psychological experiment

• 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.

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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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About the Author

After earning a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from Rutgers University and then a Master of Science in Clinical and Forensic Psychology from Drexel University, Kristen began a career as a therapist at two prisons in Philadelphia. At the same time she volunteered as a rape crisis counselor, also in Philadelphia. After a few years in the field she accepted a teaching position at a local college where she currently teaches online psychology courses. Kristen began writing in college and still enjoys her work as a writer, editor, professor and mother.

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7 Famous Psychology Experiments

Many famous experiments studying human behavior have impacted our fundamental understanding of psychology. Though some could not be repeated today due to breaches in ethical boundaries, that does not diminish the significance of those psychological studies. Some of these important findings include a greater awareness of depression and its symptoms, how people learn behaviors through the process of association and how individuals conform to a group.

Below, we take a look at seven famous psychological experiments that greatly influenced the field of psychology and our understanding of human behavior.

The Little Albert Experiment, 1920

A John’s Hopkins University professor, Dr. John B. Watson, and a graduate student wanted to test a learning process called classical conditioning. Classical conditioning involves learning involuntary or automatic behaviors by association, and Dr. Watson thought it formed the bedrock of human psychology.

A nine-month-old toddler, dubbed “Albert B,” was volunteered for Dr. Watson and Rosalie Rayner ‘s experiment. Albert played with white furry objects, and at first, the toddler displayed joy and affection. Over time, as he played with the objects, Dr. Watson would make a loud noise behind the child’s head to frighten him. After numerous trials, Albert was conditioned to be afraid when he saw white furry objects.

The study proved that humans could be conditioned to enjoy or fear something, which many psychologists believe could explain why people have irrational fears and how they may have developed early in life. This is a great example of experimental study psychology.

Stanford Prison Experiment, 1971

Stanford professor Philip Zimbardo wanted to learn how individuals conformed to societal roles. He wondered, for example, whether the tense relationship between prison guards and inmates in jails had more to do with the personalities of each or the environment.

During Zimbardo’s experiment , 24 male college students were assigned to be either a prisoner or a guard. The prisoners were held in a makeshift prison inside the basement of Stanford’s psychology department. They went through a standard booking process designed to take away their individuality and make them feel anonymous. Guards were given eight-hour shifts and tasked to treat the prisoners just like they would in real life.

Zimbardo found rather quickly that both the guards and prisoners fully adapted to their roles; in fact, he had to shut down the experiment after six days because it became too dangerous. Zimbardo even admitted he began thinking of himself as a police superintendent rather than a psychologist. The study confirmed that people will conform to the social roles they’re expected to play, especially overly stereotyped ones such as prison guards.

“We realized how ordinary people could be readily transformed from the good Dr. Jekyll to the evil Mr. Hyde,” Zimbardo wrote.

The Asch Conformity Study, 1951

Solomon Asch, a Polish-American social psychologist, was determined to see whether an individual would conform to a group’s decision, even if the individual knew it was incorrect. Conformity is defined by the American Psychological Association as the adjustment of a person’s opinions or thoughts so that they fall closer in line with those of other people or the normative standards of a social group or situation.

In his experiment , Asch selected 50 male college students to participate in a “vision test.” Individuals would have to determine which line on a card was longer. However, the individuals at the center of the experiment did not know that the other people taking the test were actors following scripts, and at times selected the wrong answer on purpose. Asch found that, on average over 12 trials, nearly one-third of the naive participants conformed with the incorrect majority, and only 25 percent never conformed to the incorrect majority. In the control group that featured only the participants and no actors, less than one percent of participants ever chose the wrong answer.

Asch’s experiment showed that people will conform to groups to fit in (normative influence) because of the belief that the group was better informed than the individual. This explains why some people change behaviors or beliefs when in a new group or social setting, even when it goes against past behaviors or beliefs.

The Bobo Doll Experiment, 1961, 1963

Stanford University professor Albert Bandura wanted to put the social learning theory into action. Social learning theory suggests that people can acquire new behaviors “through direct experience or by observing the behavior of others.” Using a Bobo doll , which is a blow-up toy in the shape of a life-size bowling pin, Bandura and his team tested whether children witnessing acts of aggression would copy them.

Bandura and two colleagues selected 36 boys and 36 girls between the ages of 3 and 6 from the Stanford University nursery and split them into three groups of 24. One group watched adults behaving aggressively toward the Bobo doll. In some cases, the adult subjects hit the doll with a hammer or threw it in the air. Another group was shown an adult playing with the Bobo doll in a non-aggressive manner, and the last group was not shown a model at all, just the Bobo doll.

After each session, children were taken to a room with toys and studied to see how their play patterns changed. In a room with aggressive toys (a mallet, dart guns, and a Bobo doll) and non-aggressive toys (a tea set, crayons, and plastic farm animals), Bandura and his colleagues observed that children who watched the aggressive adults were more likely to imitate the aggressive responses.

Unexpectedly, Bandura found that female children acted more physically aggressive after watching a male subject and more verbally aggressive after watching a female subject. The results of the study highlight how children learn behaviors from observing others.

The Learned Helplessness Experiment, 1965

Martin Seligman wanted to research a different angle related to Dr. Watson’s study of classical conditioning. In studying conditioning with dogs, Seligman made an astute observation : the subjects, which had already been conditioned to expect a light electric shock if they heard a bell, would sometimes give up after another negative outcome, rather than searching for the positive outcome.

Under normal circumstances, animals will always try to get away from negative outcomes. When Seligman tested his experiment on animals who hadn’t been previously conditioned, the animals attempted to find a positive outcome. Oppositely, the dogs who had been already conditioned to expect a negative response assumed there would be another negative response waiting for them, even in a different situation.

The conditioned dogs’ behavior became known as learned helplessness, the idea that some subjects won’t try to get out of a negative situation because past experiences have forced them to believe they are helpless. The study’s findings shed light on depression and its symptoms in humans.

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The Milgram Experiment, 1963

In the wake of the horrific atrocities carried out by Nazi Germany during World War II, Stanley Milgram wanted to test the levels of obedience to authority. The Yale University professor wanted to study if people would obey commands, even when it conflicted with the person’s conscience.

Participants of the condensed study , 40 males between the ages of 20 and 50, were split into learners and teachers. Though it seemed random, actors were always chosen as the learners, and unsuspecting participants were always the teachers. A learner was strapped to a chair with electrodes in one room while the experimenter äóñ another actor äóñ and a teacher went into another.

The teacher and learner went over a list of word pairs that the learner was told to memorize. When the learner incorrectly paired a set of words together, the teacher would shock the learner. The teacher believed the shocks ranged from mild all the way to life-threatening. In reality, the learner, who intentionally made mistakes, was not being shocked.

As the voltage of the shocks increased and the teachers became aware of the believed pain caused by them, some refused to continue the experiment. After prodding by the experimenter, 65 percent resumed. From the study, Milgram devised the agency theory , which suggests that people allow others to direct their actions because they believe the authority figure is qualified and will accept responsibility for the outcomes. Milgram’s findings help explain how people can make decisions against their own conscience, such as when participating in a war or genocide.

The Halo Effect Experiment, 1977

University of Michigan professors Richard Nisbett and Timothy Wilson were interested in following up a study from 50 years earlier on a concept known as the halo effect . In the 1920s, American psychologist Edward Thorndike researched a phenomenon in the U.S. military that showed cognitive bias. This is an error in how we think that affects how we perceive people and make judgements and decisions based on those perceptions.

In 1977, Nisbett and Wilson tested the halo effect using 118 college students (62 males, 56 females). Students were divided into two groups and were asked to evaluate a male Belgian teacher who spoke English with a heavy accent. Participants were shown one of two videotaped interviews with the teacher on a television monitor. The first interview showed the teacher interacting cordially with students, and the second interview showed the teacher behaving inhospitably. The subjects were then asked to rate the teacher’s physical appearance, mannerisms, and accent on an eight-point scale from appealing to irritating.

Nisbett and Wilson found that on physical appearance alone, 70 percent of the subjects rated the teacher as appealing when he was being respectful and irritating when he was cold. When the teacher was rude, 80 percent of the subjects rated his accent as irritating, as compared to nearly 50 percent when he was being kind.

The updated study on the halo effect shows that cognitive bias isn’t exclusive to a military environment. Cognitive bias can get in the way of making the correct decision, whether it’s during a job interview or deciding whether to buy a product that’s been endorsed by a celebrity we admire.

How Experiments Have Impacted Psychology Today

Contemporary psychologists have built on the findings of these studies to better understand human behaviors, mental illnesses, and the link between the mind and body. For their contributions to psychology, Watson, Bandura, Nisbett and Zimbardo were all awarded Gold Medals for Life Achievement from the American Psychological Foundation. Become part of the next generation of influential psychologists with King University’s online bachelor’s in psychology . Take advantage of King University’s flexible online schedule and complete the major coursework of your degree in as little as 16 months. Plus, as a psychology major, King University will prepare you for graduate school with original research on student projects as you pursue your goal of being a psychologist.

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

15 Famous Experiments and Case Studies in Psychology

Chris Drew (PhD)

Dr. Chris Drew is the founder of the Helpful Professor. He holds a PhD in education and has published over 20 articles in scholarly journals. He is the former editor of the Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education. [Image Descriptor: Photo of Chris]

Learn about our Editorial Process

Psychology has seen thousands upon thousands of research studies over the years. Most of these studies have helped shape our current understanding of human thoughts, behavior, and feelings.

The psychology case studies in this list are considered classic examples of psychological case studies and experiments, which are still being taught in introductory psychology courses up to this day.

Some studies, however, were downright shocking and controversial that you’d probably wonder why such studies were conducted back in the day. Imagine participating in an experiment for a small reward or extra class credit, only to be left scarred for life. These kinds of studies, however, paved the way for a more ethical approach to studying psychology and implementation of research standards such as the use of debriefing in psychology research .

Case Study vs. Experiment

Before we dive into the list of the most famous studies in psychology, let us first review the difference between case studies and experiments.

• It is an in-depth study and analysis of an individual, group, community, or phenomenon. The results of a case study cannot be applied to the whole population, but they can provide insights for further studies.
• It often uses qualitative research methods such as observations, surveys, and interviews.
• It is often conducted in real-life settings rather than in controlled environments.
• An experiment is a type of study done on a sample or group of random participants, the results of which can be generalized to the whole population.
• It often uses quantitative research methods that rely on numbers and statistics.
• It is conducted in controlled environments, wherein some things or situations are manipulated.

See Also: Experimental vs Observational Studies

Famous Experiments in Psychology

1. the marshmallow experiment.

Psychologist Walter Mischel conducted the marshmallow experiment at Stanford University in the 1960s to early 1970s. It was a simple test that aimed to define the connection between delayed gratification and success in life.

The instructions were fairly straightforward: children ages 4-6 were presented a piece of marshmallow on a table and they were told that they would receive a second piece if they could wait for 15 minutes without eating the first marshmallow.

About one-third of the 600 participants succeeded in delaying gratification to receive the second marshmallow. Mischel and his team followed up on these participants in the 1990s, learning that those who had the willpower to wait for a larger reward experienced more success in life in terms of SAT scores and other metrics.

This case study also supported self-control theory , a theory in criminology that holds that people with greater self-control are less likely to end up in trouble with the law!

The classic marshmallow experiment, however, was debunked in a 2018 replication study done by Tyler Watts and colleagues.

This more recent experiment had a larger group of participants (900) and a better representation of the general population when it comes to race and ethnicity. In this study, the researchers found out that the ability to wait for a second marshmallow does not depend on willpower alone but more so on the economic background and social status of the participants.

2. The Bystander Effect

In 1694, Kitty Genovese was murdered in the neighborhood of Kew Gardens, New York. It was told that there were up to 38 witnesses and onlookers in the vicinity of the crime scene, but nobody did anything to stop the murder or call for help.

