gain, or to gain relief from guilt. This argues against the theory of psychological hedonism .

Other potential sources of altruism are collectivism (act for the benefit of a group) and principlism (uphold a principle for its own sake). Effective altruism is one example of principlism based on utilitarianism.

Chap 19. Expanding the self to include the other

A psychological phenomenon of love (close personal relationships, such as lover, best friend) is to include that person in one's self. This involves perceiving, and allocating resources to, that person, in a similar way as to one's self.

Three experiments are described, from Close relationships as including other in the self (Aron, 1991) .

When allocating money, they allocate about the same to themself as to their friend.

They were asked to imagine nouns paired with their selves, mothers, or strangers. They recalled fewer nouns imagined with self or mother than nouns imagined with a stranger, suggesting that mother was processed more like self than a stranger. They explained the reason why it was recalled less by that we usually look at strangers directly, but only ourselves upon reflection (literal or not), and so it's harder to imagine ourselves than strangers.

When faced with a task to sort a list of adjectives into 4 piles: "true/false about me, and true/false about my spouse", they reacted slower on adjectives that were true about one but false about the other. This was explained by that differences between one's own and a close other's properties caused dissonance in the same way that holding opposite attitudes within oneself can cause dissonance.

Chap 20. Believing precedes disbelieving

Descartes divided the mind up into intellect and will. The intellect writes up potential beliefs about the world; the will then chooses which to endorse. Spinoza said that we believe everything that we happen to understand, and then disbelieve only if we find it necessary. You Can't Not Believe Everything You Read (Gilbert, 1993) presented three experiments that supports Spinoza's theory, and discussed its sociological effect.

... we asked subjects in Experiment 1 to play the role of a trial judge and to make sentencing decisions about an ostensibly real criminal defendant. Subjects were given some information about the defendant that was known to be false and were occasionally interrupted [by a distraction task]... We predicted that interruption would cause subjects to continue to believe the false information they accepted on comprehension and that these beliefs would exert a profound influence on their sentencing of the defendant...

Experiments 1 and 2 provide support for the Spinozan hypothesis: When people are prevented from unbelieving the assertions they comprehend... they did not merely recall that such assertions were said to be true, but they actually behaved as though they believed the assertions.

If you want to read more, I have written in detail about this .

Chap 21. Inferred memories

When we recall a memory, that memory is an inference about past based on a number of clues that we have in the present. It is not necessarily accurate.

Experiment from Women's theories of menstruation and biases in recall of menstrual symptoms (McFarland, 1989) found that when women report, day-to-day, their unpleasant emotions, there is no difference between premenstrual, menstrual, and inter-menstrual days (they feel equally unpleasant). But when asked to recall how unpleasant it was, they recall significantly more unpleasant pre-menstrual and menstrual days, and less unpleasant inter-menstrual days.

This is explained by that, when they recall, they used intuitive theories about PMS to infer "how it must have felt" instead of "how it actually felt". This also, as a side effect, casts doubt on whether PMS actually exists .

Memories can be completely made up, as in repressed memory therapies .

The fact that those inferences about the past are felt as genuine recalls, shows how little conscious introspection can give true knowledge about the self.

Chap 22. Ironic process theory

Try to not to think of a polar bear!

The theory of ironic process is that there is a cognitive process called intender who is looking for contents that matches some desired mental state. There is also a monitor who notifies consciousness about errant thoughts.

The intender is a costly process, and the monitor is a cheap process, so when one is under cognitive load, the intender doesn't work well, but the monitor still works well, and ironically, trying to not think of something results in thinking of it.

Ironic Processes of Mental Control (Wegner, 1994) reported an experiment. Participants were asked to consciously improve/deprove their moods with happy/sad thoughts. Half were also asked to do a memory task as cognitive load .

Those not under cognitive load were successful in their mood control, while those under cognitive load achieved the opposite.

This suggests that if you are under some cognitive load (such as busy studying), and you want to improve your mood, you should try consciously to feel worse. Also, if you are in a noisy and distracting environment, and want to sleep, you should try to stay awake.

Another experiment showed that people who try to avoid sexist language become ironically more prone to sexist language when under cognitive load. This is true no matter if they are sexist or not.

Chap 23. Implicit Association Test

In Single-target implicit association tests (ST-IAT) predict voting behavior of decided and undecided voters in swiss referendums (Raccuia, 2016) , compared to self-reported political orientation, implicit association was found to be a weaker, but somewhat independent, predictor of voting behavior.

Other similar methods to probe the unconsciousness are studied, and the results are new and mixed.

Chap 24. Prospect theory

People don't behave as expectation-maximizers. Instead they are better modelled by prospect theory:

• Gains and losses are measured compared to a changeable default, instead of an absolute zero.
• Losses are weighted more than gains, and both have decreasing marginal utilities.

An experiment The systematic influence of gain-and loss-framed messages on interest in and use of different types of health behavior (Rothman et al, 1999) . It was found that people used more bacteria-killing mouth wash, if they received positive advertising (about maintaining good health). They used more disclosing mouth wash (which merely detects dental diseases) if they received negative advertising (about the potential disease).

This theory, along with some others, is explained in great detail in Thinking, Fast and Slow (Kahnemann, 2011) , which I recommend.

Other mental heuristics include mental accounting (Thaler, 1980) , with its own set of irrational effects.

Chap 25. Social isolation increases aggression

If you can't join them, beat them: Effects of social exclusion on aggressive behavior (Twenge, 2001)

Social exclusion was manipulated by telling people that they would end up alone later in life or that other participants had rejected them. These manipulations caused participants to behave more aggressively. Excluded people issued a more negative job evaluation against someone who insulted them, blasted a target with higher levels of aversive noise both when the target had insulted them and when no interaction had occurred. However, excluded people were not more aggressive toward someone who issued praise.

In particular,

These responses were specific to social exclusion and were not mediated by emotion.

This was shown by two experimental facts:

Participants who were told they would end up alone later in life or that other participants had rejected them, did not feel worse than average.

Participants who were told they would end up unlucky later in life, did not act more aggressively than average.

Some psychological theories are given. One is self-determination theory from Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being (Deci and Ryan, 2000) , which says that people have three needs:

• relatedness (to some other people)
• efficacy (can do important things)
• autonomy (can control their own future)

Other relevant factors are self-esteem, and stability over time. Stability and level of self-esteem as predictors of anger arousal and hostility (Kernis et al, 1989) found that in feelings of anger and hostility,

unstable high self-esteem > low self-esteem > stable high self-esteem

There is no evolutionary explanation, though. Social exclusion causes fewer offsprings, and aggression only worsens it. An evolutionary psychological explanation would be good. Either it has evolutionary benefit, or it is a side effect of something else.

Chap 26. Social effects of gossiping

Gossip is found to have a prosocial function. The virtues of gossip: Reputational information sharing as prosocial behavior (Feinberg, 2012)

... prosocial gossip , the sharing of negative evaluative information about a target in a way that protects others from antisocial or exploitative behavior.

In the study, they found experimental support for four hypotheses about the function of gossip:

• prosocial : gossip is motivated by a desire to protect vulnerable people, without promise of material reward.
• frustration : seeing antisocial behavior makes people feel bad, which . Prosocial people are more prone to this frustration.
• relief : gossiping reduces the frustration.
• deterrence : threat of gossip makes antisocial people behave more prosocially.

Chap 27. Fear of death

Good news: we will be worm food one day!

Good news for worms, I meant.

Terror management theory argues that the terror of death creates such a profound, subconscious, anxiety, that humans spend their lives denying it in various ways, creating culture, religion, and many other social phenomena in the process.

In this chapter are reviewed the first 4 of the 7 experiments from How sweet it is to be loved by you: the role of perceived regard in the terror management of close relationships (CR Cox, J Arndt, 2012) . This paper studies

... whether people turn to close relationships to manage the awareness of mortality because they serve as a source of perceived regard.

Perceived regard means "am I a good person as viewed by someone else?" The paper in particular showed that people who have death on their mind exaggerate how much they think they are loved by a partner. Perceived regard from their own selves, and from average strangers, did not change. Having intense physical pain on the mind also did nothing.

They also found that having death on the mind makes people claim to love their partners more. They theorized that this is mediated by increased perceived regard:

death on the mind -> more perceived regard from their partner -> more love for their partner

Study 4 revealed that activating thoughts of perceived regard from a partner in response to MS reduced death-thought accessibility. Studies 5 and 6 demonstrated that MS led high relationship contingent self-esteem individuals to exaggerate perceived regard from a partner, and this heightened regard led to greater commitment to one's partner. Study 7 examined attachment style differences and found that after MS, anxious individuals exaggerated how positively their parents see them, whereas secure individuals exaggerated how positively their romantic partners see them. Together, the present results suggest that perceptions of regard play an important role in why people pursue close relationships in the face of existential concerns.

Personal comment : It has been commented that Transhumanism can be analyzed as a religion. Is there value in analyzing transhumanism through terror management theory? There is at least one paper, Software immortals: Science or faith? (Proudfoot, 2012) , that did so. This is important, because if transhumanism is indeed a religion, then the chance is high that it is deluded/unfalsifiable, like most religions have been shown to be.

Also, this would explain why moral nihilism is usually suffered as a mental disease than accepted as a working hypothesis. Despite its theoretical simplicity and moderate empirical support, it just doesn't offer any protection against terror of death.

