psychology experiments to do on friends

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)

Reference this article:

About The Author

Free Personality Test

Free Memory Test

Free IQ Test

PracticalPie.com is a participant in the Amazon Associates Program. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.

Follow Us On:

Youtube Facebook Instagram X/Twitter

Psychology Resources

Developmental

Personality

Relationships

Psychologists

Serial Killers

Psychology Tests

Personality Quiz

Memory Test

Depression test

Type A/B Personality Test

© PracticalPsychology. All rights reserved

Privacy Policy | Terms of Use

The science of why friendships keep us healthy

American culture prioritizes romance, but psychological science is exploring the human need for platonic relationships and the specific ways in which they bolster well-being

Vol. 54 No. 4 Print version: page 42

• Health and Behavior

American culture places a high premium on romantic love. In fact, relationship woes—or the lack thereof—are among the top reasons people seek therapy. And while romance can be a meaningful part of life, the benefits of friendships should not be overlooked. Psychological research suggests that stable, healthy friendships are crucial for our well-being and longevity.

People who have friends and close confidants are more satisfied with their lives and less likely to suffer from depression ( Choi, K. W., et al., The American Journal of Psychiatry , Vol. 177, No. 10, 2020 ). They’re also less likely to die from all causes, including heart problems and a range of chronic diseases ( Holt-Lunstad, J., et al., PLOS Medicine , Vol. 7, No. 7, 2010 ; Steptoe, A., et al., PNAS , Vol. 110, No. 15, 2013 ).

“On the other hand, when people are low in social connection—because of isolation, loneliness, or poor-quality relationships—they face an increased risk of premature death,” said Julianne Holt-Lunstad, PhD, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Brigham Young University who studies how relationships affect the body and brain.

Fortunately, research also suggests that friendships can be made and maintained at any age, relationships with friends can strengthen or stand in for romantic relationships, and even minimal social interactions can be powerful.

[ Related: Conversations are powerful. Here are ways to embrace the awkward and deepen relationships ]

“Friendship is something we really need to understand. There’s been this preoccupation with romantic relationships, but many of our close relationships are with friends,” said Thalia Wheatley, PhD, a professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Dartmouth College who studies social connectivity. “So how do they impact our health?”

How friendship changes the body and brain

Psychological research from around the world shows that having social connections is one of the most reliable predictors of a long, healthy, and satisfying life.

A review of 38 studies found that adult friendships, especially high-quality ones that provide social support and companionship, significantly predict well-being and can protect against mental health issues such as depression and anxiety—and those benefits persist across the life span ( Pezirkianidis, C., et al., Frontiers in Psychology , Vol. 14, 2023 ; Blieszner, R., et al., Innovation in Aging , Vol. 3, No. 1, 2019 ). People with no friends or poor-quality friendships are twice as likely to die prematurely, according to Holt-Lunstad’s meta-analysis of more than 308,000 people—a risk factor even greater than the effects of smoking 20 cigarettes per day ( PLOS Medicine , Vol. 7, No. 7, 2010 ).

“In the face of life’s challenges, having a close friend to turn to seems to be a buffer or protective factor against some of the negative outcomes we might otherwise see,” said Catherine Bagwell, PhD, a professor of psychology at Davidson College in North Carolina.

Friendships protect us in part by changing the way we respond to stress. Blood pressure reactivity is lower when people talk to a supportive friend rather than a friend whom they feel ambivalent about ( Holt-Lunstad, J., et al., Annals of Behavioral Medicine , Vol. 33, No. 3, 2007 ). Participants who have a friend by their side while completing a tough task have less heart rate reactivity than those working alone ( Kamarck, T. W., et al., Psychosomatic Medicine , Vol. 52, No. 1, 1990 ). In one study, people even judged a hill to be less steep when they were accompanied by a friend ( Schnall, S., et al., Journal of Experimental Social Psychology , Vol. 44, No. 5, 2008 ).

Scientists studying friendship have even found similar brain activity among friends in regions responsible for a range of functions, including motivation, reward, identity, and sensory processing ( Güroğlu, B., Child Development Perspectives , Vol. 16, No. 2, 2022 ). When Wheatley and her colleagues collected fMRI data on people in a social network, closer friends had more similar brain activity when watching a series of video clips ( Nature Communications , Vol. 9, 2018 ). In another study, currently under review, she and her colleagues can even begin to predict whether first-year MBA students at Dartmouth will later become friends based solely on their neural patterns.

“The big surprise here is that the similarities are all over the brain, including regions that control how we direct our attention, how we think about things, and even what we’re looking at,” Wheatley said.

The risks of social isolation

On the other side of the coin, research has shown that loneliness—among people who lack quality friendships, romantic partnerships, or other relationships—increases our risk for heart attack, stroke, and premature death, according to a longitudinal study of nearly 480,000 U.K. residents ( Hakulinen, C., et al., Heart , Vol. 104, No. 18, 2018 ). A meta-analysis by Holt-Lunstad estimates that loneliness increases the risk of early death as much as 26% ( Perspectives on Psychological Science , Vol. 10, No. 2, 2015 ).

Those findings have prompted leading health organizations, including the American Heart Association and the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), to warn the public against the dangers of isolation, particularly for older adults ( Cené, C. W., et al., Journal of the American Heart Association , Vol. 11, No. 16, 2022 ; Social Isolation and Loneliness in Older Adults: Opportunities for the Health Care System , NASEM, 2020).

Despite the risks, Americans are getting lonelier. In 2021, 12% of U.S. adults said they did not have any close friends, up from 3% in 1990 ( “The State of American Friendship: Change, Challenges, and Loss,” Survey Center on American Life, 2021 ). That decline began well before the Covid -19 pandemic, with companionship and social engagement among friends, family, and others decreasing steadily over the past two decades ( Kannan, V. D., & Veazie, P. J., SSM – Population Health , Vol. 21, 2023 ).

Social disconnection, which is rising across age groups, appears to have worsened after 2012, when smartphones and social media became virtually ubiquitous. An international study of high school students found that between 2012 and 2018, school loneliness increased in 36 of 37 countries ( Twenge, J. M., et al., Journal of Adolescence , Vol. 93, No. 1, 2021 ).

“There were significant downward trends in social contact even before the pandemic,” Holt-Lunstad said. “What’s remarkable about that is that ‘getting back to normal’ is not going to be enough—because it wasn’t looking good before.”