Such tragedy was the catalyst that inspired social psychologists Bibb Latane and John Darley to formulate the phenomenon called bystander effect or bystander apathy .

Subsequent investigations showed that this story was exaggerated and inaccurate, as there were actually only about a dozen witnesses, at least two of whom called the police. But the case of Kitty Genovese led to various studies that aim to shed light on the bystander phenomenon.

Latane and Darley tested bystander intervention in an experimental study . Participants were asked to answer a questionnaire inside a room, and they would either be alone or with two other participants (who were actually actors or confederates in the study). Smoke would then come out from under the door. The reaction time of participants was tested — how long would it take them to report the smoke to the authorities or the experimenters?

The results showed that participants who were alone in the room reported the smoke faster than participants who were with two passive others. The study suggests that the more onlookers are present in an emergency situation, the less likely someone would step up to help, a social phenomenon now popularly called the bystander effect.

3. Asch Conformity Study

Have you ever made a decision against your better judgment just to fit in with your friends or family? The Asch Conformity Studies will help you understand this kind of situation better.

In this experiment, a group of participants were shown three numbered lines of different lengths and asked to identify the longest of them all. However, only one true participant was present in every group and the rest were actors, most of whom told the wrong answer.

Results showed that the participants went for the wrong answer, even though they knew which line was the longest one in the first place. When the participants were asked why they identified the wrong one, they said that they didn’t want to be branded as strange or peculiar.

This study goes to show that there are situations in life when people prefer fitting in than being right. It also tells that there is power in numbers — a group’s decision can overwhelm a person and make them doubt their judgment.

4. The Bobo Doll Experiment

The Bobo Doll Experiment was conducted by Dr. Albert Bandura, the proponent of social learning theory .

Back in the 1960s, the Nature vs. Nurture debate was a popular topic among psychologists. Bandura contributed to this discussion by proposing that human behavior is mostly influenced by environmental rather than genetic factors.

In the Bobo Doll Experiment, children were divided into three groups: one group was shown a video in which an adult acted aggressively toward the Bobo Doll, the second group was shown a video in which an adult play with the Bobo Doll, and the third group served as the control group where no video was shown.

The children were then led to a room with different kinds of toys, including the Bobo Doll they’ve seen in the video. Results showed that children tend to imitate the adults in the video. Those who were presented the aggressive model acted aggressively toward the Bobo Doll while those who were presented the passive model showed less aggression.

While the Bobo Doll Experiment can no longer be replicated because of ethical concerns, it has laid out the foundations of social learning theory and helped us understand the degree of influence adult behavior has on children.

5. Blue Eye / Brown Eye Experiment

Following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, third-grade teacher Jane Elliott conducted an experiment in her class. Although not a formal experiment in controlled settings, A Class Divided is a good example of a social experiment to help children understand the concept of racism and discrimination.

The class was divided into two groups: blue-eyed children and brown-eyed children. For one day, Elliott gave preferential treatment to her blue-eyed students, giving them more attention and pampering them with rewards. The next day, it was the brown-eyed students’ turn to receive extra favors and privileges.

As a result, whichever group of students was given preferential treatment performed exceptionally well in class, had higher quiz scores, and recited more frequently; students who were discriminated against felt humiliated, answered poorly in tests, and became uncertain with their answers in class.

This study is now widely taught in sociocultural psychology classes.

6. Stanford Prison Experiment

One of the most controversial and widely-cited studies in psychology is the Stanford Prison Experiment , conducted by Philip Zimbardo at the basement of the Stanford psychology building in 1971. The hypothesis was that abusive behavior in prisons is influenced by the personality traits of the prisoners and prison guards.

The participants in the experiment were college students who were randomly assigned as either a prisoner or a prison guard. The prison guards were then told to run the simulated prison for two weeks. However, the experiment had to be stopped in just 6 days.

The prison guards abused their authority and harassed the prisoners through verbal and physical means. The prisoners, on the other hand, showed submissive behavior. Zimbardo decided to stop the experiment because the prisoners were showing signs of emotional and physical breakdown.

Although the experiment wasn’t completed, the results strongly showed that people can easily get into a social role when others expect them to, especially when it’s highly stereotyped .

7. The Halo Effect

Have you ever wondered why toothpastes and other dental products are endorsed in advertisements by celebrities more often than dentists? The Halo Effect is one of the reasons!

The Halo Effect shows how one favorable attribute of a person can gain them positive perceptions in other attributes. In the case of product advertisements, attractive celebrities are also perceived as intelligent and knowledgeable of a certain subject matter even though they’re not technically experts.

The Halo Effect originated in a classic study done by Edward Thorndike in the early 1900s. He asked military commanding officers to rate their subordinates based on different qualities, such as physical appearance, leadership, dependability, and intelligence.

The results showed that high ratings of a particular quality influences the ratings of other qualities, producing a halo effect of overall high ratings. The opposite also applied, which means that a negative rating in one quality also correlated to negative ratings in other qualities.

Experiments on the Halo Effect came in various formats as well, supporting Thorndike’s original theory. This phenomenon suggests that our perception of other people’s overall personality is hugely influenced by a quality that we focus on.

8. Cognitive Dissonance

There are experiences in our lives when our beliefs and behaviors do not align with each other and we try to justify them in our minds. This is cognitive dissonance , which was studied in an experiment by Leon Festinger and James Carlsmith back in 1959.

In this experiment, participants had to go through a series of boring and repetitive tasks, such as spending an hour turning pegs in a wooden knob. After completing the tasks, they were then paid either $1 or $20 to tell the next participants that the tasks were extremely fun and enjoyable. Afterwards, participants were asked to rate the experiment. Those who were given $1 rated the experiment as more interesting and fun than those who received $20.

The results showed that those who received a smaller incentive to lie experienced cognitive dissonance — $1 wasn’t enough incentive for that one hour of painstakingly boring activity, so the participants had to justify that they had fun anyway.

Famous Case Studies in Psychology

9. little albert.

In 1920, behaviourist theorists John Watson and Rosalie Rayner experimented on a 9-month-old baby to test the effects of classical conditioning in instilling fear in humans.

This was such a controversial study that it gained popularity in psychology textbooks and syllabi because it is a classic example of unethical research studies done in the name of science.

In one of the experiments, Little Albert was presented with a harmless stimulus or object, a white rat, which he wasn’t scared of at first. But every time Little Albert would see the white rat, the researchers would play a scary sound of hammer and steel. After about 6 pairings, Little Albert learned to fear the rat even without the scary sound.

Little Albert developed signs of fear to different objects presented to him through classical conditioning . He even generalized his fear to other stimuli not present in the course of the experiment.

10. Phineas Gage

Phineas Gage is such a celebrity in Psych 101 classes, even though the way he rose to popularity began with a tragic accident. He was a resident of Central Vermont and worked in the construction of a new railway line in the mid-1800s. One day, an explosive went off prematurely, sending a tamping iron straight into his face and through his brain.

Gage survived the accident, fortunately, something that is considered a feat even up to this day. He managed to find a job as a stagecoach after the accident. However, his family and friends reported that his personality changed so much that “he was no longer Gage” (Harlow, 1868).

New evidence on the case of Phineas Gage has since come to light, thanks to modern scientific studies and medical tests. However, there are still plenty of mysteries revolving around his brain damage and subsequent recovery.

11. Anna O.

Anna O., a social worker and feminist of German Jewish descent, was one of the first patients to receive psychoanalytic treatment.

Her real name was Bertha Pappenheim and she inspired much of Sigmund Freud’s works and books on psychoanalytic theory, although they hadn’t met in person. Their connection was through Joseph Breuer, Freud’s mentor when he was still starting his clinical practice.

Anna O. suffered from paralysis, personality changes, hallucinations, and rambling speech, but her doctors could not find the cause. Joseph Breuer was then called to her house for intervention and he performed psychoanalysis, also called the “talking cure”, on her.

Breuer would tell Anna O. to say anything that came to her mind, such as her thoughts, feelings, and childhood experiences. It was noted that her symptoms subsided by talking things out.

However, Breuer later referred Anna O. to the Bellevue Sanatorium, where she recovered and set out to be a renowned writer and advocate of women and children.

12. Patient HM

H.M., or Henry Gustav Molaison, was a severe amnesiac who had been the subject of countless psychological and neurological studies.

Henry was 27 when he underwent brain surgery to cure the epilepsy that he had been experiencing since childhood. In an unfortunate turn of events, he lost his memory because of the surgery and his brain also became unable to store long-term memories.

He was then regarded as someone living solely in the present, forgetting an experience as soon as it happened and only remembering bits and pieces of his past. Over the years, his amnesia and the structure of his brain had helped neuropsychologists learn more about cognitive functions .

Suzanne Corkin, a researcher, writer, and good friend of H.M., recently published a book about his life. Entitled Permanent Present Tense , this book is both a memoir and a case study following the struggles and joys of Henry Gustav Molaison.

13. Chris Sizemore

Chris Sizemore gained celebrity status in the psychology community when she was diagnosed with multiple personality disorder, now known as dissociative identity disorder.

Sizemore has several alter egos, which included Eve Black, Eve White, and Jane. Various papers about her stated that these alter egos were formed as a coping mechanism against the traumatic experiences she underwent in her childhood.

Sizemore said that although she has succeeded in unifying her alter egos into one dominant personality, there were periods in the past experienced by only one of her alter egos. For example, her husband married her Eve White alter ego and not her.

Her story inspired her psychiatrists to write a book about her, entitled The Three Faces of Eve , which was then turned into a 1957 movie of the same title.

14. David Reimer

When David was just 8 months old, he lost his penis because of a botched circumcision operation.

Psychologist John Money then advised Reimer’s parents to raise him as a girl instead, naming him Brenda. His gender reassignment was supported by subsequent surgery and hormonal therapy.

Money described Reimer’s gender reassignment as a success, but problems started to arise as Reimer was growing up. His boyishness was not completely subdued by the hormonal therapy. When he was 14 years old, he learned about the secrets of his past and he underwent gender reassignment to become male again.

Reimer became an advocate for children undergoing the same difficult situation he had been. His life story ended when he was 38 as he took his own life.

15. Kim Peek

Kim Peek was the inspiration behind Rain Man , an Oscar-winning movie about an autistic savant character played by Dustin Hoffman.

The movie was released in 1988, a time when autism wasn’t widely known and acknowledged yet. So it was an eye-opener for many people who watched the film.

In reality, Kim Peek was a non-autistic savant. He was exceptionally intelligent despite the brain abnormalities he was born with. He was like a walking encyclopedia, knowledgeable about travel routes, US zip codes, historical facts, and classical music. He also read and memorized approximately 12,000 books in his lifetime.

This list of experiments and case studies in psychology is just the tip of the iceberg! There are still countless interesting psychology studies that you can explore if you want to learn more about human behavior and dynamics.

You can also conduct your own mini-experiment or participate in a study conducted in your school or neighborhood. Just remember that there are ethical standards to follow so as not to repeat the lasting physical and emotional harm done to Little Albert or the Stanford Prison Experiment participants.

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), 1–70. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0093718

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), 575–582. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0045925

Elliott, J., Yale University., WGBH (Television station : Boston, Mass.), & PBS DVD (Firm). (2003). A class divided. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Films.

Festinger, L., & Carlsmith, J. M. (1959). Cognitive consequences of forced compliance. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 58 (2), 203–210. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0041593

Haney, C., Banks, W. C., & Zimbardo, P. G. (1973). A study of prisoners and guards in a simulated prison. Naval Research Review , 30 , 4-17.

Latane, B., & Darley, J. M. (1968). Group inhibition of bystander intervention in emergencies. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 10 (3), 215–221. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0026570

Mischel, W. (2014). The Marshmallow Test: Mastering self-control. Little, Brown and Co.