Chap 28. Motivated belief in free will

Free to punish: A motivated account of free will belief (Clark, 2014)

a key factor promoting belief in free will is a fundamental desire to hold others morally responsible for their wrongful behaviors

Five experiments from the paper are recounted in detail. The authors praised the paper highly for its comprehensiveness.

participants reported greater belief in free will after considering an immoral action than a morally neutral one... due to heightened punitive motivations... reading about others’ immoral behaviors reduced the perceived merit of anti-free-will research... the real-world prevalence of immoral behavior (as measured by crime and homicide rates) predicted free will belief on a country level.

Taken together, these results provide a potential explanation for the strength and prevalence of belief in free will: It is functional for holding others morally responsible and facilitates justifiably punishing harmful members of society.

Personal comment : Instead of philosophically studying whether free will exists, it's more productive to assume it doesn't exist , and see what behaviors can be explained. If everything can be explained without free will, then the problem of free will dissolves. Else, we will have concentrated what free will is for, and made subsequent studies more focused.

It is also useful to study the human intuitive belief in free will, as important phenomena about humans, independent of whether they are right or wrong. This is analogous to the study of folk psychology and naive physics . See From Uncaused Will to Conscious Choice: The Need to Study, Not Speculate About People’s Folk Concept of Free Will (Monroe, 2009)

the core of people’s concept of free will is a choice that fulfills one’s desires and is free from internal or external constraints. No evidence was found for metaphysical assumptions about dualism or indeterminism.

In the "Afterthoughts", the authors considered what a post-free-will society could be like. I think that such a society's theory of crime and punishment would be more like "because this follows the natural order of things", than "because criminals are morally bad".

Think of the joke about "my brain made me commit the crime"

The criminal: "My brain made me commit the crime." The judge: "My brain made me sentence you."

And now, instead of taking it as a joke, imagine both of them saying them very seriously. That's what I think could be true in the future.

The first edition of this book was published in 2003. In 2005, Ioannidis' paper "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False" started the reproducibility avalanche. How well have these experiments replicated? My university library only has the first edition. I can see from the Amazon preview of the second edition (2017) that the authors address this, but I can't see enough pages to see what their response is. I understand from other sources that priming and ego-depletion have not stood up well.

Famous Experiments

The Most Influential Psychological Experiments in History

Solomon Asch Conformity Line Experiment Study

Bandura's Bobo Doll Experiment on Social Learning

Reviewed by Olivia Guy-Evans, MSc

John Money Gender Experiment: Reimer Twins

Reviewed by Saul McLeod, PhD

Van Ijzendoorn & Kroonenberg: Cultural Variations in Attachment

Jean piaget, behaviorism, neuroscience.

Jean Piaget's theory of cognitive development suggests that children move through four different stages of intellectual development which reflect the increasing sophistication of children's thoughts. Child development is determined by biological maturation and interaction with the environment.

Learn More: Piaget's Stages of Cognitive Development

Behaviorism is a theory of learning that states all behaviors are learned through interaction with the environment through a process called conditioning. Thus, behavior is simply a response to environmental stimuli.

Learn More: Behaviorist Approach in Psychology

Sigmund Freud (1856 to 1939) was the founding father of psychoanalysis, a method for treating mental illness and a theory that explains human behavior. His theories are clinically derived, based on what his patients told him during therapy.

Learn More: Sigmund Freud's Influence on Psychology

An approach is a perspective that involves certain assumptions about human behavior: the way people function, which aspects of them are worthy of study, and what research methods are appropriate for undertaking this study. The five major psychological perspectives are biological, psychodynamic, behaviorist, cognitive, and humanistic.

Learn More: Major Perspectives in Modern Psychology

Neuroscience is the branch of science concerned with studying the nervous system. It is a multidisciplinary field integrating numerous perspectives from biology, psychology, and medicine. It consists of several sub-fields ranging from the study of neurochemicals to the study of behavior and thought.

Learn More: What is Neuroscience?

Frequent Asked Questions

Is psychodynamic same as psychoanalytic?

The words psychodynamic and psychoanalytic are often confused. Remember that Freud’s theories were psychoanalytic, whereas the term ‘psychodynamic’ refers to both his theories and those of his followers, such as Carl Jung, Anna Freud, and Erik Erikson.

Learn More: Psychodynamic Approach

What is developmental psychology?

Developmental psychology is a scientific approach which aims to explain how thinking, feeling, and behavior change throughout a person’s life. A significant proportion of theories within this discipline focus upon development during childhood, as this is the period during an individual’s lifespan when the most change occurs.

Learn More: Developmental Psychology

What is Freud’s psychosexual theory?

Sigmund Freud proposed that personality development in childhood takes place during five psychosexual stages, which are the oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital stages.

During each stage, sexual energy (libido) is expressed in different ways and through different body parts.

Learn More: Freud’s Psychosexual Stages of Development

What Is object permanence in Piaget’s theory?

Object permanence means knowing that an object still exists, even if it is hidden. It requires the ability to form a mental representation (i.e. a schema) of the object.

The attainment of object permanence generally signals the transition from the sensorimotor stage to the  preoperational stage of development .

Learn More: What Is Object Permanence According To Piaget?

What is the difference between a psychology and sociology?

Psychology studies the mind of an individual to understand human behavior and social and emotional reactions, whereas sociology looks beyond individuals and examines societal institutions and groups of people.

Learn More: Similarities and Differences Between Sociology and Psychology

Explore Famous Experiments

Dement and Kleitman (1957)

Henry Gustav Molaison: The Curious Case of Patient H.M. 

Held and Hein (1963) Kitten carosel

Harry Harlow Theory & Rhesus Monkey Experiments in Psychology

Hawthorne Effect: Definition, How It Works, and How to Avoid It

Hofling Hospital Experiment (1966)

Hodges and Tizard (1989): Attachment Research Study

What Happened to Kitty Genovese

Konrad Lorenz: Theory of Imprinting in Psychology

Little Hans - Freudian Case Study

Little Albert Experiment (Watson & Rayner)

Little Peter, Cover-Jones (1924)

Loftus and Palmer (1974): Car Crash Experiment

Mary Ainsworth: Strange Situation Experiment & Attachment Theory

Stanford Marshmallow Test Experiment

Stanley Milgram Shock Experiment

Phineas Gage: His Accident and Impact on Psychology

Pavlov’s Dogs Experiment and Pavlovian Conditioning Response

Piliavin (1969) Subway Study

Serial Position Effect (Glanzer & Cunitz, 1966)

Rosenhan (1973) Experiment - 'On being sane in insane places'

Robbers Cave Experiment | Realistic Conflict Theory

Visual Cliff Experiment (Gibson & Walk, 1960)

Skinner Box: What Is an Operant Conditioning Chamber?

Stanford Prison Experiment: Zimbardo's Famous Study

The Asch Line Study (+3 Conformity Experiments)

Sheep. Complicit. Doormat. There are a lot of negative connotations associated with conformity, especially in the United States. Individualist societies push back on "going along with what everyone is doing." And yet, we conform more than we think. According to studies like the Asch Line Study, humans have a natural tendency to conform.

The Asch Line Study is one of the most well-known experiments in modern psychology, but it's not without its faults. Keep reading to learn about how the Asch Line Study worked, its criticisms, and similar experiments!

How Did the Asch Line Study Work?

In his famous “Line Experiment”, Asch showed his subjects a picture of a vertical line followed by three lines of different lengths, one of which was obviously the same length as the first one. He then asked subjects to identify which line was the same length as the first line.

Solomon Asch used 123 male college students as his subjects, and told them that his experiment was simply a ‘vision test’. For his control group, Asch just had his subjects go through his 18 questions on their own.

However, for his experimental group, he had his subjects answer each of the same 18 questions in a group of around a dozen people, where the first 11 people intentionally said obviously incorrect answers one after another, with the final respondee being the actual subject of the experiment.

Who was Solomon Asch?

Solomon E. Asch was a pioneer in social psychology. He was born in Poland in 1907 and moved to the United States in 1920. Asch received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1932 and went on to perform some famous psychological experiments about conformity in the 1950s.

One of these studies is known as the “Asch Line Experiment”, where he found evidence supporting the idea that humans will conform to and accept the ideas of others around them, even if those ideas are obviously false. This study is one of the most influential studies in social psychology .

Findings of Asch's Conformity Study

​ Asch found that his subjects indeed were more likely to give a false response after the other members of their group (the actors) gave false responses. As shown in this ‘Table 1’ from his experiment, during 18 trials, the ‘Majority Error’ column shows no error when the group response was the correct response, such as in Trial #1.

However, when the entire group intentionally gave a false answer (these situations are designated with an * under the “Group Response” column), the ‘Majority Error’ did exist and was slanted toward the opinion of the group.

For example, if the group answered with a line that was too long, such as in Trial #3, the ‘Majority Error’ column shows that the subjects generally estimated the line to be longer than it really was (denoted with a ‘+’), and vice-versa for when the group answered with a line that was too short, such as in Trial #4.

As for his control group, Asch found that people generally said the correct answer when they did not have a group of actors saying answers before them.

Interviewing the Participants

​ After the experiment, Asch revealed the true experiment to his subjects and interviewed them. Some subjects had become very agitated during the experiment, wondering why they kept disagreeing with the group. When the group pressed one particular subject on why he thought that he was correct and the entire group was wrong, he replied defiantly, exclaiming: “You're probably right, but you may be wrong!”