The Covid -19 pandemic likely exacerbated an existing trend toward social isolation—and it also provided a natural way for scientists to measure the effects of that shift. Bagwell and psychologist Karen Kochel, PhD, of the University of Richmond, found that college students with less social support from their friends during the first year of the pandemic also had more problems with anxiety, depression, and academic adjustment ( Emerging Adulthood , Vol. 10, No. 5, 2022 ).

“For these students, their relationships with their friends and peers were quite significant in predicting how they were doing, both academically and in terms of their emotional adjustment,” Bagwell said.

[ Related: Making new friends and keeping existing ones is hard. Here’s some science-backed tips to help ]

The strength of “weak” ties

Having a close friend or confidant is undeniably good for us, but psychologists have found that interactions with acquaintances—and even strangers—can also give our mental health a boost. A casual relationship with the operator of a hot dog stand in Toronto helped Gillian Sandstrom, PhD, feel grounded and connected while pursuing her master’s degree. The relationship also inspired Sandstrom, now a senior lecturer in psychology at the University of Sussex, to start studying “weak” social ties.

These connections with acquaintances—a work friend you bump into once a week, the pet store employee who remembers your cat—can be surprisingly sustaining. Sandstrom’s research has found that people who have more weak-tie interactions are happier than those who have fewer and that people tend to be happier on days when they have more than their average number of weak-tie interactions ( Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin , Vol. 40, No. 7, 2014 ). She also encourages talking to strangers and has shown that repeated practice can make doing so easier and more enjoyable ( Journal of Experimental Social Psychology , Vol. 102, 2022 ).

“These minimal social interactions give us something important that we missed during the pandemic: novelty,” Sandstrom said. “We learn surprising things when we have unplanned encounters and conversations with people,” a benefit that people tend to underestimate ( Atir, S., et al., PNAS , Vol. 119, No. 34, 2022 ).

People often avoid conversations with strangers, assuming they will be awkward or shallow, but research suggests those worries may be overblown. Psychologist Nicholas Epley, PhD, of the University of Chicago, and his colleagues have found that conversations with strangers tend to be less awkward, more enjoyable, and more connecting than people expect. To their own surprise, people also tend to prefer having deep conversations with strangers over shallow ones ( Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , Vol. 122, No. 3, 2022 ).

Sandstrom has some advice for connecting with strangers: Tap into your curiosity. Ask someone what they’re reading, for example, or why they’re wearing airplane earrings. Another tip: Comment on the shared situation. While standing in the checkout line at a mini-mart, Sandstrom once connected with a fellow customer over the store’s unusual mishmash of Halloween and Christmas decorations.

“You’re in the same place at the same time as the other person, so there’s always something in common,” she said.

Lovers and friends

We tend to see friendship and romance as separate entities, but the two may have more in common than we realize. Psychological research points to qualities such as chemistry, intimacy, and warmth as key building blocks of close, stable friendships ( Ledbetter, A. M., et al., Personal Relationships , Vol. 14, No. 2, 2007 ; Campbell, K., et al., The Social Science Journal , Vol. 52, No. 2, 2015 ).

Regular interactions with acquaintances—the local coffee barista, for example—make people happier.

“When we view behaviors that create intimacy—being vulnerable, buying gifts, taking someone out on a date—as only appropriate for a romantic relationship, we end up limiting the potential of our friendships,” said psychologist Marisa G. Franco, PhD, an assistant clinical professor at the University of Maryland and author of Platonic , a book about making and keeping friends. “Many of us could really benefit from blurring the lines between the two.”

Conversely, romantic relationships may be more fulfilling if they look more like friendships. An analysis of nearly 8,000 respondents to the British Household Panel Survey showed that life satisfaction was about twice as high among people who said their spouse was also their best friend ( “How’s Life at Home? New Evidence on Marriage and the Set Point for Happiness,” NBER Working Paper No. 20794, 2014 ).

Research also suggests a symbiosis between romantic and platonic relationships, Franco said, suggesting that one can benefit the other. For example, marital conflict can trigger unhealthy changes in cortisol levels, but that harm is buffered when spouses feel they have adequate social support outside the marriage ( Keneski, E., et al., Social Psychological and Personality Science , Vol. 9, No. 8, 2017 ). Other research indicates that women who have social support are more resilient to stress that occurs within a marriage ( Abbas, J., et al., Journal of Affective Disorders , Vol. 244, 2019 ).

There’s also reason to believe that skills developed in friendships can be carried forward into healthier romantic relationships, particularly among teens and young adults.

“Friendships are the first relationships in life that we get to freely choose,” said Melanie Dirks, PhD, a professor of psychology at McGill University in Montreal who studies peer relationships in children, adolescents, and young adults. “Because of that, they present a really important opportunity to learn how to navigate challenging interpersonal situations before we enter relationships as adults.”

For example, self-disclosure between friends—sharing thoughts and feelings—helps young adults build empathy for others, practice seeking and providing social support, and even solidify their identities, said Rebecca Schwartz-Mette, PhD, an associate professor of clinical psychology and director of the Peer Relations Lab at the University of Maine who studies friendship in children, adolescents, and young adults.

Many young adults in the United States are juggling life transitions, stress, and developmental challenges—and friends are typically their main sources of social support, which makes them critical for psychologists to study and understand, said Dirks.

She has studied the types of challenges that tend to arise in young adult friendships, finding that they undergo strain for one of three reasons: needs are in conflict (for example: there’s one spot on a sports team that both friends want); a transgression occurs (for example: one friend reveals private information about the other); or friends have trouble exchanging support (for example: one has a problem with alcohol use, but the other doesn’t know how to help) ( Journal of Research on Adolescence , Vol. 31, No. 2, 2021 ).

In childhood and adolescence, high-quality friendships can protect kids from mental health issues—such as anxiety and depression—that might otherwise result from social challenges, including being bullied ( Bayer, J. K., et al., Child and Adolescent Mental Health , Vol. 23, No. 4, 2018 ). But there are also conditions where mental health struggles can harm friendships. Schwartz-Mette and her colleagues have found that between friends, excessive self-disclosure about life’s challenges (known as “corumination”) can trigger distancing within a friendship or even lead to the social contagion of depression, self-injury, and suicidality ( Developmental Psychology , Vol. 50, No. 9, 2014 ; Journal of Clinical Child & Adolescent Psychology , Vol. 47, No. 6, 2018 ).