Thorndike, E. (1920) A Constant Error in Psychological Ratings. Journal of Applied Psychology , 4 , 25-29. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/h0071663

Watson, J. B., & Rayner, R. (1920). Conditioned emotional reactions. Journal of experimental psychology , 3 (1), 1.

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Fascinating psych experiments

Human behavior is a riddle. In these talks, speakers share psychological studies—from asking kids to wait to eat marshmallows to planting false memories through a single word—that offer possible solutions as well as surprising new twists.

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Psychological Experiments Online

Psychological Experiments Online is a multimedia collection that synthesizes the most important psychological experiments of the 20th and 21st centuries, fostering deeper levels of understanding for students and scholars alike. These experiments have far-reaching impacts on fields as diverse as sociology, business, advertising, economics, political science, law, ethics, and the arts.

Featured Experiments

Behavioral Study of Obedience

Milgram is most famous for his controversial Obedience Study, performed at Yale University in 1961. He was inspired to perform this study by the defense commonly used at the WWII Nuremburg War Criminals Trials, that the Nazi officers and guards implementing the Holocaust had just been “following orders.” Milgram’s Behavioral Study of Obedience tested the extent to which random American civilians could be convinced to inflict pain upon their fellow citizens when ordered to do so by a perceived authority figure. The results of this study horrified the psychological community, the general public, and the study participants themselves once the true nature of the study was explained. This study was one of the driving forces behind the creation of Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) to review proposed scientific experiments using human subjects, and approve or veto their implementation.

Robbers Cave Experiment

The Robbers Cave Experiment was named after its location, as it took place at a boys summer camp in Robbers Cave State Park, Oklahoma. Sherif identified 22 psychologically-normal, white, middle-class, eleven- and twelve-year-old boys from Connecticut to take part in the experiment. The boys were divided into two groups and Sherif studied how conflict and prejudice were first fostered and then reduced. Sherif concluded that groups have their own biases, prejudices, and culture. The Robbers Cave experiment was most helpful in showing that superordinate goals for both groups can help resolve issues and create peace.

Visual Cliff Experiment

In 1960, following their work with sensory-perception in rats, Gibson and Walk hypothesized that depth perception is inherent knowledge as opposed to a learned process. Their experiment consisted of placing an infant on the visual-cliff apparatus: simply described as a table whose edge has been extended by a piece of solidly fixed Plexiglas. The parent or caregiver would call out to the child from across the Plexiglas. If the child was reluctant to cross the Plexiglas, or “cliff”, to go to its parents, the experimenters assumed that the child was able to perceive depth. The study was published that same year in Scientific American and has come to be one of psychology’s most well-known experiments.

Stanford Prison Experiment

The Stanford Prison Experiment was scheduled to run for two weeks, with the intent of studying situational influences on human behavior. The experiment was shut down after just six days due to how extreme those influences turned out to be. The experiment was conducted from August 14 to August 20, 1971, funded by the US Office of Naval Research, and showed that the random assignment of “prisoner” and “guard” to 24 male college students made a major impact on their psychology and behavior, fostering depression among the prisoners and sadism among the guards.

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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July 1, 2020

14 min read

The Biggest Psychological Experiment in History Is Running Now

What can the pandemic teach us about how people respond to adversity?

By Lydia Denworth

Bernell Grier, who leads a community development corporation in Brooklyn, N.Y., is helping black people affected by the pandemic.

T he impact of COVID-19 on the physical health of the world’s citizens has been extraordinary. By April 2021 there were almost 130 million cases spread across more than 190 countries. The pandemic’s effect on mental health could be even more far-reaching. At one point roughly one third of the planet’s population was under orders to stay home. That means 2.6 billion people—more than were alive during World War II—were experiencing the emotional and financial reverberations of this new coronavirus. “[The lockdown] is arguably the largest psychological experiment ever conducted,” wrote health psychologist Elke Van Hoof of Free University of Brussels-VUB in Belgium. The results of this unwitting experiment are only beginning to be calculated.

The science of resilience, which investigates how people weather adversity, offers some clues. A resilient individual, wrote Harvard University psychiatrist George Vaillant, resembles a twig with a fresh, green living core. “When twisted out of shape, such a twig bends, but it does not break; instead it springs back and continues growing.” The metaphor describes a surprising number of people: As many as two thirds of individuals recover from difficult experiences without prolonged psychological effects, even when they have lived through events such as violent crime or being a prisoner of war. Some even go on to grow and learn from what happened to them. But the other third suffers real psychological distress—some people for a few months, others for years.

Even if most individuals prove resilient, the toll of the COVID-19 disruptions and the sheer numbers involved have experts warning of a mental illness “tsunami.” People face a multiple wallop: the threat of disease, loneliness of isolation, loss of loved ones, repercussions of job loss and ongoing uncertainty about when the pandemic will end. Depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress will undoubtedly follow for some. Mental health hotlines have reported surges in calls, and early surveys found high levels of concern. “This pandemic just ticks all the boxes in terms of the kinds of stressors that are going to be difficult,” says psychologist Anita DeLongis of the University of British Columbia, who studies psychosocial responses to disease. The deaths by suicide of health care professionals who had been on the medical front lines are powerful reminders of the risks.

Individual resilience is further complicated by the fact that this pandemic has not affected each person in the same way. For all that is shared—the coronavirus has struck every level of society and left few lives unchanged—there has been tremendous variation in the disruption and devastation experienced. Consider Brooklyn, just one borough in hard-hit New York City. Residents who started 2020 living or working within a few miles of one another have very different stories of illness, loss and navigating the challenges of social distancing. How quickly and how well individuals, businesses and organizations recover will depend on the jobs, insurance and health they had when this started, on whether they have endured hassle or heartbreak, and on whether they can tap financial resources and social support.

The pandemic has laid bare the inequities in the American health care system and economic safety net. Black and Latino Americans are dying at much higher rates than white Americans. “When we talk about preexisting conditions, it isn’t just if I’m obese; it’s our society’s preexisting condition,” says medical anthropologist Carol Worthman of Emory University, an expert in global mental health.

Fortunately, the unprecedented pandemic is leading to unprecedented science not just in virology but on mental health and resilience. Behavioral scientists are measuring the psychological toll in real time and striving to identify what helps people cope. Unlike, say, the September 11 terrorist attacks or Hurricane Katrina, which occurred over a finite period even though their effects were drawn out, the open-ended time frame for COVID allows for new kinds of longitudinal studies and research directions. The sudden mass switch to virtual forms of working and socializing is expected to jump-start more nuanced investigations into what makes social interaction satisfying—or stultifying. If researchers meet the challenge of COVID, says psychiatrist Dennis Charney of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, “there will be a whole new science of resilience. We could learn how to help people become more resilient before these things happen.”

Bend but Don’t Break

Rafael Hasid arrived in New York City from his native Israel in 2000 to attend the French Culinary Institute. In 2005 he opened a restaurant called Miriam in Brooklyn that became a neighborhood favorite. In the first weeks of March 2020, Hasid could see what was coming. “I was following the news in Israel,” he says. “We were two weeks behind in every respect. I was saying, ‘This is going to happen here.’” When Miriam’s popular weekend brunch attracted a third of the usual crowd, Hasid did not spend much time wondering what to do: he gave away all of the restaurant’s perishable food to the neighbors. By the time the city required all restaurants to shut down, Miriam had already closed.

Faced with potentially traumatic events, “about 65 percent of people are going to show minimal psychological symptoms,” says clinical psychologist George Bonanno of Teachers College at Columbia University. Bonanno, who is an expert on resiliency, studies the aftermath of hurricanes, terrorist attacks, life-threatening injuries and epidemics such as the 2003 SARS outbreak. His research and that of others consistently shows three common psychological responses to hardship. Two thirds of people follow a resilience trajectory and maintain relatively stable psychological and physical health. About 25 percent struggle temporarily with psychopathology such as depression or post-traumatic stress disorder and then recover—a pattern known as the recovery trajectory. And 10 percent suffer lasting psychological distress. These results hold true across diverse populations and socioeconomic statuses. “We’re talking about everybody,” Bonanno says. On the other hand, the risk of psychiatric disorders is twice as high for people on the lowest economic rungs.

But the mental health effects of a crisis so sweeping and insidious may not adhere to this paradigm. Studies show that strict quarantine can lead to negative psychological effects such as PTSD, although few of us have been under true quarantine, which refers to isolating after a possible exposure to infection. Instead much of the world is living with restrictions that Bonanno suspects amount to something more like managing constant stress. “This is the first time in living history we’ve had a global lockdown that’s gone on for such a long time,” says epidemiologist Daisy Fancourt of University College London. “We simply don’t know how people are going to react to this.”

The potential scope of the impact is considerable. “This is different from other forms of stress because it’s not just one domain of your life,” says health psychologist Nancy Sin of the University of British Columbia. “People are dealing with relationship or family challenges, with financial and work challenges, with health.”

Early reports were showing clear effects. The first nationwide large-scale survey in China, where the crisis hit earliest, found that almost 35 percent reported psychological distress. In the U.S., rising fear and anxiety about COVID have been found in people who already suffer from anxiety. Another study captured worrisome findings in older adults. This is surprising because previous research shows that, for the most part, older adults have better emotional well-being. “During this pandemic, older adults don’t have those age-related strengths in emotions that we would typically expect,” says Sin, who studies aging and is collaborating with DeLongis in an ongoing COVID-19 study of 64,000 individuals worldwide. “They are reporting just as much stress as middle-aged and younger people.”

Sin is still analyzing the causes of the stress but suspects it is caused by older adults’ higher likelihood of getting sick and of losing loved ones. Older people are coping with their stress better than younger people, however, and reporting less depression or anxiety. They may be benefiting from the perspective that comes with having lived through more than younger people, Sin says. Adults older than 65 have also had more time to develop skills for dealing with stress, and many have retired and so are less likely to be concerned about work.

Fancourt began a study in mid-March 2020 that at one point grew to include more than 90,000 U.K. residents. It is tracking depression, anxiety, stress and loneliness week by week. “We need to know in real time what’s happening,” Fancourt says. Six weeks in, they found that levels of depression were significantly higher than before the pandemic.

Generally, those with previously diagnosed mental health illnesses, those who live alone and younger people were reporting the highest levels of depression and anxiety. On the positive side, there was a slight decrease in anxiety levels once the lockdown was declared. “Uncertainty tends to make things worse,” Fancourt says. Some are frozen by not knowing what is to come, whereas others find ways to carry on.

After Hasid’s restaurant had been closed for three weeks, he had not yet received any of the government payments meant to protect small businesses. While his situation was rife with uncertainty, “I was thinking that we have to continue creating business for ourselves,” he says. When a few customers e-mailed to inquire if he would consider catering their Passover seders, Hasid developed a prix fixe holiday menu for delivery. Before the pandemic, Hasid was planning to open a delicatessen that would be located in an adjacent storefront. Instead of renovating the new space, he opened the deli inside the restaurant. His biggest worry was whether employees would feel safe. To reassure them, in addition to social distancing, he requires masks and gloves and has someone come in to bleach the restaurant morning and night. Hasid also looked into other sanitizing strategies involving blowers and alcohol that he heard had been used in Singapore.

Hasid recognizes that his ability to adapt is not something every business can do, especially many restaurants that run on tight margins. The new operation used minimal staff, but Hasid continued to pay—out of his own pocket—any employees who were not able to get through to unemployment. Serving food via delivery brings in less than a third of Miriam’s former income, but he says it is better than nothing. Last year the restaurant also began preparing a weekly meal for a local hospital. “It is not a money maker, but it’s the least we can do.” Hasid is pleased with Miriam’s reinvention and optimistic that the restaurant will ultimately survive. “We are in a much better situation than a lot of other places in New York,” he says.