Other subjects admitted during the interview that they changed their answers after hearing others in their group reply differently. One was recorded saying, “If I’d been the first I probably would have responded differently.” Another subject admitted, “...at times I had the feeling: 'to heck with it, I'll go along with the rest.' "

Conclusions from the Asch Line Study

​ Asch found that his subjects often changed their answers when they heard the rest of the group unanimously giving a different response.

After the interviews, Asch concluded in his study that his subjects conformed to the opinions of the group for three different reasons:

Distortion of perception due to the stress of group pressure: This group of subjects always agreed with the group and said during the interview that they wholeheartedly believed that their obviously incorrect answers were correct. Asch concluded that the stress of group pressure had distorted their perception.

Distortion of judgment: This was the most common outcome, where subjects assumed that their individual answers were incorrect after seeing the rest of the group answer differently, so they changed their answer to align with the group.

Distortion of action: These subjects never doubted that they were correct and the group was wrong, but out of fear of being perceived as different, they suppressed their opinions and intentionally lied when it was their turn to give an answer.

Asch Line Study vs. Milgram Experiment

Both the Asch Line Study and the Milgram Experiment look at conformity, obedience, and the negative effects of going along with the majority opinion. Those negative effects are slightly awkward, like in the Asch Line Study, or dangerous, like in the Milgram Experiment. Both experiments were conducted in the Post-WWII world as a response to the conformity that was required for Nazi Germany to gain power. The premise of Asch's study was not nearly as dramatic. Milgram's was. 

To test conformity, Milgram and his researchers instructed participants to press a button. Participants believed that the buttons would shock another "participant" in a chair, who was really an actor. (No one was shocked.) The study continued as long as participants continued to shock the participant at increasingly dangerous levels. The participants knew that they could cause serious harm to the person in the chair. Yet, many obeyed.

Further Experiments and Variations

Solomon Asch didn't just conduct one experiment and move on. He replicated his experiment with new factors, including:

• Changing the size of the actor group
• Switching to a non-unanimous actor group
• Having a unanimous actor group, except for one actor who sticks to the correct response no matter what the group or subject says
• Instructing the one actor who gives the correct response come in late
• Having one actor decide to change their answer from the group’s answer to the subject’s answer

There are also many reproductions and replications of this study online. Not all of them come to the same conclusions! Read through the following texts to get a sense of how other psychologists approached this subject:

• Mori K, Arai M. No need to fake it: reproduction of the Asch experiment without confederates. Int J Psychol. 2010 Oct 1;45(5):390-7. doi: 10.1080/00207591003774485. PMID: 22044061.

Why Is The Asch Line Study Ethnocentric? And Other Criticisms

​ One big issue with the Asch line study is that the subjects were all white male college students between the ages of 17 and 25, with a mean age of 20. Since the experiment only shows results for this small and specific group of people, it alone cannot be applied to other groups such as women or older men.

Experimenter Bias in the Asch Line Study

Only choosing subjects from one demographic is a form of Experimenter Bias . Of course, researchers can use one demographic if they are specifically studying that demographic. But Asch was not just looking at young, white men. If he had expanded his research to include more participants, he may have produced different answers.

We assume Asch did not go about his study with the intention of being biased. That's the tricky thing about biases. They sneak up on us! Even the way that we share information about psychology research is the result of bias. Reporter bias is the tendency to highlight certain studies due to their results. The Asch Line Study produced fascinating results. Therefore, psychology professors, reporters, and students find it fascinating and continue to share this concept. They don't always share the full story, though.

Did you know that 95% of the participants actually defied the majority at least once during the experiment? Most textbooks don't report that. Nor did they report that the interviewees knew that they were right all along! Leaving out this key information is not Asch's fault. But it should give you, a psychology student, some pause. One thing that we should take away from this study is that we have a natural tendency to conform. This tendency also takes place when we draw conclusions from famous studies! Be critical as you learn about these famous studies and look to the source if possible.

Further Criticisms of the Asch Line Study

Does the Asch Line Study stand the test of time? Not exactly. If we look at what was happening in 1950s society, we can see why Asch got his results. Young white men in the early 1950s may have responded differently to this experiment than young white men would today. In the United States, which is where this experiment was performed, the mid-1950s was a historic turning point in terms of rejecting conformity. Youth were pushing toward a more free-thinking society. This experiment was performed right around the time that the movement was just starting to blossom, so the subjects had not grown up in the middle of this new anti-conformist movement. Had Asch performed this experiment a decade later with youth who more highly valued free-thinking, he may have come across very different results.

Another thing to note is that, at least in the United States, education has evolved with this movement of encouraging free-thinking. Teachers today tell students to question everything, and many schools reject ideas of conformity. This could once again mean that, if done again today, Asch would have found very different results with this experiment.

Another problem with this experiment is that, since subjects were not told it was a psychological experiment until after it was over, subjects may have gone through emotional and psychological pain during what they thought was just a simple ‘vision test’.

Finally, it’s good to remember that the ‘Asch Line Experiment’ is just that: an experiment where people looked at lines. This can be hard to apply to other situations because humans in group settings are rarely faced with questions that have one such obvious and clear answer, as was the case in this experiment.

Related posts:

• Solomon Asch (Psychologist Biography)
• 40+ Famous Psychologists (Images + Biographies)
• Stanley Milgram (Psychologist Biography)
• Experimenter Bias (Definition + Examples)
• The Monster Study (Summary, Results, and Ethical Issues)

Reference this article:

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# 5 Famous Social Psychology Experiments

There are countless social psychology experiments that have been influential. Here, we highlight five powerful experiments in social psychology that have shaped the development of the field.

# 1. Solomon Asch’s Experiments on Conformity

Solomon Asch carried out a series of psychological tests known as the Asch Conformity Experiments in the 1950s to find out how much social pressure from the majority group could persuade a person to conform. Asch’s experimental hypothesis was centered around how people gave in to peer pressure and whether they would disregard their own opinions in order to fit in with the group. The experiment summary of the Asch conformity studies is that several lines with different heights are presented and the participant is challenged by the confederate’s answers to either agree or disagree.

The Asch experiment's basic design comprised a subject and a cohort of accomplices. The participants were informed that they would be performing a visual perception task in which they would need to match a given line's length to one of three comparison lines.

Out of all the participants in each group, only one was truly ‘naïve’; the others were ‘confederates’ who were told to provide false answers on purpose for specific trials. Thus, the ‘naive’ participant would be challenged by the ‘confederates’ who provided wrong answers. This would essentially place the ‘naive’ participant in a challenging position to be in.

An example of the experimental procedure from Solomon Asch’s experiment on conformity in 1955. There are 6 confederates pictures and the 1 real participant, sitting in the second to last seat, who are looking at the trial stimuli at the front of the room. Image copyright: Cara Flanagan.

Throughout the trials, the confederates would intentionally select the incorrect response. The crucial query was whether the ‘naive’ participant would follow their own accurate assessment or adhere to the false majority opinion. The results and findings demonstrated that even in cases where the right response was evident, a sizable portion of the ‘naive’ participants would agree with the confederate group's inaccurate responses.

The degree of conformity was influenced by several factors:

• Group Size: Up to a certain point, conformity grew in proportion to the size of the majority. The rate of conformity did not significantly increase after a certain number of confederates.
• Unanimity: A participant was far less likely to comply if even one other person in the group provided the right response. The pressure to fit in was significantly lessened when there was a dissident voice.
• Task Difficulty: Participants found it more difficult to trust their own judgment when the task was more ambiguous or difficult, ie. when the comparison lines were more similar in size, leading to an increase in conformity.
• Response Type - Public vs. Private: When participants were required to provide their answers in public, they were more likely to comply, as opposed to when providing answers privately. Thus, one factor that clearly affected conformity was the fear of social rejection.

In summary, the Asch Conformity Experiment results emphasize the strong influence of social pressure on individual behavior and the propensity to conform even in the face of clear evidence to the contrary, have become classic studies in social psychology.

Try it out in Labvanced:

A preview of the data and Asch Conformity Experiment results recorded in Labvanced can be seen in the image below, such as the values for the presented line heights, choices, and reaction times:

View of the data collected from an online version of the Asch Conformity Experiment conducted with Labvanced.

open in new window

# 2. Bobo Doll Experiment by Albert Bandura: Social Learning Theory

Frames from a video and images shown to the children who participated in the Bobo doll experiment. Copyright owner: Albert Bandura.

Social psychologist Albert Bandura carried out a groundbreaking study in 1961 called the Bobo Doll experiment, which made a substantial contribution to our understanding of children's social learning and aggression. Bandura was curious about how children learn to pick up new behaviors by imitation and observation.

In this experiment, children interacted with a life-sized inflatable doll called Bobo while being exposed to adult models who were aggressive and non-aggressive. The conditions of the study were as follows:

• Aggressive Model Condition: Children witnessed a role model act violently against the Bobo doll. Along with hitting and kicking, the aggressive actions included verbal abuse.
• Non-Aggressive Model Condition: Children witnessed a role model who did not act aggressively toward the Bobo doll.
• Control Group: No adult role model was seen interacting with the Bandura Bobo doll.

Children were placed in a room with the Bobo doll and other toys after looking at the conditions / models. The purpose of the study was to determine whether the children would imitate the violent acts they witnessed.

The Bobo Doll study produced some fascinating results. Compared to the control group and the non-aggressive model, children who watched the aggressive model were more likely to act aggressively toward the Bobo doll. This finding aligned with Albert Bandura's social learning theory which postulates that people learn new abilities through observing and imitating the behaviors of others. The girls in the aggressive model condition also reacted more physically aggressive when the model was male, but they responded more verbally when the model was female. The observation of how frequently they punched Bobo broke the general pattern of gender-inverted effects. It was also found that boys were more likely than girls to imitate same-sex models.