“Our goal in isolating these different friendship trajectories is to inform interventions for people who are distressed—so that they can keep their relationships and have that crucial social support but not overtax or overstress their relationship partners,” Schwartz-Mette said.

Supporting healthy friendships

Given the clear benefits of friendship, psychologists say we should promote platonic social connection across society—including in school, at work, in public spaces (such as on public transportation), and through entertainment.

“After having to reduce social contact during the pandemic, we’ve realized how it impacts basically every sector of society,” said Holt-Lunstad. “That suggests that each of these sectors can potentially play a role in solutions.”

Researchers still have a lot to learn about how and why social connection supports health and well-being. The National Institutes of Health and other organizations are distributing funding for studies on “dyadic processes”—or interactions between two people—including exciting new efforts to collect fMRI data on friends while they communicate.

“What we know is that if we don’t interact regularly, things go really bad remarkably fast. But what is the magic in these interactions that’s keeping us healthy and sane?” Wheatley asked. “More and more researchers are saying there’s this huge part of human behavior we know very little about. Let’s change that.”

Further resources

The role of friendships in well-being Fehr, B., & Harasmychuk, C. In Maddux, J. E. (Ed.), Subjective Well-Being and Life Satisfaction, Routledge , 2017

Beyond the isolated brain: The promise and challenge of interacting minds Wheatley, T., et al., Neuron , 2019

Adult friendship and wellbeing: A systematic review with practical implications Pezirkianidis, C., et al., Frontiers in Psychology , 2023

What prevents people from making friends: A taxonomy of reasons Apostolou, M., & Keramari, D., Personality and Individual Differences , 2020

Recommended Reading

Six Things Psychologists are Talking About

The APA Monitor on Psychology ® sister e-newsletter offers fresh articles on psychology trends, new research, and more.

Welcome! Thank you for subscribing.

Speaking of Psychology

Subscribe to APA’s audio podcast series highlighting some of the most important and relevant psychological research being conducted today.

Subscribe to Speaking of Psychology and download via:

Contact APA

You may also like.

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.

How to make stress your friend

Does money make you mean?

The optimism bias

How reliable is your memory?

Don't eat the marshmallow!

The strange politics of disgust

Your body language may shape who you are

The art of choosing

Our buggy moral code

• Random article
• Teaching guide
• Privacy & cookies

10 great psychology experiments

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

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

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

1: Are you really paying attention? (Simons & Chabris, 1999)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you liked this article...

Don't want to read our articles try listening instead, find out more, on this website.

• Introduction to psychology
• The science of chocolate
• Neural networks
• Science of happiness

Other websites

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

• Get the book
• Send feedback

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.

8 Effective Social Psychology Experiments & Activities For High School Students

In school, social interaction plays a crucial role and forms the core of one’s academic life. Have you ever been curious about what others are thinking? Have you ever found yourself wondering about the thoughts and opinions of others? This is something that crosses everyone’s mind. The study of social psychology gives you a peek into some of these interesting stances. 

Social psychology is a field of psychology that investigates how the social environment shapes people’s thoughts, beliefs, and behavior. By studying social psychology, one can gain a deeper understanding of people’s actions and the consequences they have. Furthermore, engaging in practical experiments and activities can make this subject even more fascinating. 

In this post, you will find such engaging specific activities that will offer students valuable hands-on experience in the field of social psychology, allowing them to gain practical knowledge and insights into this fascinating subject matter.

Social psychology experiments and activities for high school students 

Here are a few interesting experiments and activities for high school students to learn about social psychology : 

1. Bystander effect simulation

The bystander effect [ 1 ] is a social psychology phenomenon that studies how an individual is unlikely to help in an urgent situation if surrounded by other people. Students can conduct experiments to study this effect in controlled settings. They can choose a social setting and select one person to pretend to need help, such as someone with a false injury struggling to cross the road or gather scattered items. 

The remaining students can observe their behavior while amongst the public.  This experiment aims to display the phenomenon called “diffusion of responsibility”. It will also help one understand the importance of helping people, acts of kindness , and empathetic understanding. Understanding the Bystander effect helps one understand the concept of social initiation, and can further be useful when a real social situation needs their intervention. 

2. Conformity experiment 

People tend to change their beliefs to match what they think is normal, which is called conformity bias. An experiment can be done to test this by asking a group of students to guess the length of a rod from three choices (25 cm, 30 cm, and 40 cm), with 25 cm being the correct answer. 

Some students might be told to give the wrong answer (like 40 cm) and act like they are sure it’s right, giving confident explanations for the same. This creates a situation of peer pressure and social conformity, making the students want to fit in and therefore agree with the group.

Other students might start to do the same thing as well to fit in with their friends. This experiment shows how conformity bias works. It also teaches students about the effects of peer pressure and social conformity, and how acting like others can affect things like confidence.

3. The marshmallow test 

The marshmallow test is a study about delaying pleasure, called delayed gratification. This happens when something else gets in the way of enjoying something right away. In an experiment such as this, immediate gratification can be understood as being given something delicious and eating it immediately. High school students can perform this experiment on preschoolers who are between three and five years old. 

The students will randomly select a few children and observe them individually. Each child will be given one marshmallow at a time and will be told that they will be given one more marshmallow if they resist eating this one until the observer returns. This is the process of delayed gratification [ 2 ]

The students would then observe and note the number of kids who attempted and succeeded in doing the same, and see if it agrees with their hypothesis. This test can help the students learn the importance of delayed gratification and how one can apply it to build virtues like discipline and organization.

4. Group polarization experiments 

The society contributes tremendously to forming one’s beliefs, prejudices, stereotypes, and notions. This particular experiment focuses on how societal agreements and discussions can strengthen already existing beliefs, lead them to extremities, and increase the rigidity of one’s thoughts. 

These experiments can take place both in classrooms and among peer groups. The first step is for students to express their opinions on a specific societal topic, such as gender norms. Then, the teacher can split the students into pairs, each holding a different viewpoint. 

The pairs will engage in discussions about the topic, sharing their personal opinions and biases. This increases their insight into the topic and open to more agreeable or disagreeable opinions. As the next step, the students will be asked their personal stance on the same topics again after the discussion. 