When Tom Inck ( top right ) fell ill with COVID-19, his wife, Wendy Blattner ( standing ), cared for him while managing upheavals in her business and their daughters' lives. Credit: Ethan Hill

The Components of Coping

When Brooklyn resident Tom Inck developed a persistent fever and dry cough in the middle of March 2020, the psychotherapist and management consultant feared he had COVID. Because of the shortage of tests at the time, Inck’s doctor first screened for every other known virus (Inck paid for the test panel). Then doctor and patient met on the streets of Manhattan. Standing on Madison Avenue in full protective equipment, the doctor administered the test, which came back positive six days later.

Successfully coping in a crisis means continuing to function and engaging in day-to-day activities. One must solve problems (whether that means getting groceries or a virus test), regulate emotions and manage relationships. There are factors that predict resilience such as optimism, the ability to keep perspective, strong social support and flexible thinking. People who believe they can cope do, in fact, tend to cope better.

During nine days of isolation in a spare room, Inck filled the time with meditating and reading. In some ways, things were harder for his wife, Wendy Blattner, who was managing her husband’s care, the transition of her marketing agency to remote work, and the emotions of the couple’s two college-aged daughters, who were upset at the loss of their semesters and anxious about their father. Blattner left meals outside her husband’s door and got up every three hours throughout the night to record his temperature and blood oxygen level. She was scared but resolute. “I felt like he had excellent care, even though it was remote, and that I had the resources within myself and the support I needed,” she says. “That’s what I told my kids and what I told myself—that it might get rough, but it was going to be okay.”

Most people’s coping skills can be strengthened. Several of the new studies are designed to identify successful strategies that buffer the effects of the stress. So far, Fancourt says, people are encouraged to follow classic mental health strategies: getting enough sleep, observing a routine, exercising, eating well and maintaining strong social connections. Spending time on projects, even small ones, that provide a sense of purpose helps.

In previous work, DeLongis has shown that those who are high in empathy are more likely to engage in appropriate health behaviors such as social distancing and to have better mental health outcomes than people who are low in empathy. But her earlier studies of diseases such as SARS and West Nile were cross-sectional and captured only a moment in time. Her COVID-19 study followed people’s behavior and attitudes for months to capture changes in empathy and coping over time. “This isn’t just about a trait of empathy,” DeLongis says. Empathetic responses can be learned and encouraged with proper messaging, and her hunch was that increases or decreases in empathetic responding over weeks and months would be associated with shifts in health behaviors and coping mechanisms.

As part of DeLongis’s study, Sin asked people to record their daily activities and emotions for a week. In the early months of the pandemic, she says, the picture was “that life is really challenging, but people are finding ways to meet that challenge.” Many reported a great deal of positive social interactions, many of them remote. Older adults reported the highest levels of positive experiences in their daily lives, often through providing support to others.

It is striking that remote connections are proving satisfying. Previous research on the effects of digital technology and media focused on the association between time spent on screens and psychological well-being but revealed little about the worth of different kinds of online interaction. Now that the world is relying on the Internet to socialize, investigating those nuances is crucial. Should social media closely mimic face-to-face interaction, or can less intense forms of communication leave people feeling connected? We do not know yet, but it is likely those studies will now get funded when previously they weren’t. “I think we just skipped a decade of conversation in a month,” says psychologist Amy Orben of the University of Cambridge, who studies adolescent mental health and technology use.

Social media is a factor in other kinds of research as well. Psychologist Roxane Cohen Silver of the University of California, Irvine, is assessing the impact of media exposure on people’s well-being. “Those who consume a great deal of news about a community-wide crisis are more distressed,” she says. Computational social scientist Johannes Eichstaedt of Stanford University is combining large-scale analyses of Twitter with machine learning to capture levels of depression, loneliness and joy during the pandemic.

As Blattner feared, things did get rough for their family. On nights seven and eight, when Inck’s fever hovered around 103 and his blood oxygen levels dropped to 93, his doctor (via Zoom) said if the levels stayed there or got worse, Inck should go to the hospital. “I’m not going to have a patient who dies at home,” he said, a statement that alarmed the children. “The toughest thing for us was the fear,” Inck says. But Tylenol kept the fever in check, and short, shallow breaths kept Inck’s blood oxygen level in the safety zone. After 10 days, he began to feel better.

The experience left Inck grateful and energized. He threw himself back into work counseling others who were sick and signed up to be a plasma donor for critical patients. But, unlike others who recovered, he did not initially venture out much. “The world felt like a vulnerable place,” he says.

Restaurant owner Rafael Hasid rapidly reinvented his business for takeout and delivery but was paying employees out of his own pocket. Credit: Ethan Hill

Society’s Preexisting Conditions

Even those brimming with personal resilience need outside help if they face challenges on multiple fronts. As executive director of IMPACCT Brooklyn, a community development corporation that serves the historically Black neighborhoods of Brooklyn, Bernell K. Grier sees just how hard the pandemic has hit the African-American community. “Daily, I’m hearing of people who are either COVID-positive, recovering from it or have died from it,” she says. Three of those deaths occurred in apartments that Grier manages and required her to organize deep-cleaning services. Still, she pressed on. “Seniors are fearful of going out, fearful of anyone coming to their front door,” Grier says. “They also are not tech-savvy. A lot of things where they’re being told to go on the computer, they need someone to hold their hand and help them through the process.”

The pandemic, Fancourt says, “is going to exacerbate the social gradient that we’re used to seeing across society. It’s crucial that [people] have interventions at a national level that can support [them].” In the U.K., such interventions include the National Health Service and a furlough program that pays up to 80 percent of the salaries of millions of Britons who could not work because of the pandemic. In the U.S., paycheck-protection packages and unemployment exist but proved difficult to access quickly.

Grier’s organization provides a variety of services around housing, small business advocacy, and interaction with financial and government institutions. As soon as the pandemic hit, her staff distributed information about public health and economic resources. They introduced webinars to help businesses apply for loans. As of late April 2020, “none of the ones that we helped got anything,” Grier says. “It’s not reaching our businesses.” Only 70 percent of Grier’s tenants were able to pay rent in April 2020. “We still have to pay the supers, the porters, the heat and electricity, the taxes and everything else,” Grier says. “It’s a domino effect. If the residents can’t pay, we can’t pay.”

Worthman, the Emory anthropologist, says the ability to cope with the pandemic’s reverberations is not just an individual issue but a societal one. It is also an opportunity. “People have pointed to periods of disaster in American history, after World War I and the Depression, that led to real structural change that benefited people.”

Grier is advocating for positive change for her community. In her talks with public health and elected officials, she points out disparities such as the fact that the first test centers were not located in poor neighborhoods. “This is a spotlight on what has existed for too long,” she says. “When you’re looking at [solutions], make sure that income equality and a racial-equity lens is a filter for everything that’s put in place.” As Brooklyn reemerges from social isolation, Grier knows the critical role groups like hers play. “We will continue to be here to be that liaison, that credit counselor, that navigator.”

Cultivating resilience though community support appears to be more important than ever. As a school nurse in Brooklyn, Marilyn Howard, who immigrated from Guyana as a teenager, worked through the early weeks of March 2020 until the public schools closed. She got sick the day after she left work. It took 10 days to get the test results that confirmed she had COVID. By then Howard thought she was on the road to recovery. But on Saturday, April 4, she awoke with labored breathing that rapidly worsened. Her brother Nigel Howard, with whom she shared an apartment, called an ambulance. But April 4 was near the peak of the pandemic in Brooklyn, and there was no ambulance available. Nigel drove them to the nearest hospital, but Marilyn’s breathing deteriorated on the way. Less than a minute before they arrived, her heart stopped, and she could not be revived. She was 53.

“A couple of simple things could have saved my sister’s life,” says Haslyn Howard, the youngest of Marilyn’s five brothers. If schools had closed earlier or her colleague could have taken a sick day, she might not have gotten sick. If someone had recommended a pulse oximeter, she would have known to go to the hospital sooner. If an ambulance had been available.... The Howard brothers arranged a viewing at a Long Island funeral home to provide some closure. Haslyn permitted only three people in the room at a time, but a simultaneous virtual service allowed more than 250 people to celebrate Marilyn’s life.

Nigel later tested positive for COVID and isolated at home. “My brothers and I are in the initial phases of trying to plan an organization that targets efforts to help the Black and brown community, poor communities, address some of these [issues] on a local and tangible level,” Haslyn said soon after losing his sister. It is something they can do in her memory that would have made her proud. “That’s one of the ways that we’re coping,” he adds. “How do we turn tragedy into triumph?”

Particularly Exciting Experiments in Psychology

Summaries of research trends in experimental psychology

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Two studies examine risk-taking behavior in adolescents vs. adults.

Attention and Autism Spectrum Disorder

The featured studies investigate the nature of attention deficits among people with Autism Spectrum Disorder.

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Attention to Emotion

Attention is biased toward negative emotional expressions.

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11+ Psychology Experiment Ideas (Goals + Methods)

Have you ever wondered why some days you remember things easily, while on others you keep forgetting? Or why certain songs make you super happy and others just…meh?

Our minds are like big, mysterious puzzles, and every day we're finding new pieces to fit. One of the coolest ways to explore our brains and the way they work is through psychology experiments.

A psychology experiment is a special kind of test or activity researchers use to learn more about how our minds work and why we behave the way we do.

It's like a detective game where scientists ask questions and try out different clues to find answers about our feelings, thoughts, and actions. These experiments aren't just for scientists in white coats but can be fun activities we all try to discover more about ourselves and others.

Some of these experiments have become so famous, they’re like the celebrities of the science world! Like the Marshmallow Test, where kids had to wait to eat a yummy marshmallow, or Pavlov's Dogs, where dogs learned to drool just hearing a bell.

Let's look at a few examples of psychology experiments you can do at home.

What Are Some Classic Experiments?

Imagine a time when the mysteries of the mind were being uncovered in groundbreaking ways. During these moments, a few experiments became legendary, capturing the world's attention with their intriguing results.

The Marshmallow Test

One of the most talked-about experiments of the 20th century was the Marshmallow Test , conducted by Walter Mischel in the late 1960s at Stanford University.

The goal was simple but profound: to understand a child's ability to delay gratification and exercise self-control.

Children were placed in a room with a marshmallow and given a choice: eat the marshmallow now or wait 15 minutes and receive two as a reward. Many kids struggled with the wait, some devouring the treat immediately, while others demonstrated remarkable patience.

But the experiment didn’t end there. Years later, Mischel discovered something astonishing. The children who had waited for the second marshmallow were generally more successful in several areas of life, from school achievements to job satisfaction!

While this experiment highlighted the importance of teaching patience and self-control from a young age, it wasn't without its criticisms. Some argued that a child's background, upbringing, or immediate surroundings might play a significant role in their choices.

Moreover, there were concerns about the ethics of judging a child's potential success based on a brief interaction with a marshmallow.

Pavlov's Dogs

Traveling further back in time and over to Russia, another classic experiment took the world by storm. Ivan Pavlov , in the early 1900s, wasn't initially studying learning or behavior. He was exploring the digestive systems of dogs.

But during his research, Pavlov stumbled upon a fascinating discovery. He noticed that by ringing a bell every time he fed his dogs, they eventually began to associate the bell's sound with mealtime. So much so, that merely ringing the bell, even without presenting food, made the dogs drool in anticipation!

This reaction demonstrated the concept of "conditioning" - where behaviors can be learned by linking two unrelated stimuli. Pavlov's work revolutionized the world's understanding of learning and had ripple effects in various areas like animal training and therapy techniques.

Pavlov came up with the term classical conditioning , which is still used today. Other psychologists have developed more nuanced types of conditioning that help us understand how people learn to perform different behaviours.

