From traumatizing events to secret experiments by the U.S. government, today we look at 11
Psychological Experiments You Won’t Believe Actually Happened!
Number 11.
Humanity Tests How far will you go when ordered to do something
by an authority?
That’s what Stanley Milgram wanted to find out.
In 1963, Milgram tested how far people would go to hurt another human being under ordinary
circumstances when given orders to do so.
One test subject was the “teacher” and another person was the “student.”
The teacher was to give the student an increasingly severe electric shock if the student made
mistakes.
The electric shock machine was clearly labeled with switches that indicated increasing voltages,
and that finally said “Danger: Severe Shock” and “XXX.”
Every time the student made a mistake, the Authority — wearing a white lab coat — ordered
the teacher to continue.
The student was hidden in another room but could clearly be heard to scream in pain.
The screams were fake, no one was hurt, but the teacher didn't know this.
The authority would order the teacher to continue even if the teacher hesitated.
How far would you go?
The results are surprising, and some say reflective of human nature.
63% of the “teachers” continued to administer the shocks, despite the agonizing screams,
until the screaming and begging ended, and the “student” fell silent.
Number 10.
Night Shift Psychiatrist Charles Hofling took Stanley
Milgram’s obedience research one step further when he tested nurses who didn’t suspect
that they were part of a psychology experiment.
In 1966 Hofling arranged to have a fake doctor call the nurses station on night shift and
order them to administer an unapproved drug to a patient at twice the maximum dosage.
The medicine was fake, too, but the nurses didn’t know that.
The questionable experiment ran 22 times, and 21 out of 22 times the nurse violated
hospital policy by taking orders over the phone and administered the “drug.”
The authority invested in the doctor was so strong, all but one of the nurses obeyed.
Number 9.
The Loneliest Number Where would you prefer to be if you had a
sudden illness or a terrible fall?
On a lonely road with only scattered traffic?
Or a busy metropolitan boulevard?
The Bystander Effect — also known as Bystander Apathy — informs us that the lonely road
may be our best hope for survival.
How can that be?
In 1968, Jon Darley and Bibb Latané demonstrated this effect in the laboratory after the murder
of Kitty Genovese in 1964.
They performed a simple but profound social psychological experiment.
They staged an emergency situation and timed how long it took people to intervene if they
do so at all.
The situations were variously staged with one, few, or many bystanders.
The results show that the more people are around, the more inhibited the response to
the emergency, and by a large margin.
When a person was alone with a fallen woman, 70% of the time they would respond.
Only 40% of the time would someone respond when there were many people around.
Number 8.
Tell the Truth How sure of yourself are you?
How sure of yourself are you if you’re the only one in the crowd with your viewpoint?
Imagine attending a planned psychology experiment, along with seven other people.
You are all ushered into a room and handed two cards, one with a single vertical line
printed on it, and one printed with three vertical lines of differing lengths.
You are asked by the experimenter to choose which of the three lines matches the length
of the line on the ONE-line card.
All seven of the other participants choose the “wrong” line.
You know what the answer is, it is obvious.
But you are the only one who sees it.
Everybody else disagrees.
What do you think?
What do you do?
In this case, in Solomon Asch’s 1951 social psychology experiment, the other seven “participants”
were actually part of the experiment and told to pick the wrong line.
Only one person was the subject of the investigation, and the purpose was to see if social pressure
from a majority group could change behavior, forcing a person to conform.
There were 18 stagings of the test, and in 12 the participants chose the wrong line.
32% of the subjects conformed. 75% of the subjects conformed to the majority at least
once.
And 25% never conformed.
Overwhelmingly, the stated reason for conforming was that the subject didn’t believe the
participants were correct, but the subject went along so that they weren’t perceived
as peculiar or ridiculed for their answer.
It seems that people just want to fit in.
Number 7.
Guard Your Sanity It was August 14-20, 1971, at Stanford University,
in a 35-foot walled-off section of the basement of Jordan Hall.
24 middle-class, psychologically stable, healthy, white males, specifically chosen to have clean
criminal records, were selected and agreed to participate in a psychology experiment
testing whether the inherent personality traits of guards and prisoners were the chief cause
of abusive behavior in prisons.
They would be in the experiment for 7-14 days, and each receives $15 a day.
That was how it started.
12 prisoners, 12 guards.
Psychology professor Philip Zimbardo, who ran the experiment, performed the function
of the superintendent.
Zimbardo's goal was to induce deindividualization, disorientation, and depersonalization into
the 24 men.
On the second day, the prisoners revolted.
The guards attacked the prisoners with fire extinguishers, and without staff supervision.
The guards felt they were at a disadvantage, so they began to use psychological tactics
against the prisoners, such as administering rewards and punishments.
Within 36 hours one prisoner began acting “crazy” and had to be released.
Soon the guards started using physical punishments and refusing sanitary cleanliness.
Forced nudity was initiated as a penalty.
Cruelty escalated.
Fully one-third of the guards exhibited authentic sadistic behavior.
The whole thing terminated after only six days.
More than 50 people observed the experiment.
Only one questioned its morality.
So, was it the internal characteristics of the participants, or the situation they were
in, that caused the utter breakdown?
What do you think?
Number 6.
Little Albert At nine months old, Little Albert was a normal
child.
