11 very interesting psychological experiments

  • Jul 26, 2021
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Interesting psychological experiments

Psychologists have long tried to penetrate our way of perceiving the world, to understand what motivates our behavior. They have made great strides in lifting that veil of mystery. In addition to providing materials for stimulating conversations at parties, some of the experiments Most famous psychological tests of the last century reveal universal and surprising truths about nature human.

In this Psychology-Online article, we discover you 11 interesting psychological experimentsFamous historical and current that could change the way we perceive the world. We will see experiments in social psychology, with animals and with people.

You may also like: Pavlov's dog psychological experiment

Index

  1. Kohler and the chimpanzee experiment
  2. Harlow's experiment on macaque attachment
  3. The Strange Situation of Mary Ainsworth
  4. The Stanford Prison Experiment
  5. Jane Elliot's Blue Eyes Experiment
  6. The Bobo doll from Bbandura
  7. Milgram's experiment
  8. Little albert
  9. Pavlov's dog
  10. Asch's experiment
  11. Rosenhan's experiment

Kohler and the Chimpanzee Experiment.

Wolfgang Kohler He studied the insight process by observing the behavior of chimpanzees in a problem situation.

In the experimental situation, the animals were placed in a cage outside of which food was stored, for example a banana. There were other objects in the cage, such as sticks or boxes. The animals participating in the experiment were hungry, so they needed to get to the food. At first, the chimpanzee used sticks mainly for play activities; but suddenly, in the mind of the hungry chimpanzee, a relationship between walking stick and food was developing. The stick, an object to play with, became a instrument through which it was possible to reach the banana put out of the cage. There has been a restructuring of the perceptual field: Kohler noted that the appearance of the new behavior was not the result of random attempts based on a trial and error process. It is one of the first experiments on the intelligence of chimpanzees.

Interesting Psychological Experiments - Kohler and the Chimpanzee Experiment

Image: YouTube

Harlow's experiment on macaque attachment.

In a scientific article (1959), Harry F. Harlow He described that he had separated the little rhesus monkeys at birth from their mothers, and that he had raised them with the help from "puppet mothers": in a series of experiments the behavior of monkeys was compared in two situations:

  • Little monkeys with a puppet mother without a bottle, but covered in a soft, fluffy and furry cloth.
  • Little monkeys with a "puppet" mother supplying food, but covered in wire.

The little monkeys showed a clear preference for the "hairy" mother, spending an average of fifteen hours a day together with her, although they were fed exclusively by the "suckling" mother puppet. conclusions from harlow's experiment: all experiments showed that the pleasure of contact elicited attachment behaviorsbut not the food.

Interesting Psychological Experiments - Harlow's Macaque Attachment Experiment

Image: Harlow Blogspot Attachment

The Strange Situation of Mary Ainsworth.

Based on the attachment theory of Bowlby, Mary Ainsworth and colleagues (1978) have developed an experimental method called Strange Situation, to assess individual differences in attachment security. The Strange Situation includes a series of brief laboratory episodes in a comfortable environment and the behaviors of the child are observed. Ainsworth and colleagues have paid particular attention to the child's behavior at the time of meeting with the caregiver after a brief separation, thus identifying three different attachment patterns or styles, so called from that moment on. Types of attachment according to Mary Ainsworth:

  • Secure attachment (63% of dyads examined)
  • Anxious-resistant or ambivalent (16%)
  • Avoidant (21%)

In this article you will find more information about attachment explanation and theories.

Interesting Psychological Experiments - Mary Ainsworth's La Strange Situation

Image: The Wall Street Journal

The Stanford Prison Experiment.

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

  • "Prisoners". The latter were locked up in three cells in the basement of a University building for six days; They were asked to wear a white robe with a paper over it and a chain on the right ankle.
  • "Guards". Students who had the role of prison guards had to guard the basement, choosing the most appropriate methods to maintain order, and to make the "prisoners" perform various chores; They were asked to wear dark glasses and uniforms, and never be violent towards participants in the opposite role. However, the situation deteriorated dramatically: the fake police officers very soon began to mistreat and seriously humiliate the "detainees", and so it was decided to discontinue the experiment.
Interesting Psychological Experiments - The Stanford Prison Experiment

Image: Tekcrispy

Jane Elliot's Blue Eyes Experiment.

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

"Children with brown eyes are the best," began the teacher. "They are more beautiful and intelligent." He wrote the word "melanin" on the board and explained that it was a substance that made people intelligent. Children with dark eyes have more, so they are more intelligent, while children with blue eyes "stay with their hands in their hands."

In no time the brown-eyed children began to treat their blue-eyed peers superior, which in turn lost their self-confidence. A very good girl started making mistakes during arithmetic class, and at recess she was approached by three little friends with brown eyes "you have to apologize because you stand in their way and because we are the best," she said. a. The girl was quick to apologize. This is one of the psychosocial experiments that shows how beliefs and prejudices influence.