As per the hypothesis, their opinions will be more diversely spread and will have an increased intensity. This will help them notice any changes in the level of emphasis, aggressiveness, and rigidity of their opinions before and after the discussion. This experiment helps one realize the social effect on the rigidity of one’s thought formation and how social construct plays a role in molding one’s beliefs and values to polarized extremities. 

5. Mirror neurons 

The brain has a fascinating component called mirror neurons. Just like mirror images,  these are activated by subconsciously copying or adapting to performing any action or feeling a certain emotion, because others are doing so.

This explains why laughter can be contagious, or when your friend feels sad without any apparent reason, you begin feeling down in the dumps too. This indicates how we have the natural ability to empathize and feel others’ emotions only by imagining us being in their shoes, or even by being in the same environment as they are. Conducting experiments and activities, such as imitation, can help us understand the workings of mirror neurons. 

In a classroom or peer group setting, students can choose to perform a skit based on a story they know, but they must play a character they don’t particularly like. For instance, a student who dislikes Draco Malfoy from the Harry Potter series may be assigned to play that character. After the skit, the students can discuss the character traits of the parts they played and the qualities they possess.

In the end, it will be seen that the students have developed a sense of understanding and empathy towards the character that they previously disliked, by being in the same character for some time. Through these exercises, the students can learn how mirror neurons foster empathy, increase understanding, and make it easier to take on different perspectives. 

6. Nonverbal cues and communication

Societal construct is built in a way that puts so much emphasis on communication skills but ironically conducts it more in nonverbal ways. For high school students, it is not only important for them to be aware of its importance, but to learn it through the perspective of social psychology. This can be manifested as a learning-based class activity similar to the game of dumb charades. 

In this activity, the teacher or a peer will split the students into two teams. Then, one member from each team will be chosen to stand in front of the class and be given a list of emotions to express through facial expressions. Starting with simple emotions like happiness and sadness, they will gradually move on to more complex emotions like anticipation, confusion, grief, and sarcasm. 

The other team members will have to guess the nonverbal cues being portrayed by their teammates and will earn five points for every correct guess. By working together, the class can gain a better understanding of nonverbal communication and its significant impact on even the smallest interactions. This fosters collaborative engagement and teamwork, along with increasing understanding and receptive levels. 

7. Foot-in-the-door experiment

The foot-in-the-door technique is derived from the English idiom that means getting an initial start to something. This technique is studied in social psychology as a strategy used usually in the corporate or marketing sector. This social phenomenon can be observed in the form of organizing an activity like role play . 

The class will be split into pairs, and each pair will act out a marketing scenario. For example, they might choose to sell a skincare product. In the scenario, the salesperson will start by offering a free sample product and explaining its qualities. This small request is more likely to be accepted by the customer as it does not require much attention or effort, or any form of financial demand. 

Then, the salesperson will slowly follow up by convincing the customer to buy the product after trying it and agreeing with the description. In a social situation like this, it builds pressure on the customer to maintain the same agreeable behavior as before, which is why the customer will be more likely to buy the product. This experiment helps the student learn about social conformity and how society plays a role in shaping one’s moral values, categorizing their behavior as acceptable and non-acceptable.

8. Door-in-the-face experiment

This technique is the exact opposite of foot-in-the-door activity. In the case of a marketing strategy, it is used very smartly. High school students can conduct a social experiment with the permission and supervision of their teacher or faculty member.

The experiment involves inviting someone to a fundraiser organized by their school or institution. The students will start by making an unreasonable request, such as asking a random person to donate a thousand dollars to the charitable initiative of the fundraiser. 

The person is likely to deny the request, but that denial can make the person feel guilty for responding negatively. The students will then follow up with a small request to attend the fundraiser event. This is now possible and easy for the person to agree to, and also calms down the guilt of denying the earlier request by forming an acceptable image of an agreeable person.

This experiment teaches students about the importance of social acceptability in building self-image and confidence. It also lets them get an insight into how society can play a role in both building their values and morals, while at the same time, inducing feelings of unease and guilt. 

Wrapping it up

Already an intriguing subject, social psychology can be made even more fun by incorporating practical experiments and activities. The experiments done in social psychology are for observational and comprehensive purposes. 

They aim to better one’s understanding of social settings and their impact on an individual’s mind, together forming a cohesive psycho-social educational experience. Additionally, students can also engage in psychology games and activities for more clarity on the subject matter. These activities will help you dive deeper into how society operates, and also get to look at it from an observer’s perspective, giving you a clear, unbiased, and non-judgmental view of social occurrences and phenomena. 

• James M. Hudson, & Amy Bruckman. (2004). The Bystander Effect: A Lens for understanding patterns of participation.  The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 13(2), 165–195.
• Mischel Walter; Ebbesen, Ebbe B. (1970). “Attention in delay of gratification”. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology . 16 (2): 329–337.

Sananda Bhattacharya, Chief Editor of TheHighSchooler, is dedicated to enhancing operations and growth. With degrees in Literature and Asian Studies from Presidency University, Kolkata, she leverages her educational and innovative background to shape TheHighSchooler into a pivotal resource hub. Providing valuable insights, practical activities, and guidance on school life, graduation, scholarships, and more, Sananda’s leadership enriches the journey of high school students.

Explore a plethora of invaluable resources and insights tailored for high schoolers at TheHighSchooler, under the guidance of Sananda Bhattacharya’s expertise. You can follow her on Linkedin

Leave a Comment Cancel reply

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Advertisement

The 5-Day Friendship challenge

The Secret to Refreshing a Friendship

Today’s challenge: ‘Repot’ a relationship and connect with an old friend in a new way.

• Share full article

By Catherine Pearson

This is Day 2 of the 5-Day Friendship Challenge. To start at the beginning, click here .

We’ve all got them: work friends, college buddies, playground dads. Whatever you call them, they’re the discrete groups of friends from different facets of our lives. Even our “weak ties” seem to exist only in certain settings, like the neighbors you nod at while walking the dog, or the barista who has memorized your coffee order.

But there is value in decompartmentalizing such friendships, said Marisa G. Franco, a psychologist and the author of “Platonic,” a book about making and keeping friends. Research has found that connecting in different settings or contexts can help bring friends closer, she added.