Our knowledge of the roles that imitation and observational learning play in children's development of aggressive behaviors has greatly increased as a result of Bandura’s Bobo doll study.

# 3. Stanford Prison Experiment by Philip Zimbardo

Experiment participants who had the role of a ‘guard’, pictured walking in the prison yard.

Social psychologist Philip Zimbardo carried out a study at Stanford University in 1971 that is known as the Stanford Prison Experiment. The experiment's goal was to find out how people would act in a prison simulation if they were in positions of power or powerlessness.

Out of the 75 volunteers, Zimbardo and his colleagues chose 24 male college students to take part in the study. The participants were divided into two groups at random and placed in a mock prison located in the Stanford psychology building's basement: guards or inmates.

The participants were completely absorbed in their parts; guards were deindividualized by being outfitted in sunglasses and uniforms, and inmates were given numbers rather than names. The guards started acting abusively and authoritarian toward the inmates as a result of the authority that had been bestowed upon them. In response, the inmates displayed symptoms of severe stress and emotional collapse.

The experiment was supposed to last two weeks, but because of the participants' severe psychological distress, it was called off after just six days! The experiment's inherent ethical issues surfaced as a result of the situation getting worse. The study has sparked ethical questions due to issues like incomplete debriefing, intense simulation, and incompletely informed consent. Because the participants' psychological well-being was compromised, Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment has come under fire on a number of occasions.

In summary, the results for Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford experiment shed a light on how even ordinary beings can quickly adopt harmful and dangerous behaviors just because of their environment or roles. The Stanford Prison Experiment is frequently brought up in conversations concerning how circumstances can affect behavior and how people can misuse their power when they are in positions of authority.

# 4. Obedience Experiment by Stanley Milgram

The study setup of the Obedience experiment where the experimenter and student are confederates and the teacher who is the participant is instructed to administer shocks.

In the early 1960s, social psychologist Stanley Milgram carried out a number of contentious studies on submission to authority figures and the Milgram Experiment is the most well-known of these studies.

For the Obedience Experiment, three people were involved in the basic setup of the experiment: the learner (an associate of the experimenter), the teacher (a participant), and the experimenter (an authority figure). The ‘teacher’ participant was informed that the overall aim of the study was to examine the impact of punishment on learning and was directed to shock the student with progressively stronger electric shocks each time they erred on a memory task. The teacher participants were led to believe that the shocks were real (even though they weren't). Thus this setup was a mask for the real aim of the study: to assess to what extent an individual will be obedient to an authority figure, even in the case where their obedience is causing severe harm to others.

As the experiment went on, the experimenter (ie. the authority figure) would give the participant instructions to intensify the shocks while the learner, or confederate, made deliberate mistakes. Voltage levels ranging from mild to severe were labeled on the shocks, with the highest level indicating possible danger from 15 volts to 450 (danger – severe shock). Thus, the teacher could see how dangerous the high shock levels were and know they were ‘inflicting’ pain (even though the shocks were not real).

In summary, the key discovery of Milgram's Obedience to Authority experiment was that a sizable fraction of participants kept shocking the confederate even after they showed signs of distress, objected, and finally fell silent. The experiment result showed that a significant number of participants used the shock generator to its maximum capacity, demonstrating a high degree of submission to authority.

Because Stanley Milgram's Obedience study caused participants psychological distress, criticism and questions were raised pointing to its ethical issues. However, the study still managed to shed light on how common people might act dubiously or immorally when directed by an authority figure, offering insightful information about the influence of authority and social conformity.

# 5. The Hawthorne Effect by Henry A. Landsberger

A phenomenon known as the Hawthorne Effect occurs when people adjust their behavior when they become aware that they are being watched or observed by others. A set of experiments carried out at the Western Electric Hawthorne Works in Chicago in the 1920s and 1930s led to the naming of this effect. The initial purpose of the studies was to look into how worker productivity and lighting conditions relate to one another. Elton Mayo also studied in this context how work structure changes (like rest periods) influenced worked outcomes at the factory.

The data from the Hawthorne studies were later reanalyzed and interpreted in the 1950s by social scientist Henry A. Landsberger. His work, especially the 1958 paper "Hawthorne Revisited," was instrumental in making the Hawthorne Effect concept widely known.

Landsberger came to the conclusion that it was the workers' awareness of being observed/studied that actually explained the observed changes in worker productivity, rather than the lighting conditions as first believed. The workers' motivation and performance improved as a result of the researchers' interest and attention.

From then, the results from Hawthorne Effect study has gained widespread acceptance in organizational behavior psychology and social science. It emphasizes how crucial social and psychological elements are in shaping behavior, especially in settings like research or in the workplace where people may behave differently because they are aware that they are being watched or studied. The Hawthorne Effect is frequently brought up when talking about the difficulties in using human subjects in experiments and research because it can be difficult to identify and comprehend the underlying causes of observed behavior when subjects are aware they are being observed.

# Social Psychology Experiments Today

While these classic experiments helped establish the field of social psychology by studying complex topics like obedience and conformity, today there are more ethical guidelines that researchers must follow.

Furthermore, due to the digitization of the 21st century, online experiments are becoming more and more popular which allow for participants to complete tasks together using their computers or smartphones.

# References

• Asch, S. E. (1952). Group forces in the modification and distortion of judgments. In S. E. Asch, Social psychology (pp. 450–501). Prentice-Hall, Inc.
• Asch, S. E. (1953). Effects of group pressure upon the modification and distortion of judgements. Group dynamics. Asch, S. E. (1956). Studies of independence and conformity: I. A minority of one against a unanimous majority. Psychological monographs: General and applied, 70(9), 1.
• Bandura, A. (1965). Influence of models' reinforcement contingencies on the acquisition of imitative responses. Journal of personality and social psychology, 1(6), 589.
• Bandura, A., Ross, D., & Ross, S. A. (1961). Transmission of aggression through imitation of aggressive models. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 63(3), 575.
• Bandura, A., Ross, D., & Ross, S. A. (1963). Imitation of film-mediated aggressive models. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 66(1), 3.
• Bandura, A., & Walters, R. H. (1977). Social learning theory(Vol. 1). Prentice Hall: Englewood cliffs.
• Landsberger, H. A. (1958). Hawthorne Revisited: Management and the Worker, Its Critics, and Developments in Human Relations in Industry.
• Milgram, S. (1963). Behavioral study of obedience. The Journal of abnormal and social psychology, 67(4), 371.
• Milgram, S. (1965). Some conditions of obedience and disobedience to authority. Human relations, 18(1), 57-76.
• Zimbardo, P. G. (1973). On the ethics of intervention in human psychological research: With special reference to the Stanford prison experiment. Cognition, 2(2), 243–256.
• Zimbardo, P. G. (1995). The psychology of evil: A situationist perspective on recruiting good people to engage in anti-social acts. Japanese Journal of Social Psychology, 11(2), 125-133.

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Stanley Milgram’s Experiment

Stanley Milgram was one of the most influential social psychologists of the twentieth century. Born in 1933 in New York, he obtained a BA from Queen’s College, and went on to receive a PhD in psychology from Harvard. Subsequently, Milgram held faculty positions in psychology at Yale University and the City University of New York until his untimely death in 1984. Although Milgram never held a formal appointment in sociology, his work was centrally focused on the social psychological aspects of social structure.

In a historic coincidence, in 1961, just as Milgram was about to begin work on his famous obedience experiments, the world witnessed the trial of Adolf Otto Eichmann, a high ranking Nazi official who was in charge of organizing the transport of millions of Jews to the death camps. To many, Eichmann appeared not at all to be the fervent anti Semite that many had suspected him to be; rather, his main defense was that he was only ‘‘following orders’’ as an administrator. To the political theorist Hannah Arendt, Eichmann’s case illustrated the ‘‘banality of evil,’’ in which personal malice appeared to matter less than the desire of individuals to fulfill their roles in the larger context of a bureaucracy. Milgram’s research is arguably the most striking example to illustrate this dynamic.

Milgram planned and conducted his obedience experiments between 1960 and 1963 at Yale University. In order to be able to study obedience to authority, he put unsuspecting research participants in a novel situation, which he staged in the laboratory. With the help of actors and props, Milgram set up an experimental ruse that was so real that hardly any of his research participants suspected that, in reality, nothing was what it pretended to be.

For this initial study, using newspaper ads promising $4.50 for participation in a psychological study, Milgram recruited men aged 20 to 50, ranging from elementary school drop outs to PhDs. Each research participant arrived in the lab along with another man, white and roughly 30 years of age, whom they thought to be another research participant. In reality, this person was a confederate, that is, an actor in cahoots with the experimenter. The experimenter explained that both men were about to take part in a study that explored the effect of punishment on memory. One man would assume the role of a ‘‘teacher’’ who would read a series of word pairings (e.g., nice day, blue box), which the other (‘‘the learner’’) was supposed to memorize. Subsequently, the teacher would read the first word of the pair with the learner having to select the correct second word from a list. Every mistake by the learner would be punished with an electric shock. It was further made clear that, although the shocks would be painful, they would not do any permanent harm.