Interesting Psychological Experiments - Jane Elliot's Blue Eyes Experiment

Image: Medium

Bobo de Bbandura doll.

Albert bandura gained great fame for the Bobo doll's experiment on child aggression by imitation, where:

  • A group of children took as an example, for visual ability, adults who in a room, without their behavior being commented, beat the Bobo doll.
  • Other contemporaries, on the other hand, saw adults sitting, always in absolute silence, next to Bobo.

Eventually all of these children were led into a room full of toys, including a doll like Bobo. Of the 10 children who hit the doll, 8 were those who had seen it done before by an adult. This explains how if a model that we follow performs a certain action, we are tempted to imitate it and this happens especially in children who do not yet have the experience to understand for themselves if this behavior is correct or not.

Interesting psychological experiments - Bobo de Bbandura doll

Image: YouTube

Milgram's experiment.

Milgram's experiment was first carried out in 1961 by the psychologist Stanley milgram, as an inquiry into the degree of our deference to authority. A subject is invited to give an electric shock to an individual who has the role of the student, placed behind a screen, when he does not answer a question correctly. Then an authorized person tells the subject to gradually increase the intensity of the shock until the student screams in pain and begs him to stop. No justification is given except the fact that the authorized person tells the subject to obey. Actually, it was a staging: absolutely no electric shock was given, but in the experiment two-thirds of the subjects influenced what they thought was a 450-volt shocksimply because a person in authority told them that they would not be responsible for anything.

Interesting Psychological Experiments - The Milgram Experiment

Image: Hypertextual

Little Albert.

We see little Albert's experiment on the unconditioned stimulus, which must be the most famous psychological study. John Watson and Rosalie Raynor they showed a white lab rat to a nine-month-old boy, little Albert. At first the boy showed no fear, but then Watson jumped up from behind and made him flinch with a sudden noise by hitting a metal bar with a hammer. Of course, the noise scared little Albert, who started crying. Each time the rat was brought out, Watson and Raynor would rattle the bar with the hammer. to scare the poor boy. Soon the single sight of the rat was enough to reduce little Albert to a quivering bundle of nerves: I had learned to fear the sight of a rat, and soon after he began to fear a series of similar objects that were shown to him.

Interesting Psychological Experiments - Little Albert

Image: YouTube

Pavlov's dog.

The sheepdog of Ivan Pavlov he became famous for his experiments that led him to discover what we call "conditioning classic "or" Pavlovian reflex "and remained a very famous psychological experiment in the present. Hardly any other psychological experiment is cited as often and with as much gusto as Pavlov's theory expounded in 1905: the Russian physiologist had remained impressed by the fact that his dogs did not start drooling at the sight of food, but when they heard laboratory employees telling him about it. wore. He investigated it and ordered a bell to ring every time it was lunchtime. Coming Soon, the sound of the doorbell was enough for the dogs to start drooling: they had connected the signal to the arrival of the food.

In this article you will find more information about Pavlov's dog psychological experiment.

Asch's experiment.

This is a social psychology experiment carried out in 1951 by the Polish psychologist Solomon asch on majority influence and social conformity.

The experiment is based on the idea that being part of a group is a sufficient condition to change a person's actions, judgments and visual perceptions. The very simple experiment consisted of asking the subjects involved to associate a line 1 drawn on a white sheet to the corresponding one, choosing between three different lines A, B and C present in another leaf. Only one was identical to the other, while the other two were evidently longer or shorter. The experiment was carried out in three phases. As soon as one of the subjects, Asch's accomplice, gave a wrong answer associating line 1 with the wrong one, the other members of the group also made the same mistake, even though the correct answer was more than obvious. The participants, questioned about the reason for this choice, responded that aware of the correct answer, had decided to conform to the group, adapting to those who had preceded them.

Interesting Psychological Experiments - The Asch Experiment

Rosenhan's experiment.

Among the most interesting investigations in this field, stands out an experiment carried out by David rosenhan (1923) to document the poor validity of psychiatric diagnoses. Rosenhan admitted eight assistants to various psychiatric hospitals alleging psychotic symptoms, but once they entered the hospital they behaved in a habitual manner. Despite this, they were held on average for 19 days, and all but one were diagnosed as "psychotic". One of the reasons why the staff is not aware of the "normality" of the subjects is, according to Rosenhan, the very poor contact between staff and patients.

Interesting Psychological Experiments - The Rosenhan Experiment

This article is merely informative, in Psychology-Online we do not have the power to make a diagnosis or recommend a treatment. We invite you to go to a psychologist to treat your particular case.

If you want to read more articles similar to Interesting psychological experiments, we recommend that you enter our category of Experimental psychology.

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