Friendship Challenge Day 2: ‘Repot’ a friendship.

“Repot” is a term coined by Ryan Hubbard, who heads up Hinterland, a social lab that has generated reports on friendship. And it’s simple: Think of friends you tend to interact with in one setting. Then invite them to join you for something else.

Ask a colleague you usually gossip with on Slack to sneak out to a matinee with you. Ask a friend you normally meet for dinner to join you for a walk through a museum. Or maybe raise the stakes a bit and invite a friend on an overnight trip — you really get to know someone once you’ve hung out together in your PJs, Dr. Franco said — or to try something totally new to you both. ( Clown cardio , anyone?)

Dr. Franco pointed to research showing that sharing unusual or extraordinary experiences can sometimes help bring people together. And researchers who study romantic love have long known that novelty can nourish relationships. But it’s not all about finding activities that are unconventional or adventurous.

You can repot a relationship by asking a friend for help, Dr. Franco said, or ask if that person wants to meet your family, something we do naturally all the time as kids. You can also “integrate” your friendships, inviting people who don’t know each other to meet up.

Whatever you settle on, your overarching goal should be to “challenge the norms” of your friendship, Dr. Franco said. If you feel unsure of whom to reach out to, she recommends simply asking yourself: Is there someone I would like to feel closer to in some way?

Repotting has risks. Your friend might screech at the idea of taking a beginner’s trapeze class with you, rather than meeting for your usual glass of wine. But the only way to know is to ask, Dr. Franco said. You might also discover that you don’t like spending time with your friend in another context, which can be valuable information as well, she added.

When it works, repotting can lead to a greater sense of ease and comfort with friends, Dr. Franco said, because you are each getting a more complete picture of the other person. “Every setting,” she said, “brings out a different side of us.”

Catherine Pearson is a Times reporter who writes about families and relationships. More about Catherine Pearson

Social Psychology Experiments: 10 Of The Most Famous Studies

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

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

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

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

The answer quite often is because of other people — something social psychologists have comprehensively shown.

Each of the 10 brilliant social psychology experiments below tells a unique, insightful story relevant to all our lives, every day.

Click the link in each social psychology experiment to get the full description and explanation of each phenomenon.

1. Social Psychology Experiments: The Halo Effect

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

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

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

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

2. Cognitive Dissonance

Cognitive dissonance is the mental discomfort people feel when trying to hold two conflicting beliefs in their mind.

People resolve this discomfort by changing their thoughts to align with one of conflicting beliefs and rejecting the other.

The study provides a central insight into the stories we tell ourselves about why we think and behave the way we do.

3. Robbers Cave Experiment: How Group Conflicts Develop

The Robbers Cave experiment was a famous social psychology experiment on how prejudice and conflict emerged between two group of boys.

It shows how groups naturally develop their own cultures, status structures and boundaries — and then come into conflict with each other.

For example, each country has its own culture, its government, legal system and it draws boundaries to differentiate itself from neighbouring countries.

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

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

4. Social Psychology Experiments: The Stanford Prison Experiment

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

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

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

5. The Milgram Social Psychology Experiment

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

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

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

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

6. The False Consensus Effect

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

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

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

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

7. Social Psychology Experiments: Social Identity Theory

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

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

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

8. Negotiation: 2 Psychological Strategies That Matter Most

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

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

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

9. Bystander Effect And The Diffusion Of Responsibility

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

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

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

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

10. Asch Conformity Experiment: The Power Of Social Pressure

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

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

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

Author: Dr Jeremy Dean

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

Join the free PsyBlog mailing list. No spam, ever.

We're sorry, your browser is not supported. Please update to a modern browser to view this page. Learn More

The Biggest Psychological Experiment in History Is Running Now

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

• Research has shown that when faced with potentially traumatic events, about two thirds of people show psychological resilience.
• But the mental health toll of the pandemic may not fit this paradigm.
• Life has been upended at an unprecedented scope and speed, and researchers see an opportunity to investigate the science of resilience in new ways.

T he impact of ­COVID-19 on the physical health of the world's citizens is extraordinary. By mid-May there were upward of four million cases spread across more than 180 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 are reporting surges in calls, and early surveys have 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 the year 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-19 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-19, 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."

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 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 Teacher's 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 show 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 are already 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 that grew to include more than 85,000 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 is looking into other sanitizing strategies involving blowers and alcohol that he heard have 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 is using minimal staff, but Hasid continues to pay--out of his own pocket--any employees who have not been 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. The restaurant is also 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 Brooklyn resident Tom Inck developed a persistent fever and dry cough in the middle of March, the psychotherapist and management consultant feared he had ­COVID-19. 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 also 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 will follow 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 is that increases or decreases in empathetic responding over weeks and months will be associated with shifts in health behaviors and coping mechanisms.

As part of DeLongis's study, Sin is having people record their daily activities and emotions for a week. "So far the picture is that life is really challenging, but people are finding ways to meet that challenge," she says. Many report a great deal of positive social interactions, many of them remote. Older adults are reporting 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.

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, "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. "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 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-19. 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 has since tested positive for ­­COVID-19 and has been 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 says. It is something they can do in memory of their sister 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?"

Read more about the coronavirus outbreak from Scientific American here . And read coverage from our international network of magazines here .

• How the COVID-19 Pandemic Could End Recent epidemics provide clues to ways the current crisis could stop By Lydia Denworth
• How Doctors and Nurses Manage Coronavirus Grief In their own voices, health care workers from across the country reflect on coping with the pandemic Interviews by Jillian Mock and Jen Schwartz
• Genetic Engineering Could Make a COVID-19 Vaccine in Months Rather Than Years Candidates are speeding toward human trials By Charles Schmidt
• Virus Mutations Reveal How COVID-19 Really Spread Globe-trotting humans were the culprits By Mark Fischetti, Martin Krzywinski

Support science journalism.

Thanks for reading Scientific American. Knowledge awaits.

Already a subscriber? Sign in.

Thanks for reading Scientific American. Create your free account or Sign in to continue.

See Subscription Options

Continue reading with a Scientific American subscription.

You may cancel at any time.

• Skip to main content
• Keyboard shortcuts for audio player

• LISTEN & FOLLOW
• Apple Podcasts
• Google Podcasts
• Amazon Music
• Amazon Alexa

Your support helps make our show possible and unlocks access to our sponsor-free feed.