Following this explanation, the experimenter assigned both men to the roles. Because the procedure was rigged, the unsuspecting research participant always was assigned to the role of teacher. As first order of business, the learner was seated in an armchair in an adjoining room such that he would be separated by a wall from the teacher, but would other wise be able to hear him from the main room. Electrodes were affixed to the learner’s arms, who was subsequently strapped to the chair apparently to make sure that improper movements would not endanger the success of the experiment.

In the main room, the teacher was told that he would have to apply electric shocks every time the learner made a mistake. For this purpose, the learner was seated in front of an electric generator with various dials. The experimenter instructed the teacher to steadily increase the voltage of the shock each time the learner made a new mistake. The shock generator showed a row of levers ranging from 15 volts on the left to 450 volts on the right, with each lever in between delivering a shock 15 volts higher than its neighbor on the left. Milgram labeled the voltage level, left to right, from ‘‘Slight Shock’’ to ‘‘Danger: Severe Shock,’’ with the last two switches being marked ‘‘XXX.’’ The teacher was told that he simply should work his way from the left to the right without using any lever twice. To give the teacher an idea of the electric current he would deliver to the learner, he received a sample shock of 45 volts, which most research participants found surprisingly painful. However, despite its appearance, in reality the generator never emitted any electric shocks. It was merely a device that allowed Milgram to examine how far the teacher would go in harming another person based on the experimenter’s say so.

As learning trials started, the teacher applied electric shocks to the learner. The learner’s responses were scripted such that he apparently made many mistakes, requiring the teacher to increase shock levels by 15 volts with every new mistake. As the strength of electric shocks increased, occasional grunts and moans of pain were heard from the learner. At 120 volts the learner started complaining about the pain. At 150 volts, the learner demanded to be released on account of a heart condition, and the protest continued until the shocks reached 300 volts and the learner started pounding on the wall. At 315 volts the learner stopped responding altogether.

As the complaints by the learner started, the teacher would often turn to the experimenter, who was seated at a nearby desk, wondering whether and how to proceed. The experimenter, instead of terminating the experiment, replied with a scripted succession of prods:

• Prod 1: ‘‘Please continue.’’
• Prod 2: ‘‘The experiment requires that you continue.’’
• Prod 3: ‘‘It is absolutely necessary to continue.’’
• Prod 4: ‘‘You have no other choice: you must go on.’’

These prods were successful in coaxing many teachers into continuing to apply electric shocks even when the learner no longer responded to the word memory questions. Indeed, in the first of Milgram’s experiments, a stunning 65 percent of all participants continued all the way to 450 volts, and not a single participant refused to continue the shocks before they reached the 300 volt level! The high levels of compliance illustrate the powerful effect of the social structure that participants had entered. By accepting the role of teacher in the experiment in exchange for the payment of a nominal fee, participants had agreed to accept the authority of the experimenter and carry out his instructions. In other words, just as Milgram suspected, the social forces of hierarchy and obedience could push normal and well adjusted individuals into harming others.

The overall level of obedience, however, does not reveal the tremendous amount of stress that all teachers experienced. Because the situation was extremely realistic, teachers were agonizing over whether or not to continue the electric shocks. Should they care for the well being of the obviously imperiled learners and even put their life in danger? Or should they abide by a legitimate authority figure, who presented his instructions crisply and confidently? Participants typically sought to resolve this conflict by seeking assurances that the experimenter, and not themselves, would accept full responsibility for their actions. Once they felt assured, they typically continued to apply shocks that would have likely electrocuted the learner.

Milgram expanded his initial research into a series of 19 experiments in which he carefully examined the conditions under which obedience would occur. For instance, the teacher’s proximity to the learner was an important factor in lowering obedience, that is, the proportion of people willing to deliver the full 450 volts. When the teacher was in the same room with the learner, obedience dropped to 40 percent, and when the teacher was required to touch the learner and apply physical force to deliver the electric shock, obedience dropped to 30 percent.

Milgram further suspected that the social status of the experimenter, presumably a serious Yale University researcher in a white lab coat, would have important implications for obedience. Indeed, when there was no obvious connection with Yale, and the above experiment was repeated in a run down office building in Bridgeport, Connecticut, obedience dropped to 48 percent. Indeed, when not the white coated experimenter but another confederate encouraged the teacher to continue the shocks, all participants terminated the experiment as soon as the confederate complained. Milgram concluded that ‘‘a substantial proportion of people do what they are told to do, irrespective of the content of the act and with out limitations of conscience, so long as they perceive that the command comes from a legitimate authority’’ (1965). However, additional studies highlighted that obedience is in part contingent on surveillance. When the experimenter transmitted his orders not in person but via telephone, obedience levels dropped to 20 percent, with many participants only pretending to apply higher and higher electric shocks.

Since its initial publication in 1963, Mil gram’s research has drawn a lot of criticism, mainly on ethical grounds. First, it was alleged that it was unethical to deceive participants to the extent that occurred in these studies. It is important to note that all participants were fully debriefed on the deception, and most did not seem to mind and were relieved to find out that they had not shocked the learner. The second ethical criticism is, however, much more serious. As alluded to earlier, Milgram exposed his participants to tremendous levels of stress. Milgram, anticipating this criticism, inter viewed participants after the experiment and followed up several weeks later. The over whelming majority of his participants commented that they enjoyed being in the experiment, and only a small minority experienced regret. Even though personally Milgram rejected allegations of having mistreated his participants, his own work suggests that he may have gone too far: ‘‘Subjects were observed to sweat, tremble, bite their lips, groan, and dig their fingernails into their flesh . . . A mature and initially poised businessman entered the laboratory smiling and confident. Within 20 minutes, he was reduced to a twitching, stuttering wreck who was rapidly approaching a point of nervous collapse’’ (1963: 375). Today, Milgram’s obedience studies are generally considered unethical and would not pass muster with regard to contemporary regulations protecting the well being of research participants. Ironically, partly because Milgram’s studies illustrated the power of hierarchical social relationships, contemporary researchers are at great pains to avoid coercion and allow participants to terminate their participation in any research study at any time without penalty.

Another type of criticism of the obedience studies has questioned their generality and charged that their usefulness in explaining real world events is limited. Indeed, Milgram conducted his research when trust in authorities was higher than it is nowadays. However, Milgram’s studies have withstood this criticism. Reviews of research conducted using Milgram’s paradigm have generally found obedience levels to be at roughly 60 percent (see, e.g., Blass 2000). In one of his studies Milgram further documented that there was no apparent difference in the responses of women and men. More recent research using more ethically acceptable methods further testifies to the power of obedience in shaping human action (Blass 2000).

Milgram offers an important approach to explaining the Holocaust by emphasizing the bureaucratic nature of evil, which relegated individuals to executioners of orders issued by a legitimate authority. Sociologists have extended this analysis and provided compelling accounts of obedience as root causes of many horrific crimes, ranging from the My Lai massacre to Watergate (Hamilton & Kelman 1989). How ever, it is arguably somewhat unclear to what extent Milgram’s findings can help explain the occurrence of the Holocaust itself. Whereas obedience kept the machinery of death running with frightening efficiency, historians often caution against ignoring the malice and sadism that many of Hitler’s executioners brought to the task (see Blass 2004).

Milgram’s dramatic experiments have left a lasting impression beyond the social sciences. They are the topic of various movies, including the 1975 TV film The Tenth Level starring William Shatner. Further, the 37 percent of participants who did not obey were memorialized in a 1986 song by the rock musician Peter Gabriel titled ‘‘We Do What We’re Told (Milgram’s 37).’’

References:

• Blass, T. (Ed.) (2000) Obedience to Authority: Current Perspectives on the Milgram Paradigm. Erlbaum, Mahwah, NJ.
• Blass, T. (2004) The Man Who Shocked the World: The Life and Legacy of Stanley Milgram. Basic Books, New York.
• Hamilton, V. L. & Kelman, H. (1989) Crimes of Obedience: Toward a Social Psychology of Authority and Responsibility. Yale University Press, New Haven.
• Milgram, S. (1963) Behavioral Study of Obedience. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 69: 371-8.
• Milgram, S. (1965) Some Conditions of Obedience and Disobedience to Authority. Human Relations 18: 57-76.
• Milgram, S. (1974) Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. Harper & Row, New York.

The Secrets Behind Psychology’s Most Famous Experiment

What you didn't know about the milgram experiments..

Posted January 22, 2013 | Reviewed by Ekua Hagan

If you were asked to name the most famous psychology investigation ever to be conducted, the chances are good that you’d come up with the “obedience to authority” experiment as your answer. From this study, you learned that ordinary people are capable of inflicting pain on their fellow humans if someone gives them orders to do so. Yet, in this fascinating new book, Behind the Shock Machine , we learn that the study, if not the conclusion, is highly flawed.

Even if you never took introductory psychology or even high school psychology, you must certainly have heard at some point in your life about this well-known investigation. A Yale psychologist brought ordinary citizens into his lab and instructed them to act as teachers, administering what they believed to be painful electric shocks when the “learner” failed at a simple memory task. In reality, of course, the situation was all a setup. The electric shock machine was a fake, the learner was hired by the experimenter to pretend to make the punishment -deserving mistakes, and the person acting as the experimenter was an actor hired by the psychologist. The psychologist, Stanley Milgram, was motivated by his reading of actions of Nazi concentration camp guards to find out if the tendency to obey authority (“I was only following orders”) was a general human trait or some specific feature of the German psyche.

