Some Psychological experiments Have managed to generate very important discoveries in this discipline, although some have been unethical.
Psychology has had a breakthrough in a short time. This is partly due to the fact that many of the things we currently know about how our mind works come from experimentation with both humans and animals.
At present, to carry out an experiment, there are clear ethical barriers that can not be overcome. However, it has not always been so. A few years ago, researchers were able to maneuver around human and non-human animals to test their hypotheses.
Is it worth destroying lives or manipulating people for important advances in science?
The most striking psychological experiments
1- The Bobo doll experiment: are we born aggressive or do we learn to be aggressive?
During the 1960s, there was a great debate about child development: what influences more, genetics, the environment or social learning?
Many tried to answer this question through various experiments. The psychologist Albert Bandura Was interested in the subject, specifically wanted to know where the aggressiveness .
To do this, he divided a group of children into three groups: the first was exposed to adults who beat and behaved aggressively with a doll called"Bobo". The second group had adults who played quietly with the doll, while the third group was not exposed to any of these situations (what is known as a control group).
The results showed that children who saw adults being aggressive with the Bobo doll mimicked the observed behavior, tending more to be aggressive in general. In contrast, the other two groups did not exhibit this aggressiveness.
What did this prove? It seems that many of the things we do are not due to inherited genetic factors, but to the education received. Especially, what we learn through the observation of other people. This is called vicarious or social learning.
2- The selective attention experiment: do we have control over our perception?
Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris were very interested in knowing how we perceive the outside world and if we are aware of all its elements.
Thus, in 1999, they carried out an experiment that you can do yourself by watching the video that appears below:
Have you answered correctly? Congratulations!
Now try to answer this question: have you seen the man disguised as a gorilla? According to the studies, most participants do not realize the existence of this character.
What did this prove? The existence of the concept â?? inattentional blindnessâ?? Or"blindness by inattention". It means that an unexpected object that is completely visible can be ignored by us, as if it did not exist, when we are focused on another task.
This shows that we are not as aware as we are of the things that happen around us.
3- The marshmallow experiment: is controlling your impulses the key to success?
Psychologist Walter Mischel in the 1970s developed this test to see if control of our immediate impulses had anything to do with greater or lesser success in the future.
He gathered a group of four-year-olds, pledging to track them for 14 years to assess their success.
The experiment consisted of placing the children in front of a marshmallow, telling them they could eat it whenever they wanted. But if they waited for 15 minutes without eating it they could get another marshmallow.
Children who chose not to wait and were carried away by their impulses, when evaluated after a few years, showed less tolerance to frustration and lower self-esteem. Instead, the group that hoped for more success at academic, social and emotional level.
What did this prove? Knowing how to handle immediate impulses and reflecting on the consequences of our long-term actions is essential to success in our lives.
4- The Asch conformity experiment: are we afraid to differentiate ourselves from the rest?
Solomon Asch, an important figure in Social Psychology, carried out this famous experiment, obtaining incredible results.
In 1951 he assembled a group of students to perform a vision test. Actually all the participants of the room were actors, and only one individual was the one that was to the test. And it was not a test of vision, but the real objective was to see the degree of conformity of people when they are pressed by the group.
In that way, they were shown a series of lines and were asked which was longer or which were similar. The students had to say in front of everyone and out loud what they thought was the correct answer.
All actors were prepared in advance to respond incorrectly (most times). When the true participant had to respond, he differed from the rest of the group the first two or three times, but later, he yielded to the group and indicated the same response as they, even if it was obviously wrong.
The most curious thing was that this phenomenon occurred in 33% of the subjects, especially when there were more than three accomplices who gave the same answer. However, when they were alone or the group's responses were very different, they had no problem in giving the correct answer.
What did this prove? We tend to adapt to the group because it exerts a great pressure on us. Even your answers or opinions, if they are uniform, could make us doubt even our own perception.
5- Milgram's experiment: to what extent are we able to obey authority?
After reflecting on everything that happened in the Holocaust during Nazi Germany, it was Stanley Milgram's idea to see to what extent we can follow orders.
Surely when he published his experiment on obedience in 1963, he did not know that he was going to become so famous. And the results were chilling.
The experiment consisted in punishing a student with electric shocks when he gave incorrect answers.
In the same room were the researcher, the"teacher"who was the participant and the"student", who was an accomplice of the researcher. However, the participant was made to believe that the student was simply another volunteer who had played that role by chance.
The student was tied to a chair, had electrodes all over his body, and was placed behind a glass wall in view of the participant.