Classical conditioning is the process by which a neutral stimulus becomes associated with a meaningful stimulus , leading to the same response. In Pavlov's case, the neutral stimulus (bell) became associated with the meaningful stimulus (food), leading the dogs to salivate just by hearing the bell.

Modern thinkers often critique Pavlov's methods from an ethical standpoint. The dogs, crucial to his discovery, may not have been treated with today's standards of care and respect in research.

Both these experiments, while enlightening, also underline the importance of conducting research with empathy and consideration, especially when it involves living beings.

What is Ethical Experimentation?

The tales of Pavlov's bells and Mischel's marshmallows offer us not just insights into the human mind and behavior but also raise a significant question: At what cost do these discoveries come?

Ethical experimentation isn't just a fancy term; it's the backbone of good science. When we talk about ethics, we're referring to the moral principles that guide a researcher's decisions and actions. But why does it matter so much in the realm of psychological experimentation?

An example of an experiment that had major ethical issues is an experiment called the Monster Study . This study was conducted in 1936 and was interested in why children develop a stutter.

The major issue with it is that the psychologists treated some of the children poorly over a period of five months, telling them things like “You must try to stop yourself immediately. Don’t ever speak unless you can do it right.”

You can imagine how that made the children feel!

This study helped create guidelines for ethical treatment in experiments. The guidelines include:

Respect for Individuals: Whether it's a dog in Pavlov's lab or a child in Mischel's study room, every participant—human or animal—deserves respect. They should never be subjected to harm or undue stress. For humans, informed consent (knowing what they're signing up for) is a must. This means that if a child is participating, they, along with their guardians, should understand what the experiment entails and agree to it without being pressured.

Honesty is the Best Policy: Researchers have a responsibility to be truthful. This means not only being honest with participants about the study but also reporting findings truthfully, even if the results aren't what they hoped for. There can be exceptions if an experiment will only succeed if the participants aren't fully aware, but it has to be approved by an ethics committee .

Safety First: No discovery, no matter how groundbreaking, is worth harming a participant. The well-being and mental, emotional, and physical safety of participants is paramount. Experiments should be designed to minimize risks and discomfort.

Considering the Long-Term: Some experiments might have effects that aren't immediately obvious. For example, while a child might seem fine after participating in an experiment, they could feel stressed or anxious later on. Ethical researchers consider and plan for these possibilities, offering support and follow-up if needed.

The Rights of Animals: Just because animals can't voice their rights doesn't mean they don't have any. They should be treated with care, dignity, and respect. This means providing them with appropriate living conditions, not subjecting them to undue harm, and considering alternatives to animal testing when possible.

While the world of psychological experiments offers fascinating insights into behavior and the mind, it's essential to tread with care and compassion. The golden rule? Treat every participant, human or animal, as you'd wish to be treated. After all, the true mark of a groundbreaking experiment isn't just its findings but the ethical integrity with which it's conducted.

So, even if you're experimenting at home, please keep in mind the impact your experiments could have on the people and beings around you!

Let's get into some ideas for experiments.

1) Testing Conformity

Our primary aim with this experiment is to explore the intriguing world of social influences, specifically focusing on how much sway a group has over an individual's decisions. This social influence is called groupthink .

Humans, as social creatures, often find solace in numbers, seeking the approval and acceptance of those around them. But how deep does this need run? Does the desire to "fit in" overpower our trust in our own judgments?

This experiment not only provides insights into these questions but also touches upon the broader themes of peer pressure, societal norms, and individuality. Understanding this could shed light on various real-world situations, from why fashion trends catch on to more critical scenarios like how misinformation can spread.

Method: This idea is inspired by the classic Asch Conformity Experiments . Here's a simple way to try it:

• Assemble a group of people (about 7-8). Only one person will be the real participant; the others will be in on the experiment.
• Show the group a picture of three lines of different lengths and another line labeled "Test Line."
• Ask each person to say out loud which of the three lines matches the length of the "Test Line."
• Unknown to the real participant, the other members will intentionally choose the wrong line. This is to see if the participant goes along with the group's incorrect choice, even if they can see it's wrong.

Real-World Impacts of Groupthink

Groupthink is more than just a science term; we see it in our daily lives:

Decisions at Work or School: Imagine being in a group where everyone wants to do one thing, even if it's not the best idea. People might not speak up because they're worried about standing out or being the only one with a different opinion.

Wrong Information: Ever heard a rumor that turned out to be untrue? Sometimes, if many people believe and share something, others might believe it too, even if it's not correct. This happens a lot on the internet.

Peer Pressure: Sometimes, friends might all want to do something that's not safe or right. People might join in just because they don't want to feel left out.

Missing Out on New Ideas: When everyone thinks the same way and agrees all the time, cool new ideas might never get heard. It's like always coloring with the same crayon and missing out on all the other bright colors!

2) Testing Color and Mood

We all have favorite colors, right? But did you ever wonder if colors can make you feel a certain way? Color psychology is the study of how colors can influence our feelings and actions.

For instance, does blue always calm us down? Does red make us feel excited or even a bit angry? By exploring this, we can learn how colors play a role in our daily lives, from the clothes we wear to the color of our bedroom walls.

• Find a quiet room and set up different colored lights or large sheets of colored paper: blue, red, yellow, and green.
• Invite some friends over and let each person spend a few minutes under each colored light or in front of each colored paper.
• After each color, ask your friends to write down or talk about how they feel. Are they relaxed? Energized? Happy? Sad?

Researchers have always been curious about this. Some studies have shown that colors like blue and green can make people feel calm, while colors like red might make them feel more alert or even hungry!

Real-World Impacts of Color Psychology

Ever noticed how different places use colors?

Hospitals and doctors' clinics often use soft blues and greens. This might be to help patients feel more relaxed and calm.

Many fast food restaurants use bright reds and yellows. These colors might make us feel hungry or want to eat quickly and leave.

Classrooms might use a mix of colors to help students feel both calm and energized.

3) Testing Music and Brainpower

Think about your favorite song. Do you feel smarter or more focused when you listen to it? This experiment seeks to understand the relationship between music and our brain's ability to remember things. Some people believe that certain types of music, like classical tunes, can help us study or work better. Let's find out if it's true!

• Prepare a list of 10-15 things to remember, like a grocery list or names of places.
• Invite some friends over. First, let them try to memorize the list in a quiet room.
• After a short break, play some music (try different types like pop, classical, or even nature sounds) and ask them to memorize the list again.
• Compare the results. Was there a difference in how much they remembered with and without music?

The " Mozart Effect " is a popular idea. Some studies in the past suggested that listening to Mozart's music might make people smarter, at least for a little while. But other researchers think the effect might not be specific to Mozart; it could be that any music we enjoy boosts our mood and helps our brain work better.

Real-World Impacts of Music and Memory

Think about how we use music:

• Study Sessions: Many students listen to music while studying, believing it helps them concentrate better.
• Workout Playlists: Gyms play energetic music to keep people motivated and help them push through tough workouts.
• Meditation and Relaxation: Calm, soothing sounds are often used to help people relax or meditate.

4) Testing Dreams and Food

Ever had a really wild dream and wondered where it came from? Some say that eating certain foods before bedtime can make our dreams more vivid or even a bit strange.

This experiment is all about diving into the dreamy world of sleep to see if what we eat can really change our nighttime adventures. Can a piece of chocolate or a slice of cheese transport us to a land of wacky dreams? Let's find out!

• Ask a group of friends to keep a "dream diary" for a week. Every morning, they should write down what they remember about their dreams.
• For the next week, ask them to eat a small snack before bed, like cheese, chocolate, or even spicy foods.
• They should continue writing in their "dream diary" every morning.
• At the end of the two weeks, compare the dream notes. Do the dreams seem different during the snack week?

The link between food and dreams isn't super clear, but some people have shared personal stories. For example, some say that spicy food can lead to bizarre dreams. Scientists aren't completely sure why, but it could be related to how food affects our body temperature or brain activity during sleep.

A cool idea related to this experiment is that of vivid dreams , which are very clear, detailed, and easy to remember dreams. Some people are even able to control their vivid dreams, or say that they feel as real as daily, waking life !

Real-World Impacts of Food and Dreams

Our discoveries might shed light on:

• Bedtime Routines: Knowing which foods might affect our dreams can help us choose better snacks before bedtime, especially if we want calmer sleep.
• Understanding Our Brain: Dreams can be mysterious, but studying them can give us clues about how our brains work at night.
• Cultural Beliefs: Many cultures have myths or stories about foods and dreams. Our findings might add a fun twist to these age-old tales!

5) Testing Mirrors and Self-image

Stand in front of a mirror. How do you feel? Proud? Shy? Curious? Mirrors reflect more than just our appearance; they might influence how we think about ourselves.

This experiment delves into the mystery of self-perception. Do we feel more confident when we see our reflection? Or do we become more self-conscious? Let's take a closer look.

• Set up two rooms: one with mirrors on all walls and another with no mirrors at all.
• Invite friends over and ask them to spend some time in each room doing normal activities, like reading or talking.
• After their time in both rooms, ask them questions like: "Did you think about how you looked more in one room? Did you feel more confident or shy?"
• Compare the responses to see if the presence of mirrors changes how they feel about themselves.

Studies have shown that when people are in rooms with mirrors, they can become more aware of themselves. Some might stand straighter, fix their hair, or even change how they behave. The mirror acts like an audience, making us more conscious of our actions.

Real-World Impacts of Mirrors and Self-perception

Mirrors aren't just for checking our hair. Ever wonder why clothing stores have so many mirrors? They might help shoppers visualize themselves in new outfits, encouraging them to buy.

Mirrors in gyms can motivate people to work out with correct form and posture. They also help us see progress in real-time!

And sometimes, looking in a mirror can be a reminder to take care of ourselves, both inside and out.

But remember, what we look like isn't as important as how we act in the world or how healthy we are. Some people claim that having too many mirrors around can actually make us more self conscious and distract us from the good parts of ourselves.

Some studies are showing that mirrors can actually increase self-compassion , amongst other things. As any tool, it seems like mirrors can be both good and bad, depending on how we use them!

6) Testing Plants and Talking

Have you ever seen someone talking to their plants? It might sound silly, but some people believe that plants can "feel" our vibes and that talking to them might even help them grow better.

In this experiment, we'll explore whether plants can indeed react to our voices and if they might grow taller, faster, or healthier when we chat with them.

• Get three similar plants, placing each one in a separate room.
• Talk to the first plant, saying positive things like "You're doing great!" or singing to it.
• Say negative things to the second plant, like "You're not growing fast enough!"
• Don't talk to the third plant at all; let it be your "silent" control group .
• Water all plants equally and make sure they all get the same amount of light.
• At the end of the month, measure the growth of each plant and note any differences in their health or size.

The idea isn't brand new. Some experiments from the past suggest plants might respond to sounds or vibrations. Some growers play music for their crops, thinking it helps them flourish.

Even if talking to our plants doesn't have an impact on their growth, it can make us feel better! Sometimes, if we are lonely, talking to our plants can help us feel less alone. Remember, they are living too!

Real-World Impacts of Talking to Plants

If plants do react to our voices, gardeners and farmers might adopt new techniques, like playing music in greenhouses or regularly talking to plants.

Taking care of plants and talking to them could become a recommended activity for reducing stress and boosting mood.

And if plants react to sound, it gives us a whole new perspective on how connected all living things might be .

7) Testing Virtual Reality and Senses

Virtual reality (VR) seems like magic, doesn't it? You put on a headset and suddenly, you're in a different world! But how does this "new world" affect our senses? This experiment wants to find out how our brains react to VR compared to the real world. Do we feel, see, or hear things differently? Let's get to the bottom of this digital mystery!