Psychology students have, for the past 40 years or so, memorized the statistic that 65% of all participants in the Milgram experiments not only administered what they thought was an electric shock but went “all the way,” letting loose the maximum and potentially lethal dose in the face of the learner’s repeated mistakes. They’ve also learned that, as a result of much public outcry following the study’s publication, the American Psychological Association has enacted a set of stringent ethical guidelines that require research participants to be informed of a study’s purposes ahead of time, to be allowed to withdraw without penalty during the experiment if they don’t want to continue, and to receive a complete debriefing after the study ends explaining exactly what was done, and why.

Even though the Milgram study seemed to provide compelling evidence for the human tendency to exert cruel punishment while under orders, there were occasional reports questioning the validity of its findings. Many of these concerns were addressed by a replication study conducted by Santa Clara University psychologist Jerry Burger .

This study, the subject of a 2007 ABC 20-20 documentary, and published in 2009 in the prestigious journal American Psychologist, supported the finding that the majority of participants were willing to punish the learner by administering what they thought was a painful electric shock. However, the Burger replication differed from Milgram’s study in the important way that the maximum level of shock that “teachers” could administer was 150 volts, or 1/3 the amount used as the cutoff in the original studies.

For many in the psychological community, the Burger replication seemed to put to rest questions about whether the Milgram findings described something fundamental to the human psyche. We were safe again to teach our students and write our own scientific papers, confident that the general tendency to conform is something real in our social attitudes and behavior. The publication by Australian author and journalist Gina Perry of Behind the Shock Machine (2012) shatters that conclusion.

This 395-page book with its 21 pages of references documents in extensive detail the author’s journey to understand the purpose, findings, and interpretations of all 24 conditions of what we now know as “the” Milgram experiment. Perry spent months tracking down former participants, Milgram students, and relatives of the men who served as the experimenter and learners. In addition, she pored through volumes of archives, papers, and notes that up until now have received very little public (if not professional) attention. Perry provides enough of her personal observations to give the reader a sense of who she is and how the experience of writing the book affected her. However, her focus remains unswervingly on the science behind the study and the man behind the science. It’s a complex mixture of compelling drama, unexpected revelations, and just plain old good storytelling.

I’ve been reading this book over the past few months, thanks to Ms. Perry’s kindly sending me a copy for my review. At the time, the book was not available in the U.S., but luckily it now is . While reading it, I wondered how I could ever do it justice. I’ve decided to focus on these four themes:

1. Findings Not Generally Known

As I stated earlier, nearly everyone who teaches and/or learns about the Milgram experiments comes away with the figure “65%.” This was the percentage of teachers who, in one of the study’s conditions, administered the maximum amount of shock possible. It’s fairly well known, though, that many participants refused to go to that level, particularly in the conditions when the study participants felt less pressured to conform. For example, if the learner and the teacher were in the same room, fewer teachers moved up the shock scale to its maximum voltage. What is less well broadcasted is the fact that many participants sensed that the learner wasn’t really receiving any shock. The psychological term for this is “participant expectations.”

All human participants go into psychology experiments with a certain amount of skepticism about what the experimenter is up to, so as a result, their behavior doesn’t reflect what they would actually do in the real world. Many of Milgram’s participants believed it to be impossible that the prestigious Yale University experimenter would allow real harm to be inflicted on an experimental subject. Although Milgram claimed that 75% of his participants thought they were administering painful shocks, Perry’s re-analysis of the data showed that “It’s more truthful to say that only half of the people who undertook the experiment fully believed it was real, and of those, two-thirds disobeyed the experimenter” (p. 163). Furthermore, she argues that many of those who did administer the maximum amount of shock did so because they were confident the shock wasn’t real or that the experiment was an elaborate ruse.

Perry spoke to one of Milgram’s former research assistants whose own unpublished analysis led him to conclude that “in 18 of 23 conditions, those who wrote that they fully believed the learner was receiving painful shocks gave lower levels of shock than those who said they thought the learner was faking it” (p. 164).

2. Ethical Issues

Soon after completing his experiments, Milgram was investigated by the American Psychological Association for ethical violations in the treatment of his participants, primarily due to the lack of proper attention given to the phase of the experiment called “debriefing.” At the time, Milgram argued that he had “de-hoaxed” his participants, meaning that he had told them that the experiment had all been a “hoax.” However, as Perry reveals, Milgram didn’t completely reveal the purpose of the study to his participants nor did he comfort their ethical qualms about having supposedly inflicted pain on a fellow human. Not only that, but the authority figure in the room, the actor hired to portray the experimenter, didn’t offer his participants an opportunity to opt-out of the study. This is now a mandatory requirement of all human research.

If participants want to discontinue their involvement in the study, they must be allowed to do so without any penalty or question. Yet, for Milgram, participants were told that they had no choice but to continue. The transcripts that Perry examined showed numerous dialogues in which the experimenter pushed the participant well beyond the point that the participant was ready to walk out, even without receiving compensation. As stated by one participant: “The experiment is not going to require me to go on. You take the money back.” The experimenter told this participant that “You have no other choice but to continue” (p. 196).

The most chilling revelation of the book to me was what happened in “Condition 24.” This was the one that most people don’t know about when the teacher and learner were either related to each other, neighbors, or friends. Of all the conditions, this one produced the least amount of obedience. However, those who went even partway left with grave doubts about themselves and their personal ethics . Milgram stopped short of devising a condition in which wives and husbands would be asked to shock each other. However, he kept Condition 24 a secret. Perry’s theory was that “Milgram might have kept it secret because he realized that what he’d asked subjects to do in condition 24 would be difficult to defend.” In addition, the data contradicted the results he hoped to demonstrate in the study as a whole: “When people believed someone was being hurt—and it was someone close to them—they refused to continue” (p. 202). To include their data would have lowered the estimated 65% obedience even further than was already apparent in many of the study’s variations, further challenging the study's validity.

3. Lack of Theory

As disturbing as Milgram’s experiments were in terms of ethics, you might believe that they could be justified on the basis of the underlying theory; namely, the value of showing that people would obey an authority figure, particularly if that authority figure wielded “authority” in the lab. However, according to Perry, Milgram embarked on the study without making specific predictions ahead of time.

In the chapter “In Search of a Theory,” Perry tells us that Milgram submitted his results to scientific journals only to be met by the criticism that he had “no clear theory… and therefore the psychological processes leading up to the obedient act remain a mystery” (p. 244). If he was going to get the study published, he needed to come up with a theory. According to Perry, Milgram found his inspiration in such sources as the instructions he read while on an airplane in which passengers are told how to respond to an emergency, the words of Adolf Eichmann while he was on trial for his actions during the Holocaust, and a book that he had seen in a bookstore called “How to Train Your Dog to Obey.” Although the article eventually was accepted for publication, Milgram continued to experience problems receiving funding due to the theory deficit: “Without a theory, and without an explanation of why people behaved as they did, the research seemed to shed little light on obedience to authority” (p. 247).

4. Milgram the Man

Perry’s overall portrayal of Milgram suggests that this was an individual driven by the pettiest of petty concerns that often plague academics. He became enraged when his colleagues and his participants didn’t understand or appreciate what he was trying to do. The product of a tradition in social psychology that set up elaborate unnatural scenarios in which to observe human behavior, Milgram sought to out-do his mentors and colleagues and make a permanent name for himself by concocting an experiment that would go further than all the others that preceded it. He is described as vengeful and elitist, critical of his female and working-class participants.

When Milgram's work was challenged in print by psychologist Diana Baumrind, he eventually disregarded her comments as a “tempest in a teapot,” despite the fact that the objections she raised were seminal in leading to a revised code of ethics by the American Psychological Association. Similarly, he became infuriated by a playwright who, some years after the study was published, painted a less than complimentary portrait of him. Despite all this, Milgram seemed fixated on gaining as much publicity as possible from this research, keeping press reports from his articles at bay until he was able to publish his book.

Social psychology experiments are often based on a premise of deception , including sometimes elaborate schemes to see how participants react to unusual conditions, including the pressure to conform. Philip Zimbardo, the man behind the Stanford Prison experiment , created a scenario perhaps even more extreme and disturbing than Milgram’s, pitting college students against each other as fake prisoners and guards. Unlike Milgram, however, Zimbardo realized it was time to call the whole thing off, and his experiment was discontinued when the behavior of his participants got out of hand.

It was also surprising to me to learn that Milgram was denied tenure at Harvard University because we so often associate him with his work at Yale. In fact, he spent the final years of his career at the City University of New York. According to one of his former students, Fordham University psychologist Harold Takooshian , while at CUNY, Milgram engaged in teaching methods that pushed the envelope in ways similar to his research. For example, Takooshian reports that at the end of the semester, Milgram asked the students in his graduate seminar to grade each other’s performance, and then to turn in their grades. Much to their chagrin, Milgram then read out the grades that the students each gave each other. Imagine how this experience affected the students as individuals, not to mention as a cohort of classmates. Takooshian also reports that Milgram would occasionally burst out into song or spontaneously invent other types of in-class experiments that left the students in a state of bewilderment about their professor: “The only predictable thing about Milgram was his unpredictability” (p. 278).

Perry began her journey to understand the Milgram experiments because, like many psychology students, she was fascinated with the findings and what they implied about human nature. By the end, she realized how important it was to “question the stories we’ve been told” (p. 12).

While reading the book, I felt that I was taking my own journey of psychological discovery. Each page contained a new revelation that led me to question what I thought I knew not only about Milgram, but the field of social psychology in general. You don’t have to be a psych history buff to enjoy this book, but even if you casually follow psych news, you’ll almost certainly question the stories you’ve been told as well.