When the student said an incorrect answer, the teacher had to give him electrical shocks with increasing intensity. Thus, the student showed great pain, shouted and asked the experiment to stop; But really it was all a performance and the electric shocks were not being produced. The goal was really to evaluate the behavior of the"master"to be pressured by the authority figure, the investigator.
Thus, when teachers refused to follow the experiment, the researcher insisted:"you must continue"or"it is necessary for the experiment to continue." If participants still stopped, the experiment stopped.
The results were that 65% of the participants arrived at the end of the experiment, although all tried to stop at a certain point.
What did this prove? Maybe this is the proof of why we can get to do horrible things. When we consider that there is an authority that rules over us, we believe that it has control of the situation and knows what it does. All this, together with our refusal to face a"superior", makes us able to obey whatever.
6- Little Albert: where do our fears come from?
The father of behaviorism, John Watson, caused a great controversy with this experiment since it had no ethical limit.
I wanted to resolve the typical debate about whether fears are innate or conditioned (learned). More specifically, his goal was to see how we can develop fear of an animal, if that fear extends to similar things, and how long that learning lasts.
So he selected little Albert, an eight-month-old baby who was placed in front of a white rat to watch his reaction. At first he showed no fear, but later, when the rat's appearance matched a great startling noise, Albert wept in terror.
After several repetitions, only with the appearance of the rat without the noise, the baby began to move away sobbing. In addition, this fear spread to more similar things: a fur coat, a rabbit or a dog.
What did this prove? That most of our fears are learned, and that we tend to generalize this very quickly to other similar or related stimuli.
7- Aversion therapies for homosexuals: Can your sexual orientation be changed?
A few years ago, homosexuality was considered a mental illness that had to be corrected.
Many psychologists began to wonder how to change the sexual orientation of homosexuals, since they thought that this was something learned or chosen (and therefore that could be reversed).
In this way, in the 60s they tried a therapy that consisted of presenting exciting images for the subject simultaneously to electric shocks in the genitals, or injections that provoked the vomit. They intended that the person link the desire to people of the same sex with something negative, and so that desire would disappear.
However, they did not achieve the desired results, quite the opposite. There was a strong psychological impact on these people, and many developed sexual dysfunctions that darkened (even more) their lives.
What did this prove? These findings indicated that sexual orientation is something that is not chosen and can not be changed. It is not yet known exactly whether there are genetic or environmental implications, the most important thing is to know that each one's sexuality is something intimate where one should not try to intervene.
8- The Stanford jail experiment, or how a simple role can cause you to do horrible things
This is one of the most famous experiments in psychology for its shattering results: it had to be canceled after a week.
Over the 1970s, Philip Zimbardo and his colleagues suspected that we are more slaves to our roles than we think. To prove it, they created a simulation of a prison in a part of Stanford University. They chose several students who were psychologically stable, and divided them into two groups: the guards and the prisoners.
They had to behave according to the role assigned to them, and he controlled a number of aspects to bring about differences: guards had more privileges and uniforms chosen by themselves, while prisoners were called by numbers and wore chains at the ankles.
The guards could do whatever they wanted except physical violence. The aim was to frighten and lead to extreme subordination to the prisoners.
Soon the guards took their role so seriously that they volunteered overtime and devised a thousand terrible ways to punish and subdue the inmates: they forced him to exercise, they did not give him food, and many forced them to go naked.
The most surprising thing was that something similar happened with the prisoners: being able to leave the experiment, they did not request it. Thus many developed strong psychological damages, somatizaciones and severe traumas.
It also surprised everyone how the researchers did not cancel the experiment before and how they became so familiar with the situation. What's more, sometimes they"revived"to see what happened.
What did this prove? A role and a certain environment could become someone we never imagined: a sissy, a submissive, or, simply, a passive subject who does not see how horrible the situation is.
9- The viewer effect: do the images of lost children really work?
An Orlando news station conducted an experiment called"The Missing Girl".
What they did was fill a shopping mall with"looking for"posters of a girl named Britney Begonia, with her photo and features.
Actually, the 8-year-old girl was sitting near one of the posters, and she wanted to watch how the others reacted. Most of the people passed by, many did not look at the poster and others asked the girl if she was okay.
Only a few, who were later asked, noticed Britney's resemblance to the girl sitting, but confessed that they did not want to get involved.
What did this prove? This is proof of the existence of the"spectator effect", a phenomenon widely proven in Social Psychology that explains facts such as why we do not intervene in a fight in the middle of the street when nobody else does.
It seems that this happens because we want to escape from uncomfortable situations, and we hope that someone else will act for us. Finally, everyone shares the same way of thinking and no one reacts.