What 'Inside Out 2' got right about anxiety, per a psychologist

Regina G. Barber

Rachel Carlson

Rebecca Ramirez

Pixar's new movie Inside Out 2 revisits the internal life of Riley, as she hits puberty and copes with a growing range of emotions. Pixar hide caption

Pixar's new movie Inside Out 2 revisits the internal life of Riley, as she hits puberty and copes with a growing range of emotions.

Pixar's new movie, Inside Out 2 came out Friday. It's the sequel to the 2015 movie Inside Out , which followed 11-year-old Riley and her family as they move to San Francisco. In the first movie, audiences meet Riley's core emotions – Joy, Sadness, Fear, Disgust and Anger. They live in Headquarters, the place in Riley's mind from which they operate her emotions.

In Inside Out 2, Riley is 13 and thriving in her new city. She has friends and is a star on her hockey team. But when puberty hits one night, four new emotions shake up Riley's core emotions: Envy, Ennui, Embarrassment and, most of all, Anxiety.

Pop Culture Happy Hour

'inside out 2' is a pixar sequel worth celebrating.

Clinical psychologist and Inside Out 2 consultant Lisa Damour says the movie is surprisingly accurate when it comes to experiencing anxiety and puberty.

Particularly, Damour notes that, as in the film, clinicians see anxiety as an important member of the larger team of emotions.

"As psychologists, we see anxiety as an important, valuable protective and natural human emotion," she says. "We only see anxiety as pathological if it's, you know, anticipating threats that aren't real or overreacting to potential problems."

Spoiler alert: In the film, Anxiety's plans do culminate in Riley having a panic attack. Damour notes that this scene was also pretty accurately depicted in the film — as an overwhelming experience that causes Riley to hyperventilate and disconnect from herself and the outside world.

Feeling anxious? Try smiling or doing a good deed to snap out of it

Part of what helps Riley overcome her panic attack is touching her hockey stick. Damour says that doing this — touching something — is what's known as a grounding technique. It's a real tool that therapists teach to their patients to help them manage their anxiety in these particularly intense moments.

But it's not the only tool available.

Damour also notes that people use cognitive interventions to bring their anxieties into a more manageable realm. That can involve reframing negative thoughts and helping people regain their agency.

And in the end, she says, it's key to remember that anxiety is normal. "Our goal is not to rid people of anxiety. Our goal is to help people manage anxiety if it gets to an irrational level," she says.

Questions about the inner workings of our minds? Email us at [email protected] — we'd love to consider it for a future episode!

Listen to Short Wave on Spotify and Apple Podcasts .

Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave .

This episode was produced by Rachel Carlson. It was edited by Rebecca Ramirez. Rachel and Regina G. Barber checked the facts. The audio engineer was Patrick Murray.

• The 25 Most Influential Psychological Experiments in History

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

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

1. A Class Divided

Study conducted by: jane elliott.

Study Conducted in 1968 in an Iowa classroom

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

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

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

For more information click here

2. Asch Conformity Study

Study conducted by: dr. solomon asch.

Study Conducted in 1951 at Swarthmore College

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

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

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

3. Bobo Doll Experiment

Study conducted by: dr. alburt bandura.

Study Conducted between 1961-1963 at Stanford University

In his groundbreaking study he separated participants into three groups:

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

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

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

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

4. Car Crash Experiment

Study conducted by: elizabeth loftus and john palmer.

Study Conducted in 1974 at The University of California in Irvine

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

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

5. Cognitive Dissonance Experiment

Study conducted by: leon festinger and james carlsmith.

Study Conducted in 1957 at Stanford University

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

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

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

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

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

6. Fantz’s Looking Chamber

Study conducted by: robert l. fantz.

Study Conducted in 1961 at the University of Illinois

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

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

7. Hawthorne Effect

Study conducted by: henry a. landsberger.

Study Conducted in 1955 at Hawthorne Works in Chicago, Illinois

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

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

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

8. Kitty Genovese Case

Study conducted by: new york police force.

Study Conducted in 1964 in New York City

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

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

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

9. Learned Helplessness Experiment

Study conducted by: martin seligman.

Study Conducted in 1967 at the University of Pennsylvania

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

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

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

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

10. Little Albert Experiment

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

Study Conducted in 1920 at Johns Hopkins University

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

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

11. Magical Number Seven

Study conducted by: george a. miller.

Study Conducted in 1956 at Princeton University

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

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

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

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

12. Pavlov’s Dog Experiment

Study conducted by: ivan pavlov.

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

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

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

This theory came to be known as classical conditioning.

13. Robbers Cave Experiment

Study conducted by: muzafer and carolyn sherif.

Study Conducted in 1954 at the University of Oklahoma

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

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

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

14. Ross’ False Consensus Effect Study

Study conducted by: lee ross.

Study Conducted in 1977 at Stanford University

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

Featured Programs

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.

• 20 Most Unethical Experiments in Psychology
• What Careers are in Experimental Psychology?
• 10 Things to Know About the Psychology of Psychotherapy

About Education: Psychology

Explorable.com

Mental Floss.com

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.

• 5 Best Online Ph.D. Marriage and Family Counseling Programs
• Top 5 Online Doctorate in Educational Psychology
• 5 Best Online Ph.D. in Industrial and Organizational Psychology Programs
• Top 10 Online Master’s in Forensic Psychology
• 10 Most Affordable Counseling Psychology Online Programs
• 10 Most Affordable Online Industrial Organizational Psychology Programs
• 10 Most Affordable Online Developmental Psychology Online Programs
• 15 Most Affordable Online Sport Psychology Programs
• 10 Most Affordable School Psychology Online Degree Programs
• Top 50 Online Psychology Master’s Degree Programs
• Top 25 Online Master’s in Educational Psychology
• Top 25 Online Master’s in Industrial/Organizational Psychology
• Top 10 Most Affordable Online Master’s in Clinical Psychology Degree Programs
• Top 6 Most Affordable Online PhD/PsyD Programs in Clinical Psychology
• 50 Great Small Colleges for a Bachelor’s in Psychology
• 50 Most Innovative University Psychology Departments
• The 30 Most Influential Cognitive Psychologists Alive Today
• Top 30 Affordable Online Psychology Degree Programs
• 30 Most Influential Neuroscientists
• Top 40 Websites for Psychology Students and Professionals
• Top 30 Psychology Blogs
• 25 Celebrities With Animal Phobias
• Your Phobias Illustrated (Infographic)
• 15 Inspiring TED Talks on Overcoming Challenges
• 10 Fascinating Facts About the Psychology of Color
• 15 Scariest Mental Disorders of All Time
• 15 Things to Know About Mental Disorders in Animals
• 13 Most Deranged Serial Killers of All Time