Subject to an experiment of Watson and Rayner in 1920, at first Little Albert was given
a soft white rat to play with, a white rabbit, a monkey, and various masks and toys.
Little Albert was unafraid and played happily alone.
In subsequent sessions, while he was playing nicely, a steel bar was struck loudly with
a hammer behind his head, frightened, Little Albert would burst into tears.
Whenever the steel bar was hammered, Little Albert would become afraid.
He soon grew anxious and feared his sessions.
Two months later, he was presented with the white rat, and within a moment the steel bar
was struck.
Each weekly session for seven weeks the same thing happened until just the sight of the
white rat caused Little Albert to cry horribly, even if the steel bar had not been struck.
He would quickly move away from the rat.
In later sessions, Little Albert started shying away from anything white and furry, such as
the white rabbit, then the furry monkey.
He even developed a phobia around a Father Christmas mask with a full beard.
The story almost ends there because Little Albert was taken away from these men.
He was not deconditioned.
He was not healed.
It was thought that Little Albert was better off without those men around him.
It is now known that Little Albert was in real life Douglas Merritte, and his mother
was a wet-nurse at the campus hospital.
She was paid $1 for “Little Albert’s” participation in the experiment.
Douglas Merritt died at age six of acquired hydrocephalus, and his mental state was unknown.
Number 5.
Eyes Wide Shut How good are you at observing your surroundings?
Are you like Sherlock Holmes?
Or more like Homer Simpson?
The answer may disappoint you.
In Orlando, Florida, in 2008, local news television channel 6 set up a social experiment of their
own.
They printed up a missing child poster, but the child wasn’t missing.
It was the picture of 8-year-old (alleged) Britney Begonia.
Channel 6 posted the poster on the front window of a grocery store and had “Britney” sit
only a few feet from it.
Hundreds of people passed by.
They passed by the poster and looked at it.
They passed by Britney and looked at her.
They said nothing.
Only two people out of those hundreds reacted to the poster and did something about it.
When asked about it afterward, the most common reaction as to why nothing was said or done
was that they didn’t want to get involved.
Oh, they noticed all right.
Sure.
But they weren’t comfortable being part of the whole thing.
Sound believable?
Number 4.
Monsters In 1939, 22 orphan children were subjected
to what has become known as the Monster Study.
At the University of Iowa, in Davenport, Wendell Johnson supervised graduate student Mary Tudor
in an experiment that horrified Johnson’s peers when they found out about it.
It was nicknamed the "Monster Study" presumambly because that is how his peers felt about Johnson
and his study.
Half the orphan children were stutterers and received positive speech therapy.
The other half were normal speaking children and received negative speech therapy, punishing
and shaming the children for any speech imperfection.
As a result, those that began as normal speaking children developed negative psychological
problems, sometimes severe, and some acquired speech problems that remained with them for
the rest of their lives.
The monster study has produced the largest amount of scientific data available about
stuttering and stutterers and showed the influence of a stutterer’s thoughts and beliefs on
their condition.
Number 3.
Less is More Can you imagine wanting to be paid less to
work a more boring job?
That’s one of the surprising psychological findings based on the concept of Cognitive
Dissonance.
Cognitive Dissonance means that we find it difficult to hold two contradictory beliefs
in our head at one time, so we unconsciously adjust one to fit the other better.
In our boring job example, a study was done using students undertaking a boring task.
They found the work more interesting if they were paid less, reasoning that if they didn’t
do it for the money, it must have some inherent interest within it.
If this wasn’t the case, they couldn’t explain their behavior.
This kind of rationalization goes on in our heads all the time.
We don’t even realize it.
Unsettling, isn’t it?
Number 2.
Four Elise Albany Medical College in New York researches
what is hip with rats.
What they came up with is that mostly, rats like the sounds of silence.
And if they are just in a sober, relaxing mood, they like Beethoven.
But if they are high on cocaine, they dig Miles Davis’ jazz.
The way it works is this.
They tested non-drugged rats and let them listen to Miles Davis’ “Four.”
The scientists measure how active the rats were.
Then half of them were drugged with meth and dosed with Davis again.
The meth-rats showed more activity than the unmedicated rats.
The next experiment gave rats a choice between Beethoven’s “Für Elise” and Miles.
Mostly the rats chose neither artist and liked the quiet.
Their second place choice, when the rats weren't drugged, was Beethoven.
But after being amped-up on cocaine, the rats listened to their least favorite choice, Miles
Davis’ “Four.”
This is a rat’s brain on drugs.
Number 1.
Mind Control The CIA would control all of our minds if
it could, we know this.
In fact, it has tried at least once, that we are aware of.
In the 1950s, and for the next twenty years, the CIA would use sleep deprivation, electric
shock, hallucinogenic drugs, and other such brutal techniques to achieve mind control
over human beings.
This top-secret program was code-named MKULTRA.
Its goal was to be able to brainwash victims at will.
More than 149 research projects were carried out by CIA scientists through MKULTRA.
The scope of some of the tests was far-reaching.
One project involved giving LSD to unwary bar patrons in New York and San Francisco
to see what happened when hallucinogens were taken in social situations.
Another project offered LSD to heroin addicts, with a reward of more heroin if they agreed
to the LSD doses.
Your government working for you.