Although perhaps, it may happen, we do not pay as much attention as we think to the notices we see in the streets and that is why so few people got involved.
10- The Monster experiment: what if we convince someone that they have a defect?
The American psychologist Wendell Johnson wanted to test the effects of"speech therapy"on children at an Iowa orphanage in 1939. More specifically, whether to say positive or negative things about his speech could eliminate existing stuttering or, conversely , Provoke her if she did not have it.
Some of the children had speech deficits and some did not. Thus, with children who had such difficulties, positive speech therapy was practiced, which consisted in pretending they had no deficit, encouraging them to speak and praising them for their linguistic achievements.
On the other hand, healthy children were told that they were stutterers and they despised and maximized any mistakes they made. Finally, in the latter group, stuttering did not develop, but if they got them to refuse to talk and develop negative psychological and emotional effects.
The study was never published, and compared to the human experiments conducted by the Nazis in World War II. Even so, it came to light over the years and the University of Iowa had to apologize publicly for the damages.
In addition, in 2007, the state of Iowa had to pay compensation to six victims who had suffered a lifetime of psychological damage for participating in the experiment.
What did this prove? What we tell the children about their abilities and potential is crucial for them to build their self-esteem and achieve achievement. If we convince a child who is not good for something, even if it is false, he will believe it and inhibit his attempts to do it. That is why it is so important to educate the little ones properly, paying attention to the way we talk to them.
11- Lost in the mall or how we can implant false memories
Elizabeth Loftus found that memories can be malleable, and that if certain keys or clues are given when the person is remembering an event, they may well store new false information about the event.
It seems that our own memories can be distorted depending on how we ask about them or what later data we give.
Thus, Loftus and his colleagues tried to implant a memory in a group of subjects: to have lost in a commercial center to the 5 years. They first asked the families to tell them real childhood experiences of the related subjects. Later they were mixed with the false memory of being lost and presented to the participants.
The results were that one in four subjects stored that false data, thinking it was a real memory.
Loftus also discovered in related experiments that it is more difficult for people who score higher on intelligence tests to implant fake memories.
What did this prove? We do not remember in a totally objective way the details of the past, but it is something that is constructed subjectively coming into play many factors like the state of mind of the moment.
In addition, there seems to be a mechanism that revises and shapes (if necessary) our memories when we recover them, to save them already transformed.
12- The case of David Reimer: can we change the sexual identity?
When David Reimer's phimosis was operated at eight months of age, he accidentally burned his genitals.
His parents, worried about the future of his son, went to the consultation of the well-known psychologist John Money. He advocated the idea that gender identity was something that was learned during childhood, and that if children were educated in a way, they could easily adopt a male or female gender.
Money said the best option was to operate on David, to remove his testicles and raise him as a child. Secretly, Money was benefiting from the situation, using it as an experiment to validate his theory.
David was renamed"Brenda"and received psychological therapy for ten years. Apparently the experiment worked and David behaved like a child, but he was not really getting the desired success: the little boy felt like a child, tended to reject the female dress and developed depression at age 13. Even the female hormones she received did not have the effect they should.
When Money tried to persuade the parents to implant a vagina through surgery, they stopped going to therapy. At age 14, David knew the truth and lived the rest of his life as a boy.
In 2004, he could not stand several dramatic events, such as the death of his brother and the separation of his wife, and committed suicide.
What did this prove? Sexual identity is something much more complex than we imagine. Feeling man or woman is not determined by our genitals, nor receiving certain hormones, nor how we are educated. It is a set of factors that science is still trying to determine accurately.
The truth is that we can not choose if we want to feel men or women, and therefore, we can not change it either.
References
- 25 Mind Blowing Psychology Experiments... You Will not Believe What's Inside Your Head. (June 5, 2012). Retrieved from List25.
- Behavioral Experiment: Watson and Little Albert (in Spanish). (March 18, 2009). Retrieved from YouTube.
- Inattentional blindness. (S.f.). Retrieved on September 23, 2016, from Scholarpedia.
- Missing Child Experiment. (May 6, 2008). Obtained from Hoaxes.
- Monster Study. (S.f.). Retrieved on September 23, 2016, from Wikipedia.
- Parras Montero, V. (May 7, 2012). Impulse control in children. Marshmallow test. Obtained from ILD Psychology.
- The 10 Most Controversial Psychology Studies Ever Published. (September 19, 2014). Retrieved from The British Psychological Society.
- Top 10 Unethical Psychological Experiments. (7 September 2008). Retrieved from Listverse.