Perry’s in-depth analysis makes us think about we are so fascinated with this study, so many years after its completion. Television documentaries, works of fiction, and reality shows based on the premise of the Milgram experiments continue to draw millions of viewers. However, once we start to separate the fiction from the reality perhaps, like Perry, we will be able to trade our “admiration of Milgram for a better view of people” (p. 388).

Copyright Susan Krauss Whitbourne, Ph.D. 201

Burger, J. M. (2009). Replicating Milgram: Would people still obey today? American Psychologist, 64, 1-11.

Perry, G. (2012). Behind the shock machine. Melbourne, Australia: Scribe.

Susan Krauss Whitbourne, Ph.D. , is a Professor Emerita of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her latest book is The Search for Fulfillment.

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Social Psychology Research Topics

Choosing topics for social psychology research papers or projects for class can be challenging. It is a broad and fascinating field, which can make it challenging to figure out what you want to investigate in your research.

Social psychology explores how individual thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are affected by social influences. It explores how each person's behavior is affected by their social environment.

This article explores a few different social psychology topics and research questions you might want to study in greater depth. It covers how to start your search for a topic as well as specific ideas you might choose to explore.

How to Find a Social Psychology Research Topic

As you begin your search, think about the questions that you have. What topics interest you? Following your own interests and curiosities can often inspire great research questions.

Choose a Sub-Topic

Social psychologists are interested in all aspects of social behavior. Some of the main areas of interest within the field include social cognition, social influence, and social relationships investigating subtopics such as conformity, groupthink, attitude formation, obedience, prejudice, and so on.

• Social cognition : How do we process and use information about social experiences? What kinds of biases influence how we engage with other people?
• Social influence: What are the key social factors that influence our attitudes and behavior? What are group dynamics and how do we understand patterns of behavior in groups?
• Social relationships : What are the different types of social relationships? How do they develop and change over time?

To help ensure that you select a topic that is specific enough, it can be helpful to start by confining your search to one of these main areas.

Browse Through Past Research

After narrowing down your choices, consider what questions you might have. Are there questions that haven't been fully answered by previous studies? At this point, it can be helpful to spend some time browsing through journal articles or books to see some examples of past findings and identify gaps in the literature.

You can also find inspiration and learn more about a topic by searching for keywords related to your topic in psychological databases such as PsycINFO or browsing through some professional psychology journals.

Narrow Down Your Specific Topic

Once you have a general topic, you'll need to narrow down your research. The goal is to choose a research question that is specific, measurable, and testable. Let's say you want to study conformity; An example of a good research question might be, “Are people more likely to conform when they are in a small group or a large group?” In this case, the specific topic of your paper would be how group size influences social conformity .

Review the Literature on Your Chosen Topic

After choosing a specific social psychology topic to research, the next step is to do a literature review. A literature review involves reading through the existing research findings related to a specific topic.

You are likely to encounter a great deal of information on your topic, which can seem overwhelming at times. You may find it helpful to start by reading review articles or meta-analysis studies. These are summaries of previous research on your topic or studies that incorporate a large pool of past research on the topic.

Talk to Your Instructor

Even if you are really excited to dive right in and start working on your project, there are some important preliminary steps you need to take.

Before you decide to tackle a project for your social psychology class, you should always clear your idea with your instructor. This initial step can save you a lot of time and hassle later on.

Your instructor can offer clear feedback on things you should and should not do while conducting your research and might be able to offer some helpful tips. Also, if you plan to implement your own social experiment, your school might require you to present to and gain permission from an institutional review board.

Thinking about the questions you have about social psychology can be a great way to discover topics for your own research. Once you have a general idea, explore the literature and refine your research question to make sure it is specific enough.

Examples of Social Psychology Research Topics

The following are some specific examples of different subjects you might want to investigate further as part of a social psychology research paper, experiment, or project:

Implicit Attitudes

How do implicit attitudes influence how people respond to others? This can involve exploring how people's attitudes towards different groups of people (e.g., men, women, ethnic minorities) influence their interactions with those groups. For example, one study found that 75% of people perceive men to be more intelligent than women .

In your own project, you might explore how implicit attitudes impact perceptions of qualities such as kindness, intelligence, leadership skills, or attractiveness.

Prosocial Behavior

You might also choose to focus on prosocial behavior in your research. This can involve investigating the reasons why people help others. Some questions you could explore further include:

• What motivates people to help others?
• When are people most likely to help others?
• How does helping others cause people to feel?
• What are the benefits of helping other people?

How do people change their attitudes in response to persuasion? What are the different techniques that can be used to persuade someone? What factors make some people more susceptible to persuasion than others?

One way to investigate this could be through collecting a wide variety of print advertisements and analyzing how​ persuasion is used. What types of cognitive and affective techniques are utilized? Do certain types of advertisements tend to use specific kinds of persuasive techniques ?

Another area of social psychology that you might research is aggression and violence. This can involve exploring the factors that lead to aggression and violence and the consequences of these behaviors. Some questions you might explore further include:

• When is violence most likely to occur?
• What factors influence violent behavior?
• Do traumatic experiences in childhood lead to more aggressive behavior in adulthood?
• Does viewing violent media content contribute to increased aggressive behavior in real life?

Prejudice and discrimination are areas that present a range of research opportunities. This can involve studying the different forms that prejudice takes (e.g., sexism, racism, ageism ), as well as the psychological effects of prejudice and discrimination. You might also want to investigate topics related to how prejudices form or strategies that can be used to reduce such discrimination.

Nonverbal Behavior

How do people respond when nonverbal communication does not match up to verbal behavior (for example, saying you feel great when your facial expressions and tone of voice indicate otherwise). Which signal do people respond to most strongly?

How good are people at detecting lies ? Have participants tell a group of people about themselves, but make sure some of the things are true while others are not. Ask members of the group which statements they thought were true and which they thought were false.

Social Norms

How do people react when social norms are violated? This might involve acting in a way that is outside the norm in a particular situation or enlisting friends to act out the behaviors while you observe.

Some examples that you might try include wearing unusual clothing, applauding inappropriately at the end of a class lecture, cutting in line in front of other people, or some other mildly inappropriate behavior. Keep track of your own thoughts as you perform the experiment and observe how people around you respond.

Online Social Behavior

Does online social networking make people more or less likely to interact with people in face-to-face or other offline settings? To investigate this further, you could create a questionnaire to assess how often people participate in social networking versus how much time they spend interacting with their friends in real-world settings.

Social Perception

How does our appearance impact how people respond to us? Ask some friends to help you by having two people dress up in dramatically different ways, one in a professional manner and one in a less conventional manner. Have each person engage in a particular action, then observe how they are treated and how other people's responses differ.

Social psychologists have found that attractiveness can produce what is known as a halo effect . Essentially, we tend to assume that people who are physically attractive are also friendly, intelligent, pleasant, and likable.

To investigate this topic, you could set up an experiment where you have participants look at photographs of people of varying degrees of physical attractiveness, and then ask them to rate each person based on a variety of traits, including social competence, kindness, intellect, and overall likability.

Think about how this might affect a variety of social situations, including how employees are selected or how jurors in a criminal case might respond.

Social psychology is a broad field, so there are many different subtopics you might choose to explore in your research. Implicit attitudes, prosocial behavior, aggression, prejudice, and social perception are just a few areas you might want to consider.

A Word From Verywell

Social psychology topics can provide a great deal of inspiration for further research, whether you are writing a research paper or conducting your own experiment. In addition to some of the social psychology topics above, you can also draw inspiration from your own curiosity about social behavior or examine social issues that you see taking place in the world around you. 

American Psychological Association.  Frequently asked questions about institutional review boards .

Storage D, Charlesworth TES, Banaji M, Cimpian A.  Adults and children implicitly associate brilliance with men more than women .  J Exp Soc Psychol . 2012;90:104020. doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2020.104020

Talamas SN, Mavor KI, Perrett DI. Blinded by beauty: Attractiveness bias and accurate perceptions of academic performance . PLoS ONE . 2016;11(2):e0148284. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0148284

By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

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5 ground-breaking social psychology experiments.

Home » Blog » Psychology » 5 Ground-Breaking Social Psychology Experiments

Psychologists often use experiments to answer humanity’s most difficult questions. After the atrocities of Nazi Germany in World War II, many wondered how people could follow the orders to perform such horrific actions.

Yale researcher Stanley Milgram devised an experiment around the following question: “Could it be that [Adolf] Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?”

[Adolf Eichmann was one of the major organizers of the Holocaust.]

He found that other populations would follow orders to harm people despite the orders conflicting with their personal morals. By studying this social phenomenon, scientists were able to surmise that atrocities committed during the war were not endemic to German soldiers, as initially believed.

Throughout history, other psychology experiments have tried to address specific issues to foster better understanding of human behavior.

Here is a look at five notable experiments from the second half of the 20th century to present day:

Bobo Doll Experiment

Conducted in 1961 by scientist Albert Bandura, this experiment sought to prove human behavior was learned through social imitation, rather than inherited genetically. Bandura hypothesized children would mimic an adult’s behavior if they trusted the adult. He chose to use a Bobo doll, a roughly 5-foot-tall inflatable toy weighted at the bottom that bounces back to standing upright after being struck.

One group of children did not witness any adult interaction with the toy. Another group watched an adult behave aggressively. Bandura’s experiment found that children exposed to aggression were more likely to imitate the behavior and boys were three times more likely to mimic violence than girls.