• You'll need a VR headset and a game or experience that can be replicated in real life (like walking through a forest). If you don't have a headset yourself, there are virtual reality arcades now!
• Invite friends to first experience the scenario in VR.
• Afterwards, replicate the experience in the real world, like taking a walk in an actual forest.
• Ask them questions about both experiences: Did one seem more real than the other? Which sounds were more clear? Which colors were brighter? Did they feel different emotions?

As VR becomes more popular, scientists have been curious about its effects. Some studies show that our brains can sometimes struggle to tell the difference between VR and reality. That's why some people might feel like they're really "falling" in a VR game even though they're standing still.

Real-World Impacts of VR on Our Senses

Schools might use VR to teach lessons, like taking students on a virtual trip to ancient Egypt. Understanding how our senses react in VR can also help game designers create even more exciting and realistic games.

Doctors could use VR to help patients overcome fears or to provide relaxation exercises. This is actually already a method therapists can use for helping patients who have serious phobias. This is called exposure therapy , which basically means slowly exposing someone (or yourself) to the thing you fear, starting from very far away to becoming closer.

For instance, if someone is afraid of snakes. You might show them images of snakes first. Once they are comfortable with the picture, they can know there is one in the next room. Once they are okay with that, they might use a VR headset to see the snake in the same room with them, though of course there is not an actual snake there.

8) Testing Sleep and Learning

We all know that feeling of trying to study or work when we're super tired. Our brains feel foggy, and it's hard to remember stuff. But how exactly does sleep (or lack of it) influence our ability to learn and remember things?

With this experiment, we'll uncover the mysteries of sleep and see how it can be our secret weapon for better learning.

• Split participants into two groups.
• Ask both groups to study the same material in the evening.
• One group goes to bed early, while the other stays up late.
• The next morning, give both groups a quiz on what they studied.
• Compare the results to see which group remembered more.

Sleep and its relation to learning have been explored a lot. Scientists believe that during sleep, especially deep sleep, our brains sort and store new information. This is why sometimes, after a good night's rest, we might understand something better or remember more.

Real-World Impacts of Sleep and Learning

Understanding the power of sleep can help:

• Students: If they know the importance of sleep, students might plan better, mixing study sessions with rest, especially before big exams.
• Workplaces: Employers might consider more flexible hours, understanding that well-rested employees learn faster and make fewer mistakes.
• Health: Regularly missing out on sleep can have other bad effects on our health. So, promoting good sleep is about more than just better learning.

9) Testing Social Media and Mood

Have you ever felt different after spending time on social media? Maybe happy after seeing a friend's fun photos, or a bit sad after reading someone's tough news.

Social media is a big part of our lives, but how does it really affect our mood? This experiment aims to shine a light on the emotional roller-coaster of likes, shares, and comments.

• Ask participants to note down how they're feeling - are they happy, sad, excited, or bored?
• Have them spend a set amount of time (like 30 minutes) on their favorite social media platforms.
• After the session, ask them again about their mood. Did it change? Why?
• Discuss what they saw or read that made them feel that way.

Previous research has shown mixed results. Some studies suggest that seeing positive posts can make us feel good, while others say that too much time on social media can make us feel lonely or left out.

Real-World Impacts of Social Media on Mood

Understanding the emotional impact of social media can help users understand their feelings and take breaks if needed. Knowing is half the battle! Additionally, teachers and parents can guide young users on healthy social media habits, like limiting time or following positive accounts.

And if it's shown that social media does impact mood, social media companies can design friendlier, less stressful user experiences.

But even if the social media companies don't change things, we can still change our social media habits to make ourselves feel better.

10) Testing Handwriting or Typing

Think about the last time you took notes. Did you grab a pen and paper or did you type them out on a computer or tablet?

Both ways are popular, but there's a big question: which method helps us remember and understand better? In this experiment, we'll find out if the classic art of handwriting has an edge over speedy typing.

• Divide participants into two groups.
• Present a short lesson or story to both groups.
• One group will take notes by hand, while the other will type them out.
• After some time, quiz both groups on the content of the lesson or story.
• Compare the results to see which note-taking method led to better recall and understanding.

Studies have shown some interesting results. While typing can be faster and allows for more notes, handwriting might boost memory and comprehension because it engages the brain differently, making us process the information as we write.

Importantly, each person might find one or the other works better for them. This could be useful in understanding our learning habits and what instructional style would be best for us.

Real-World Impacts of Handwriting vs. Typing

Knowing the pros and cons of each method can:

• Boost Study Habits: Students can pick the method that helps them learn best, especially during important study sessions or lectures.
• Work Efficiency: In jobs where information retention is crucial, understanding the best method can increase efficiency and accuracy.
• Tech Design: If we find out more about how handwriting benefits us, tech companies might design gadgets that mimic the feel of writing while combining the advantages of digital tools.

11) Testing Money and Happiness

We often hear the saying, "Money can't buy happiness," but is that really true? Many dream of winning the lottery or getting a big raise, believing it would solve all problems.

In this experiment, we dig deep to see if there's a real connection between wealth and well-being.

• Survey a range of participants, from those who earn a little to those who earn a lot, about their overall happiness. You can keep it to your friends and family, but that might not be as accurate as surveying a wider group of people.
• Ask them to rank things that bring them joy and note if they believe more money would boost their happiness. You could try different methods, one where you include some things that they have to rank, such as gardening, spending time with friends, reading books, learning, etc. Or you could just leave a blank list that they can fill in with their own ideas.
• Study the data to find patterns or trends about income and happiness.

Some studies have found money can boost happiness, especially when it helps people out of tough financial spots. But after reaching a certain income, extra dollars usually do not add much extra joy.

In fact, psychologists just realized that once people have an income that can comfortably support their needs (and some of their wants), they stop getting happier with more . That number is roughly $75,000, but of course that depends on the cost of living and how many members are in the family.

Real-World Impacts of Money and Happiness

If we can understand the link between money and joy, it might help folks choose jobs they love over jobs that just pay well. And instead of buying things, people might spend on experiences, like trips or classes, that make lasting memories.

Most importantly, we all might spend more time on hobbies, friends, and family, knowing they're big parts of what makes life great.

Some people are hoping that with Artificial Intelligence being able to do a lot of the less well-paying jobs, people might be able to do work they enjoy more, all while making more money and having more time to do the things that make them happy.

12) Testing Temperature and Productivity

Have you ever noticed how a cold classroom or office makes it harder to focus? Or how on hot days, all you want to do is relax? In this experiment, we're going to find out if the temperature around us really does change how well we work.

• Find a group of participants and a room where you can change the temperature.
• Set the room to a chilly temperature and give the participants a set of tasks to do.
• Measure how well and quickly they do these tasks.
• The next day, make the room comfortably warm and have them do similar tasks.
• Compare the results to see if the warmer or cooler temperature made them work better.

Some studies have shown that people can work better when they're in a room that feels just right, not too cold or hot. Being too chilly can make fingers slow, and being too warm can make minds wander.

What temperature is "just right"? It won't be the same for everyone, but most people find it's between 70-73 degrees Fahrenheit (21-23 Celsius).

Real-World Implications of Temperature and Productivity

If we can learn more about how temperature affects our work, teachers might set classroom temperatures to help students focus and learn better, offices might adjust temperatures to get the best work out of their teams, and at home, we might find the best temperature for doing homework or chores quickly and well.

Interestingly, temperature also has an impact on our sleep quality. Most people find slightly cooler rooms to be better for good sleep. While the daytime temperature between 70-73F is good for productivity, a nighttime temperature around 65F (18C) is ideal for most people's sleep.

Psychology is like a treasure hunt, where the prize is understanding ourselves better. With every experiment, we learn a little more about why we think, feel, and act the way we do. Some of these experiments might seem simple, like seeing if colors change our mood or if being warm helps us work better. But even the simple questions can have big answers that help us in everyday life.

Remember, while doing experiments is fun, it's also important to always be kind and think about how others feel. We should never make someone uncomfortable just for a test. Instead, let's use these experiments to learn and grow, helping to make the world a brighter, more understanding place for everyone.

Related posts:

• 150+ Flirty Goodnight Texts For Him (Sweet and Naughty Examples)
• Dream Interpreter & Dictionary (270+ Meanings)
• Sleep Stages (Light, Deep, REM)
• What Part of the Brain Regulates Body Temperature?
• Why Do We Dream? (6 Theories and Psychological Reasons)

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Psychology Experiment Ideas

Categories Psychology Education

Quick Ideas | Experiment Ideas | Designing Your Experiment | Types of Research

If you are taking a psychology class, you might at some point be asked to design an imaginary experiment or perform an experiment or study. The idea you ultimately choose to use for your psychology experiment may depend upon the number of participants you can find, the time constraints of your project, and limitations in the materials available to you.

Consider these factors before deciding which psychology experiment idea might work for your project.

This article discusses some ideas you might try if you need to perform a psychology experiment or study.

Table of Contents

A Quick List of Experiment Ideas

If you are looking for a quick experiment idea that would be easy to tackle, the following might be some research questions you want to explore:

• How many items can people hold in short-term memory ?
• Are people with a Type A personality more stressed than those with a Type B personality?
• Does listening to upbeat music increase heart rate?
• Are men or women better at detecting emotions ?
• Are women or men more likely to experience imposter syndrome ?
• Will students conform if others in the group all share an opinion that is different from their own?
• Do people’s heartbeat or breathing rates change in response to certain colors?
• How much do people rely on nonverbal communication to convey information in a conversation?
• Do people who score higher on measures of emotional intelligence also score higher on measures of overall well-being?
• Do more successful people share certain personality traits ?

Most of the following ideas are easily conducted with a small group of participants, who may likely be your classmates. Some of the psychology experiment or study ideas you might want to explore:

Sleep and Short-Term Memory

Does sleep deprivation have an impact on short-term memory ?

Ask participants how much sleep they got the night before and then conduct a task to test short-term memory for items on a list.

Social Media and Mental Health

Is social media usage linked to anxiety or depression?

Ask participants about how many hours a week they use social media sites and then have them complete a depression and anxiety assessment.

Procrastination and Stress

How does procrastination impact student stress levels?

Ask participants about how frequently they procrastinate on their homework and then have them complete an assessment looking at their current stress levels.

Caffeine and Cognition

How does caffeine impact performance on a Stroop test?

In the Stroop test , participants are asked to tell the color of a word, rather than just reading the word. Have a control group consume no caffeine and then complete a Stroop test, and then have an experimental group consume caffeine before completing the same test. Compare results.

Color and Memory

Does the color of text have any impact on memory?

Randomly assign participants to two groups. Have one group memorize words written in black ink for two minutes. Have the second group memorize the same words for the same amount of time, but instead written in red ink. Compare the results.

Weight Bias

How does weight bias influence how people are judged by others?

Find pictures of models in a magazine who look similar, including similar hair and clothing, but who differ in terms of weight. Have participants look at the two models and then ask them to identify which one they think is smarter, wealthier, kinder, and healthier.

Assess how each model was rated and how weight bias may have influenced how they were described by participants.

Music and Exercise

Does music have an effect on how hard people work out?

Have people listen to different styles of music while jogging on a treadmill and measure their walking speed, heart rate, and workout length.

The Halo Effect

How does the Halo Effect influence how people see others?

Show participants pictures of people and ask them to rate the photos in terms of how attractive, kind, intelligent, helpful, and successful the people in the images are.

How does the attractiveness of the person in the photo correlate to how participants rate other qualities? Are attractive people more likely to be perceived as kind, funny, and intelligent?

Eyewitness Testimony

How reliable is eyewitness testimony?

Have participants view video footage of a car crash. Ask some participants to describe how fast the cars were going when they “hit into” each other. Ask other participants to describe how fast the cars were going when they “smashed into” each other.