Site Information

• About Online Psychology Degree Guide

• Bipolar Disorder
• Therapy Center
• When To See a Therapist
• Types of Therapy
• Best Online Therapy
• Best Couples Therapy
• Best Family Therapy
• Managing Stress
• Sleep and Dreaming
• Understanding Emotions
• Self-Improvement
• Healthy Relationships
• Student Resources
• Personality Types
• Guided Meditations
• Verywell Mind Insights
• 2024 Verywell Mind 25
• Mental Health in the Classroom
• Editorial Process
• Meet Our Review Board
• Crisis Support

Classic Psychology Experiments

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.

The history of psychology is filled with fascinating studies and classic psychology experiments that helped change the way we think about ourselves and human behavior. Sometimes the results of these experiments were so surprising they challenged conventional wisdom about the human mind and actions. In other cases, these experiments were also quite controversial.

Some of the most famous examples include Milgram's obedience experiment and Zimbardo's prison experiment. Explore some of these classic psychology experiments to learn more about some of the best-known research in psychology history.

Harlow’s Rhesus Monkey Experiments

In a series of controversial experiments conducted in the late 1950s and early 1960s, psychologist Harry Harlow demonstrated the powerful effects of love on normal development. By showing the devastating effects of deprivation on young rhesus monkeys , Harlow revealed the importance of love for healthy childhood development.

His experiments were often unethical and shockingly cruel, yet they uncovered fundamental truths that have heavily influenced our understanding of child development.

In one famous version of the experiments, infant monkeys were separated from their mothers immediately after birth and placed in an environment where they had access to either a wire monkey "mother" or a version of the faux-mother covered in a soft-terry cloth. While the wire mother provided food, the cloth mother provided only softness and comfort.

Harlow found that while the infant monkeys would go to the wire mother for food, they vastly preferred the company of the soft and comforting cloth mother. The study demonstrated that maternal bonds   were about much more than simply providing nourishment and that comfort and security played a major role in the formation of attachments .

Pavlov’s Classical Conditioning Experiments

The concept of classical conditioning is studied by every entry-level psychology student, so it may be surprising to learn that the man who first noted this phenomenon was not a psychologist at all. Pavlov was actually studying the digestive systems of dogs when he noticed that his subjects began to salivate whenever they saw his lab assistant.

What he soon discovered through his experiments was that certain responses (drooling) could be conditioned by associating a previously neutral stimulus (metronome or buzzer) with a stimulus that naturally and automatically triggers a response (food). Pavlov's experiments with dogs established classical conditioning.

The Asch Conformity Experiments

Researchers have long been interested in the degree to which people follow or rebel against social norms. During the 1950s, psychologist Solomon Asch conducted a series of experiments designed to demonstrate the powers of conformity in groups.  

The study revealed that people are surprisingly susceptible to going along with the group, even when they know the group is wrong.​ In Asch's studies, students were told that they were taking a vision test and were asked to identify which of three lines was the same length as a target line.

When asked alone, the students were highly accurate in their assessments. In other trials, confederate participants intentionally picked the incorrect line. As a result, many of the real participants gave the same answer as the other students, demonstrating how conformity could be both a powerful and subtle influence on human behavior.

Skinner's Operant Conditioning Experiments

Skinner studied how behavior can be reinforced to be repeated or weakened to be extinguished. He designed the Skinner Box where an animal, often a rodent, would be given a food pellet or an electric shock. A rat would learn that pressing a level delivered a food pellet. Or the rat would learn to press the lever in order to halt electric shocks.

Then, the animal may learn to associate a light or sound with being able to get the reward or halt negative stimuli by pressing the lever. Furthermore, he studied whether continuous, fixed ratio, fixed interval , variable ratio, and variable interval reinforcement led to faster response or learning.

Milgram’s Obedience Experiments

In Milgram's experiment , participants were asked to deliver electrical shocks to a "learner" whenever an incorrect answer was given. In reality, the learner was actually a confederate in the experiment who pretended to be shocked. The purpose of the experiment was to determine how far people were willing to go in order to obey the commands of an authority figure.

Milgram  found that 65% of participants were willing to deliver the maximum level of shocks   despite the fact that the learner seemed to be in serious distress or even unconscious.

Why This Experiment Is Notable

Milgram's experiment is one of the most controversial in psychology history. Many participants experienced considerable distress as a result of their participation and in many cases were never debriefed after the conclusion of the experiment. The experiment played a role in the development of ethical guidelines for the use of human participants in psychology experiments.

The Stanford Prison Experiment

Philip Zimbardo's famous experiment cast regular students in the roles of prisoners and prison guards. While the study was originally slated to last 2 weeks, it had to be halted after just 6 days because the guards became abusive and the prisoners began to show signs of extreme stress and anxiety.

Zimbardo's famous study was referred to after the abuses in Abu Ghraib came to light. Many experts believe that such group behaviors are heavily influenced by the power of the situation and the behavioral expectations placed on people cast in different roles.

It is worth noting criticisms of Zimbardo's experiment, however. While the general recollection of the experiment is that the guards became excessively abusive on their own as a natural response to their role, the reality is that they were explicitly instructed to mistreat the prisoners, potentially detracting from the conclusions of the study.

Van rosmalen L, Van der veer R, Van der horst FCP. The nature of love: Harlow, Bowlby and Bettelheim on affectionless mothers. Hist Psychiatry. 2020. doi:10.1177/0957154X19898997

Gantt WH . Ivan Pavlov . Encyclopaedia Brittanica .

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

Koren M. B.F. Skinner: The man who taught pigeons to play ping-pong and rats to pull levers . Smithsonian Magazine .

B.F. Skinner Foundation. A brief survey of operant behavior .