Bystander Effect

In the 1960s, John Darley and Bibb Latané sought to measure how much time elapsed before bystanders reacted and either intervened or ignored the need for help when an emergency situation involving a group or an individual was staged. The researchers were inspired by the murder of Kitty Genovese in 1964, which became infamous after The New York Times reported that there were 38 witnesses to her murder and none of them tried to help.

Although the Kitty Genovese phenomenon was debunked later by the Times itself , it caused Darley and Latané’s discovery of The Bystander Effect. They demonstrated that a larger number of bystanders diminished the chances any of them would offer help. The Bystander Effect has continued to be replicated for years.

Halo Effect

The “halo effect” is a famous social psychology finding which suggests global or group evaluations about an individual can influence judgments about a specific trait. For example, a likable person is often perceived to be intelligent. The term, originally coined by psychology Edward Thorndike, is a type of confirmation bias.

In the 1970s, researchers Richard Nisbett and Timothy DeCamp Wilson performed an experiment to demonstrate this by showing two groups of students the same lecture, but changing the demeanor of the lecturer from one group to the next. When the lecturer appeared friendly, students responded more favorably than the group who saw the lecturer who appeared cold and distant.

The Chameleon Effect

Also referred to as “unintentional mirroring,” the Chameleon Effect is believed to be a natural tendency for one person to imitate another person based on how well they get along without any realization that it’s happening. Tanya Chartrand and John Bargh from New York University studied this phenomenon in the 1990s. They interviewed participants individually while affecting different mannerisms throughout the talk to gauge the bond that developed.

During two follow-up talks, the scientists mimicked the posture and other mannerisms of some test subjects. The participants mimicked the scientists more in the first experiment and found the scientists more likable when they mimicked their own mannerisms in the follow-ups. Those participants who weren’t mimicked had a more neutral opinion of the scientists.

The Volkswagen Fun Theory

In 2009, advertising agency DDB Stockholm created an initiative on behalf of car manufacturer Volkswagen. The company came up with the “ Fun Theory ,” conducting three experiments to see whether people might choose to change behavior and do something based on how much fun it was to do, such as recycling, throwing away trash or taking stairs versus an escalator.

In one instance, a set of stairs next to an escalator was decorated to look like piano keys with accompanying notes for each step a person took while traversing the stairs. The experiment found 66% more people chose the stairs than usual. In another, a trash bin with sound effects when people deposited litter collected more trash than nearby bins.

Though these were part of an advertising campaign rather than a scientific experiment, the results indicate people may be more inclined to perform a task such as taking stairs instead of an escalator if it appears to be fun.

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• Jan 25, 2020

8 Famous & Interesting Social Psychology Experiments

SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY

Do people really stop to appreciate the beauty of the world? How can society encourage people to engage in healthy behaviors? Is there anything that can be done to bring peace to rival groups? Social psychologists have been tackling questions like these for decades, and some of the results of their experiments just might surprise you.

1 Robbers Cave Experiment Why do conflicts tend to occur between different groups? According to psychologist Muzafer Sherif, intergroup conflicts tend to arise from competition for resources, stereotypes, and prejudices. In a controversial experiment, the researchers placed 22 boys between the ages of 11 and 12 in two groups at a camp in the Robbers Cave Park in Oklahoma. The boys were separated into two groups and spent the first week of the experiment bonding with their other group members. It wasn't until the second phase of the experiment that the children learned that there was another group, at which point the experimenters placed the two groups in direct competition with each other. This led to considerable discord, as the boys clearly favored their own group members while they disparaged the members of the other group. In the final phase, the researchers staged tasks that required the two groups to work together. These shared tasks helped the boys get to know members of the other group and eventually led to a truce between the rivals. Why Do We Try so Hard to Be Like Other People and Conform?

2 The 'Violinist in the Metro' Experiment In 2007, acclaimed violinist Josh Bell posed as a street musician at a busy Washington, D.C. subway station. Bell had just sold out a concert with an average ticket price of $100 each. He is one of the most renowned musicians in the world and was playing on a handcrafted violin worth more than $3.5 million. Yet most people scurried on their way without stopping to listen to the music. When children would occasionally stop to listen, their parents would grab them and quickly usher them on their way. The experiment raised some interesting questions about how we not only value beauty but whether we truly stop to appreciate the remarkable works of beauty that are around us.

3 The Piano Stairs Experiment How can you get people to change their daily behavior and make healthier choices? In one social experiment sponsored by Volkswagen as part of their Fun Theory initiative, making even the most mundane activities fun can inspire people to change their behavior. In the experiment, a set of stairs was transformed into a giant working keyboard. Right next to the stairs was an escalator, so people were able to choose between taking the stairs or taking the escalator. The results revealed that 66 percent more people took the stairs instead of the escalator. Adding an element of fun can inspire people to change their behavior and choose the healthier alternative.

4 The Marshmallow Test Experiment During the late 1960s and early 1970s, a psychologist named Walter Mischel led a series of experiments on delayed gratification. Mischel was interested in learning whether the ability to delay gratification might be a predictor of future life success. In the experiments, children between the ages of 4 and 6 were placed in a room with a treat (often a marshmallow or cookie). Before leaving the room, the experimenter told each child that they would receive a second treat if the first treat was still on the table after 15 minutes. Follow-up studies conducted years later found that the children who were able to delay gratification did better in a variety of areas, including academically. Those who had been able to wait the 15 minutes for the second treat tended to have higher SAT scores and higher educational levels. The results suggest that this ability to wait for gratification is not only an essential skill for success but also something that forms early on and lasts throughout life.

5 The Smoky Room Experiment If you saw someone in trouble, do you think you would try to help? Psychologists have found that the answer to this question is highly dependent on the number of other people present. We are much more likely to help when we are the only witness but much less likely to lend a hand when we are part of a crowd. The phenomenon came to the public's attention after the gruesome murder of a young woman named Kitty Genovese. While multiple people may have witnessed her attack, no one called for help until it was much too late. This behavior was identified as an example of the bystander effect, or the failure of people to take action when there are other people present. How Diffusion of Responsibility Affects the Way We Act in Groups In one classic experiment, researchers had participants sit in a room to fill out questionnaires. Suddenly, the room began to fill with smoke. In some cases the participant was alone, in some there were three unsuspecting participants in the room, and in the final condition, there was one participant and two confederates. In the situation involving the two confederates who were in on the experiment, these actors ignored the smoke and went on filling out their questionnaires. When the participants were alone, about three-quarters of the participants left the room calmly to report the smoke to the researchers. In the condition with three real participants, only a little under 40 percent reported the smoke. In the final condition where the two confederates ignored the smoke, a mere 10 percent of participants left to report the smoke. The experiment is a great example of how much people rely on the responses of others to guide their actions. When something is happening, but no one seems to be responding, people tend to take their cues from the group and assume that a response is not required.

6 Carlsberg Social Experiment Have you ever felt like people have judged you unfairly based on your appearance? Or have you ever gotten the wrong first impression of someone based on how they looked? Unfortunately, people are all too quick to base their decisions on snap judgments made when they first meet people. These impressions based on what's on the outside sometimes cause people to overlook the characteristics and qualities that lie on the inside. In one rather amusing social experiment, which actually started out as an advertisement, unsuspecting couples walked into a crowded movie theater. All but two of the 150 seats were already full. The twist is that the 148 already-filled seats were taken by a bunch of rather rugged and scary-looking male bikers. What would you do in this situation? Would you take one of the available seats and enjoy the movie, or would you feel intimidated and leave? In the informal experiment, not all of the couples ended up taking a seat, but those who eventually did were rewarded with cheers from the crowd and a round of free Carlsberg beers. The exercise served as a great example of why people shouldn't always judge a book by its cover.

7 Halo Effect Experiment In an experiment described in a paper published in 1920, psychologist Edward Thorndike asked commanding officers in the military to give ratings of various characteristics of their subordinates. Thorndike was interested in learning how impressions of one quality, such as intelligence, bled over onto perceptions of other personal characteristics, such as leadership, loyalty, and honesty. Thorndike discovered that when people hold a good impression of one characteristic, those good feelings tend to affect perceptions of other qualities. For example, thinking someone is attractive can create a halo effect that leads people also to believe that a person is kind, smart, and funny. The opposite effect is also true. Negative feelings about one characteristic lead to negative impressions of an individual's other features. When people have a good impression of one characteristic, those good feelings tend to affect perceptions of other qualities.

8 False Consensus Experiment During the late 1970s, researcher Lee Ross and his colleagues performed some eye-opening experiments. In one experiment, the researchers had participants choose a way to respond to an imagined conflict and then estimate how many people would also select the same resolution. They found that no matter which option the respondents chose, they tended to believe that the vast majority of other people would also choose the same option. In another study, the experimenters asked students on campus to walk around carrying a large advertisement that read "Eat at Joe's." The researchers then asked the students to estimate how many other people would agree to wear the advertisement. They found that those who agreed to carry the sign believed that the majority of people would also agree to carry the sign. Those who refused felt that the majority of people would refuse as well. The results of these experiments demonstrate what is known in psychology as the false consensus effect. No matter what our beliefs, options, or behaviors, we tend to believe that the majority of other people also agree with us and act the same way we do. Social psychology is a rich and varied field that offers fascinating insights into how people behave in groups and how behavior is influenced by social pressures. Exploring some of these classic social psychology experiments can provide a glimpse at some of the fascinating research that has emerged from this field of study.

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