Give the participants a memory test a few days later and ask them to recall if they saw any broken glass at the accident scene. Compare to see if those in the “smashed into” condition were more likely to report seeing broken glass than those in the “hit into” group.

The experiment is a good illustration of how easily false memories can be triggered.

Simple Psychology Experiment Ideas

If you are looking for a relatively simple psychology experiment idea, here are a few options you might consider.

The Stroop Effect

This classic experiment involves presenting participants with words printed in different colors and asking them to name the color of the ink rather than read the word. Students can manipulate the congruency of the word and the color to test the Stroop effect.

Memory Recall

Students can design a simple experiment to test memory recall by presenting participants with a list of items to remember and then asking them to recall the items after a delay. Students can manipulate the length of the delay or the type of encoding strategy used to see the effect on recall.

Social Conformity

Students can test social conformity by presenting participants with a simple task and manipulating the responses of confederates to see if the participant conforms to the group response.

Selective Attention

Students can design an experiment to test selective attention by presenting participants with a video or audio stimulus and manipulating the presence or absence of a distracting stimulus to see the effect on attention.

Implicit Bias

Students can test implicit bias by presenting participants with a series of words or images and measuring their response time to categorize the stimuli into different categories.

The Primacy/Recency Effect

Students can test the primacy /recency effect by presenting participants with a list of items to remember and manipulating the order of the items to see the effect on recall.

Sleep Deprivation

Students can test the effect of sleep deprivation on cognitive performance by comparing the performance of participants who have had a full night’s sleep to those who have been deprived of sleep.

These are just a few examples of simple psychology experiment ideas for students. The specific experiment will depend on the research question and resources available.

Elements of a Good Psychology Experiment

Finding psychology experiment ideas is not necessarily difficult, but finding a good experimental or study topic that is right for your needs can be a little tough. You need to find something that meets the guidelines and, perhaps most importantly, is approved by your instructor.

Requirements may vary, but you need to ensure that your experiment, study, or survey is:

• Easy to set up and carry out
• Easy to find participants willing to take part
• Free of any ethical concerns

In some cases, you may need to present your idea to your school’s institutional review board before you begin to obtain permission to work with human participants.

Consider Your Own Interests

At some point in your life, you have likely pondered why people behave in certain ways. Or wondered why certain things seem to always happen. Your own interests can be a rich source of ideas for your psychology experiments.

As you are trying to come up with a topic or hypothesis, try focusing on the subjects that fascinate you the most. If you have a particular interest in a topic, look for ideas that answer questions about the topic that you and others may have. Examples of topics you might choose to explore include:

• Development
• Personality
• Social behavior

This can be a fun opportunity to investigate something that appeals to your interests.

Read About Classic Experiments

Sometimes reviewing classic psychological experiments that have been done in the past can give you great ideas for your own psychology experiments. For example, the false memory experiment above is inspired by the classic memory study conducted by Elizabeth Loftus.

Textbooks can be a great place to start looking for topics, but you might want to expand your search to research journals. When you find a study that sparks your interest, read through the discussion section. Researchers will often indicate ideas for future directions that research could take.

Ask Your Instructor

Your professor or instructor is often the best person to consult for advice right from the start.

In most cases, you will probably receive fairly detailed instructions about your assignment. This may include information about the sort of topic you can choose or perhaps the type of experiment or study on which you should focus.

If your instructor does not assign a specific subject area to explore, it is still a great idea to talk about your ideas and get feedback before you get too invested in your topic idea. You will need your teacher’s permission to proceed with your experiment anyway, so now is a great time to open a dialogue and get some good critical feedback.

Experiments vs. Other Types of Research

One thing to note, many of the ideas found here are actually examples of surveys or correlational studies .

For something to qualify as a tru e experiment, there must be manipulation of an independent variable .

For many students, conducting an actual experiment may be outside the scope of their project or may not be permitted by their instructor, school, or institutional review board.

If your assignment or project requires you to conduct a true experiment that involves controlling and manipulating an independent variable, you will need to take care to choose a topic that will work within the guidelines of your assignment.

Types of Psychology Experiments

There are many different types of psychology experiments that students could perform. Examples of psychological research methods you might use include:

Correlational Study

This type of study examines the relationship between two variables. Students could collect data on two variables of interest, such as stress and academic performance, and see if there is a correlation between the two.

Experimental Study

In an experimental study, students manipulate one variable and observe the effect on another variable. For example, students could manipulate the type of music participants listen to and observe its effect on their mood.

Observational Study

Observational studies involve observing behavior in a natural setting . Students could observe how people interact in a public space and analyze the patterns they see.

Survey Study

Students could design a survey to collect data on a specific topic, such as attitudes toward social media, and analyze the results.

A case study involves in-depth analysis of a single individual or group. Students could conduct a case study of a person with a particular disorder, such as anxiety or depression, and examine their experiences and treatment options.

Quasi-Experimental Study

Quasi-experimental studies are similar to experimental studies, but participants are not randomly assigned to groups. Students could investigate the effects of a treatment or intervention on a particular group, such as a classroom of students who receive a new teaching method.

Longitudinal Study

Longitudinal studies involve following participants over an extended period of time. Students could conduct a longitudinal study on the development of language skills in children or the effects of aging on cognitive abilities.

These are just a few examples of the many different types of psychology experiments that students could perform. The specific type of experiment will depend on the research question and the resources available.

Steps for Doing a Psychology Experiment

When conducting a psychology experiment, students should follow several important steps. Here is a general outline of the process:

Define the Research Question

Before conducting an experiment, students should define the research question they are trying to answer. This will help them to focus their study and determine the variables they need to manipulate and measure.

Develop a Hypothesis

Based on the research question, students should develop a hypothesis that predicts the experiment’s outcome. The hypothesis should be testable and measurable.

Select Participants

Students should select participants who meet the criteria for the study. Participants should be informed about the study and give informed consent to participate.

Design the Experiment

Students should design the experiment to test their hypothesis. This includes selecting the appropriate variables, creating a plan for manipulating and measuring them, and determining the appropriate control conditions.

Collect Data

Once the experiment is designed, students should collect data by following the procedures they have developed. They should record all data accurately and completely.

Analyze the Data

After collecting the data, students should analyze it to determine if their hypothesis was supported or not. They can use statistical analyses to determine if there are significant differences between groups or if there are correlations between variables.

Interpret the Results

Based on the analysis, students should interpret the results and draw conclusions about their hypothesis. They should consider the study’s limitations and their findings’ implications.

Report the Results

Finally, students should report the results of their study. This may include writing a research paper or presenting their findings in a poster or oral presentation.

Britt MA. Psych Experiments . Avon, MA: Adams Media; 2007.

Martin DW. Doing Psychology Experiments. Belmont, CA: Cengage Learning; 2008.

Behavioral Economics

Ends vs. means: why does it matter, experiment finding that both ends and means matter opens new line of inquiry..

Updated June 30, 2024 | Reviewed by Devon Frye

• Weighing the means against the goal achieved is irrelevant to rational choice, in one view of economics.
• A study by economists investigates whether doing so is as rare as supposed, and instead finds it to be common.
• However, which means people have qualms about shows no clear pattern.
• People who make unselfish, cooperative decisions are not necessarily the same ones that care about means.

When trade-offs between ends and means come up in conversation, it’s usually in a context in which some clear-cut harm must be suffered by someone in order for a desired good to be achieved for others. To prevent a terrorist from attacking civilians, for example, one may have to weigh the collateral damage likely to be suffered by innocent bystanders. To reduce the commute times of large numbers of motorists, one may need to cut through what was once an undivided neighborhood and erect barriers that will sunder the fabric of an unluckily situated community.

A new study by economists Roland Bénabou, Armin Falk, and Luca Henkel considers a class of ends-means trade-offs in which—unlike those examples—the unappetizing aspect of the path to a desired end is not a harm done to anyone in particular. Rather, it’s having to violate a principle, moral norm, or ideal that the actor tries adhering to whenever possible.

As an archetypal example, the authors quote Emmanuel Kant’s claim that telling a lie can never be justified. Kant, the authors say, argued that saving a friend or family member from embarrassment , or even helping to alleviate another’s suffering, are never acceptable justifications for lying .

As another example, they consider expressing approval of a repugnant statement. What if you could achieve a highly commendable goal, like having your contribution to cancer research or refugee assistance tripled, provided that you express agreement with what you consider to be a reprehensible declaration, such as “I think that the environment should be destroyed,” or “I agree that the U.S. should stop accepting immigrants from ‘shithole countries’”? (Recall poor Galileo, who in 1633 was threatened by the Inquisition if he did not recant his support of the Copernican view that the earth revolves around the sun. Here, making an abhorrent statement permitted him to avoid torture or possible death.)

Suppose, now, that your abhorrent statement will be made in total secrecy, assuring that it can have no nefarious influence on your own reputation or on the opinions others will hold about the referenced issues. Doesn’t the good end easily justify the nauseating means? Wouldn’t it be the height of irrationality to hesitate to click your approval to the statement, if you had an iron-clad guarantee that nobody would find out?

The authors include one of the leading economic theorists concerned with the impact of self-image and moral value concerns and one of the top designers of studies on interpersonal cooperation and conflict using experimental lab and survey techniques. They elicited multiple decisions by study participants, decisions which were grouped into three clusters.

The first cluster studied willingness to violate norms (such as the norm against lying, and that against making disbelieved and reprehensible statements) if doing so was required to help others (such as having the experimenter release funding to a medical charity). The second cluster studied willingness to sacrifice some potential money earnings from the study in order to deliver more earnings or benefits to other individuals—for example, voluntarily contributing to a joint investment project, as discussed elsewhere in this blog. In other words, the second set of decisions were conventional tests of having other-regarding or altruistic concerns, tests that have typically concluded that such concerns are widely held.

The third cluster consisted of answering survey questions widely used to measure moral values, including modules known as the Oxford Utilitarian Scale (Kahane et al., 2018), the Moral Foundations Questionnaire (Graham et al., 2011), the Moral Universalism module (Enke, Rodriguez-Padilla and Zimmermann, 2022), and a classical Trolley dilemma.

What the Researchers Found

The main findings of the study can be summarized by five statements.

First, a considerable number of study participants—specifically, between 20 and 44 percent, depending on the objectionable means in question—appeared to be unwilling to engage in the unsavory but inconsequential behavior as a means to achieve a benevolent goal.

Second, those who acted as if unwilling to accept some of the ends-means trade-offs were willing to accept several others, without any evident pattern as to which sets of means would tend to be unacceptable to given subsets of participants (say male vs. female, or religious vs. non-religious). There was not, for example, an identifiable subset of participants who tended to reject most of the objectionable means cases while most other participants acted as if concerned only about the ends, never rejecting any of the means studied.

Third, in contrast to the previous point, individuals did tend to display considerable consistency with regard to how selfishly or unselfishly they behaved in the second cluster of decisions, the ones in which self-interest and altruism or cooperation were in conflict. That is, an individual who was relatively unselfish on some tasks (for instance, contributing to the group investment) also tended to be relatively unselfish on other tasks (for instance, dividing an endowment between themselves and an anonymous other individual).

Fourth, there was almost no correlation between the degree of hesitation to engage in unsavory but inconsequential actions, on the one hand, and the degree of willingness to engage in unselfish actions, on the other. Thus, having strong abstract values, such as a strong desire to avoid lying, to identify as non-racist or non-sexist, or to refuse to pay or accept bribes, was—perhaps surprisingly—not correlated with being strongly “pro-social” or unselfish in consequential choices. This means that whereas decisions in the first block seemed unrelated to one another and those in the second block seemed strongly related to each other, first- and second-block decisions were uncorrelated.

Finally, there were correlations among responses to the survey style moral values questions of the third block, indicating that elements of the different surveys tend to similarly distinguish between individuals claiming to hold more demanding moral values and those not doing so. However, responses to questions in the third block had little predictive power with respect to decisions in the other two blocks, with a few notable exceptions.