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

Zimbardo PG. Philip G. Zimbardo on his career and the Stanford Prison Experiment's 40th anniversary. Interview by Scott Drury, Scott A. Hutchens, Duane E. Shuttlesworth, and Carole L. White. Hist Psychol. 2012;15(2):161-170. doi:10.1037/a0025884

Le texier T. Debunking the Stanford Prison Experiment. Am Psychol. 2019;74(7):823-839. doi:10.1037/amp0000401

Perry G. Deception and illusion in Milgram's accounts of the Obedience Experiments . Theoretical & Applied Ethics . 2013;2(2):79-92.

Specter M. Drool: How Everyone Gets Pavlov Wrong . The New Yorker. 2014; November 24.

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

Experimenting With Your Life

To reach your goals, think like a scientist: be curious, not driven..

Posted September 21, 2019 | Reviewed by Matt Huston

Brian wants to get out of debt and manage his money better. Emily wants to be better organized and use her time more efficiently. Jake wants to stop falling into relationships with women who initially seem interested but then gradually seem to take him for granted. Sara wants to stop walking on eggshells with those close to her and be more assertive .

We all have something we want to change. Things that bother us, patterns that seem to have their own lives that are dysfunctional and continue to get us into trouble. We want to do better, turn things around, stop whatever we are doing that isn’t working.

And so, we go on a campaign. Brian decides that he needs to watch his spending more closely and vows to stick to a weekly budget. Emily maps out her goals for the week and decides to not let her tiredness or offers to go out with friends get in the way. Jake decides that he needs to stay on top of his relationships and speak up when they seem to be going off course. Sara is determined to shake off those times she bites her tongue and instead let others know exactly how she feels.

This firm resolve is often good for a few weeks and then fades. Similarly, some people resolve on January 2 to go to the gym every day and exercise. By the end of January, they’ve fallen back into their old habits. Screw it, I give up. All or nothing thinking, lots of guilt .

There’s a problem with this straight-ahead, white-knuckle, let’s get it done now, put-this-to-rest thinking. It is hard to sustain. There’s performance pressure, and there are too many opportunities for failure.

But there is a better approach. You may want to step back and think like a scientist. Rather than being driven, you’re curious. Instead of all-or-nothing, you try and track, see how it turns out, and use that information to fine-tune and move forward. Without the ultimate investment in an outcome, you paradoxically have a better chance at success.

Here’s how to experiment with your life:

1. Develop your hypothesis

Before scientists begin an experiment, they develop a hypothesis — a notion of what they are actually testing and what will happen. Brian decides that his problem has been that he hasn’t been keeping careful records of his spending; Emily decides that she crams too much into her daily To-do list; Jake decides his profile may be giving the wrong impression, and that he moves too fast and comes on a bit too strong at the start of the relationship; Sara realizes that her Achilles heel is that she is afraid of anyone getting angry at her.

This is great — they each have a starting point for their experiments.

2. Design your experiment

Again, we’re not shooting for a personality makeover here, but a limited exercise in specifically doing something differently. The key elements are making the goals concrete in terms of exact behaviors, and having a specific timeframes.

Brian sets up an Excel spreadsheet into which he will enter his expenses for a week; Emily sits down on Sunday night and writes a list of five things (not 50) that she needs to get done this week; Jake tones down his online profile and tells himself to hold back on the texting if his new Saturday night date goes well; Sara plans to speak up about the work schedule at the weekly staff meeting, rather than once again “letting it go.”

By mapping out clear behaviors you know exactly what to do and are less likely to slip into a “good enough,” “let’s see what happens,” “maybe” attitude. By having clear timeframes, you avoid the “just step up and change it” vagueness that usually leads to failure.

3. Do and track

Brian, Emily, Jake, and Sara do their experiments, but like good scientists take notes along the way. Brian realizes on Wednesday that he didn’t enter his expenses on Tuesday because he forgot to get receipts; Emily sees she didn’t do anything on her #4 goal by Thursday — talking with her supervisor about new projects — because she had a work emergency that consumed most of the week; Jake did redo his profile but found less interest rather than more, did refrain from texting and was pleasantly surprised when his date reached out to him the next day; Sara did speak up in a staff meeting, and patted herself on the back, but then noticed how automatically she agreed to have dinner with her parents on the weekend even though she had other things she really wanted to do instead.

4. Tweak and repeat

Okay, all these folks have done a good job with their experiments and learned lessons along the way. Brian realizes that he may need to be more diligent in gathering receipts so he doesn’t have to keep his day in his head; Emily needs to build unexpected emergencies into her workweek, or make her meetings with her supervisor more of a priority; Jake wants to get feedback from friends about his profile; Sara realizes that being assertive with her parents is a real challenge for her, and she needs to take the risk of being clearer with them about their expectations.

The danger, of course, is that they don’t build on this information, don’t take the next step forward, don’t keep up their newfound behaviors. If that is the case, again, curiosity — why? Their goals weren’t really that important? The timeline was too long? Their goals weren’t concrete enough? All good food for thought.

The point here is that’s there a value in being able to step back and view your life with a more detached attitude, one that is curious rather than demanding and self-critical. We live on two different planes — the life we want to create, and the life that seems to run on its own. We don’t need to manhandle this other life, but listen to it, see what it needs, experiment with changing those patterns and needs.

And then see what happens.

Bob Taibbi, L.C.S.W., has 49 years of clinical experience. He is the author of 13 books and over 300 articles and provides training nationally and internationally.

• Find a Therapist
• Find a Treatment Center
• Find a Psychiatrist
• Find a Support Group
• Find Online Therapy
• United States
• Brooklyn, NY
• Chicago, IL
• Houston, TX
• Los Angeles, CA
• New York, NY
• Portland, OR
• San Diego, CA
• San Francisco, CA
• Seattle, WA
• Washington, DC
• Asperger's
• Bipolar Disorder
• Chronic Pain
• Eating Disorders
• Passive Aggression
• Personality
• Goal Setting
• Positive Psychology
• Stopping Smoking
• Low Sexual Desire
• Relationships
• Child Development
• Self Tests NEW
• Therapy Center
• Diagnosis Dictionary
• Types of Therapy

At any moment, someone’s aggravating behavior or our own bad luck can set us off on an emotional spiral that could derail our entire day. Here’s how we can face triggers with less reactivity and get on with our lives.

• Emotional Intelligence
• Gaslighting
• Affective Forecasting
• Neuroscience