The strongest of those exceptions was that a “trolley-dilemma”-like means-ends conflict constructed by the authors for the first block of the experiment was a good predictor of responses to the classically phrased trolley dilemma of the third block, confirming that subjects understood the first block’s trolley-like problem similarly to the classically phrased hypothetical one in the third block. (In a trolley dilemma, an individual tells the interviewer or answers a questionnaire about whether they would be willing to push a large stranger off of a bridge and onto a trolley track, where the individual would die with certainty, if they knew for sure that this would prevent a run-away trolley car from killing five individuals standing further down the track.)

Why This Matters for Behavioral Economics

The most important takeaway from this research might not lie in the specific results just reviewed so much as in the way in which it begins to open up a "next frontier" in the field of behavioral economics.

The initial decades of economists’ research into the social and normative side of human behavior and its impact on aspects of economic life (like willingness to pay taxes, voluntary compliance in matters like recycling, or adherence to norms constraining corruption in the public sector) focused mainly on willingness to forego private rewards for the sake of fairness, loyalty, or group advancement. It also studied altruism, philanthropy, and willingness to incur costs in order to punish unfairness and norm violation.

These bodies of research helped economists to admit that the caricature of perfectly selfish decision-making had been an impediment to a better understanding of the complexity of human interaction. But most of this work remained focused on material payoffs, as if the actors in question considered only such consequences, and were fully indifferent to the means by which consequences were brought about.

Roland Bénabou, Armin Falk and Luca Henkel, “Ends versus Means: Kantians, Utilitarians, and Moral Decisions,” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. 32074, Jan. 2024.

Benjamin Enke, Ricardo Rodríguez-Padilla, and Florian Zimmermann (2022). “Moral Universalism: Measurement and Economic Relevance.” Management Science 68 (5): 3590–603.

Jesse Graham, Brian A. Nosek, Jonathan Haidt, Ravi Iyer, Spassena Koleva, and Peter H. Ditto (2011). “Mapping the Moral Domain.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 101 (2): 366–85.

Guy Kahane, Jim A.C. Everett, Brian D. Earp, Lucius Caviola, Nadira S. Faber, Molly J. Crockett, and Julian Savulescu (2018). “Beyond sacrificial harm: A two-dimensional model of utilitarian psychology”. Psychological Review 125 (2): 131–64.

Louis Putterman, Ph.D., is an economics professor at Brown.

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How to Conduct a Psychology Experiment

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

Emily is a board-certified science editor who has worked with top digital publishing brands like Voices for Biodiversity, Study.com, GoodTherapy, Vox, and Verywell.

Conducting your first psychology experiment can be a long, complicated, and sometimes intimidating process. It can be especially confusing if you are not quite sure where to begin or which steps to take.

Like other sciences, psychology utilizes the  scientific method  and bases conclusions upon empirical evidence. When conducting an experiment, it is important to follow the seven basic steps of the scientific method:

• Ask a testable question
• Define your variables
• Conduct background research
• Design your experiment
• Perform the experiment
• Collect and analyze the data
• Draw conclusions
• Share the results with the scientific community

At a Glance

It's important to know the steps of the scientific method if you are conducting an experiment in psychology or other fields. The processes encompasses finding a problem you want to explore, learning what has already been discovered about the topic, determining your variables, and finally designing and performing your experiment. But the process doesn't end there! Once you've collected your data, it's time to analyze the numbers, determine what they mean, and share what you've found.

Find a Research Problem or Question

Picking a research problem can be one of the most challenging steps when you are conducting an experiment. After all, there are so many different topics you might choose to investigate.

Are you stuck for an idea? Consider some of the following:

Investigate a Commonly Held Belief

Folk knowledge is a good source of questions that can serve as the basis for psychological research. For example, many people believe that staying up all night to cram for a big exam can actually hurt test performance.

You could conduct a study to compare the test scores of students who stayed up all night with the scores of students who got a full night's sleep before the exam.

Review Psychology Literature

Published studies are a great source of unanswered research questions. In many cases, the authors will even note the need for further research. Find a published study that you find intriguing, and then come up with some questions that require further exploration.

Think About Everyday Problems

There are many practical applications for psychology research. Explore various problems that you or others face each day, and then consider how you could research potential solutions. For example, you might investigate different memorization strategies to determine which methods are most effective.

Define Your Variables

Variables are anything that might impact the outcome of your study. An operational definition describes exactly what the variables are and how they are measured within the context of your study.

For example, if you were doing a study on the impact of sleep deprivation on driving performance, you would need to operationally define sleep deprivation and driving performance .

An operational definition refers to a precise way that an abstract concept will be measured. For example, you cannot directly observe and measure something like test anxiety . You can, however, use an anxiety scale and assign values based on how many anxiety symptoms a person is experiencing. 

In this example, you might define sleep deprivation as getting less than seven hours of sleep at night. You might define driving performance as how well a participant does on a driving test.

What is the purpose of operationally defining variables? The main purpose is control. By understanding what you are measuring, you can control for it by holding the variable constant between all groups or manipulating it as an independent variable .

Develop a Hypothesis

The next step is to develop a testable hypothesis that predicts how the operationally defined variables are related. In the recent example, the hypothesis might be: "Students who are sleep-deprived will perform worse than students who are not sleep-deprived on a test of driving performance."

Null Hypothesis

In order to determine if the results of the study are significant, it is essential to also have a null hypothesis. The null hypothesis is the prediction that one variable will have no association to the other variable.

In other words, the null hypothesis assumes that there will be no difference in the effects of the two treatments in our experimental and control groups .

The null hypothesis is assumed to be valid unless contradicted by the results. The experimenters can either reject the null hypothesis in favor of the alternative hypothesis or not reject the null hypothesis.

It is important to remember that not rejecting the null hypothesis does not mean that you are accepting the null hypothesis. To say that you are accepting the null hypothesis is to suggest that something is true simply because you did not find any evidence against it. This represents a logical fallacy that should be avoided in scientific research.  

Conduct Background Research

Once you have developed a testable hypothesis, it is important to spend some time doing some background research. What do researchers already know about your topic? What questions remain unanswered?

You can learn about previous research on your topic by exploring books, journal articles, online databases, newspapers, and websites devoted to your subject.

Reading previous research helps you gain a better understanding of what you will encounter when conducting an experiment. Understanding the background of your topic provides a better basis for your own hypothesis.

After conducting a thorough review of the literature, you might choose to alter your own hypothesis. Background research also allows you to explain why you chose to investigate your particular hypothesis and articulate why the topic merits further exploration.

As you research the history of your topic, take careful notes and create a working bibliography of your sources. This information will be valuable when you begin to write up your experiment results.

Select an Experimental Design

After conducting background research and finalizing your hypothesis, your next step is to develop an experimental design. There are three basic types of designs that you might utilize. Each has its own strengths and weaknesses:

Pre-Experimental Design

A single group of participants is studied, and there is no comparison between a treatment group and a control group. Examples of pre-experimental designs include case studies (one group is given a treatment and the results are measured) and pre-test/post-test studies (one group is tested, given a treatment, and then retested).

Quasi-Experimental Design

This type of experimental design does include a control group but does not include randomization. This type of design is often used if it is not feasible or ethical to perform a randomized controlled trial.

True Experimental Design

A true experimental design, also known as a randomized controlled trial, includes both of the elements that pre-experimental designs and quasi-experimental designs lack—control groups and random assignment to groups.

Standardize Your Procedures

In order to arrive at legitimate conclusions, it is essential to compare apples to apples.

Each participant in each group must receive the same treatment under the same conditions.

For example, in our hypothetical study on the effects of sleep deprivation on driving performance, the driving test must be administered to each participant in the same way. The driving course must be the same, the obstacles faced must be the same, and the time given must be the same.

Choose Your Participants

In addition to making sure that the testing conditions are standardized, it is also essential to ensure that your pool of participants is the same.

If the individuals in your control group (those who are not sleep deprived) all happen to be amateur race car drivers while your experimental group (those that are sleep deprived) are all people who just recently earned their driver's licenses, your experiment will lack standardization.

When choosing subjects, there are some different techniques you can use.

Simple Random Sample

In a simple random sample, the participants are randomly selected from a group. A simple random sample can be used to represent the entire population from which the representative sample is drawn.

Drawing a simple random sample can be helpful when you don't know a lot about the characteristics of the population.

Stratified Random Sample

Participants must be randomly selected from different subsets of the population. These subsets might include characteristics such as geographic location, age, sex, race, or socioeconomic status.

Stratified random samples are more complex to carry out. However, you might opt for this method if there are key characteristics about the population that you want to explore in your research.

Conduct Tests and Collect Data

After you have selected participants, the next steps are to conduct your tests and collect the data. Before doing any testing, however, there are a few important concerns that need to be addressed.

Address Ethical Concerns

First, you need to be sure that your testing procedures are ethical . Generally, you will need to gain permission to conduct any type of testing with human participants by submitting the details of your experiment to your school's Institutional Review Board (IRB), sometimes referred to as the Human Subjects Committee.

Obtain Informed Consent

After you have gained approval from your institution's IRB, you will need to present informed consent forms to each participant. This form offers information on the study, the data that will be gathered, and how the results will be used. The form also gives participants the option to withdraw from the study at any point in time.

Once this step has been completed, you can begin administering your testing procedures and collecting the data.

Analyze the Results

After collecting your data, it is time to analyze the results of your experiment. Researchers use statistics to determine if the results of the study support the original hypothesis and if the results are statistically significant.

Statistical significance means that the study's results are unlikely to have occurred simply by chance.

The types of statistical methods you use to analyze your data depend largely on the type of data that you collected. If you are using a random sample of a larger population, you will need to utilize inferential statistics.

These statistical methods make inferences about how the results relate to the population at large.

Because you are making inferences based on a sample, it has to be assumed that there will be a certain margin of error. This refers to the amount of error in your results. A large margin of error means that there will be less confidence in your results, while a small margin of error means that you are more confident that your results are an accurate reflection of what exists in that population.

Share Your Results After Conducting an Experiment

Your final task in conducting an experiment is to communicate your results. By sharing your experiment with the scientific community, you are contributing to the knowledge base on that particular topic.

One of the most common ways to share research results is to publish the study in a peer-reviewed professional journal. Other methods include sharing results at conferences, in book chapters, or academic presentations.

In your case, it is likely that your class instructor will expect a formal write-up of your experiment in the same format required in a professional journal article or lab report :

• Introduction
• Tables and figures

What This Means For You

Designing and conducting a psychology experiment can be quite intimidating, but breaking the process down step-by-step can help. No matter what type of experiment you decide to perform, always check with your instructor and your school's institutional review board for permission before you begin.

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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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The influence of state authenticity on the sense of meaning in life of middle school students: evidence from a daily diary investigation and an authenticity enhancement experiment, share and cite.

Yan, S.; Tang, W. The Influence of State Authenticity on the Sense of Meaning in Life of Middle School Students: Evidence from a Daily Diary Investigation and an Authenticity Enhancement Experiment. Behav. Sci. 2024 , 14 , 550. https://doi.org/10.3390/bs14070550

Yan S, Tang W. The Influence of State Authenticity on the Sense of Meaning in Life of Middle School Students: Evidence from a Daily Diary Investigation and an Authenticity Enhancement Experiment. Behavioral Sciences . 2024; 14(7):550. https://doi.org/10.3390/bs14070550

Yan, Shan, and Weihai Tang. 2024. "The Influence of State Authenticity on the Sense of Meaning in Life of Middle School Students: Evidence from a Daily Diary Investigation and an Authenticity Enhancement Experiment" Behavioral Sciences 14, no. 7: 550. https://doi.org/10.3390/bs14070550

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