Professional Documents
Culture Documents
18 Classic Experiments
18 Classic Experiments
Psychology
Research in Psychology
• Some will go on to become ”classic” due to their novelty, the size of their impact and
often controversy
Asch Conformity Experiments
Asch Conformity Experiments
• Conclusion:
• People seem to conform to a group opinion even if it is inaccurate
• Limitations:
• The task is low-risk
• Participants could’ve been aware of the manipulation
• Could people conform even outside of group-settings, for example, due to the
influence of a singular authority?
Milgram‘s Obedience to Authority Study
Milgram‘s Obedience to Authority Study
65% of participants
Continued to inflict shocks
up to 450V
Milgram‘s Obedience to Authority Study
• Conclusion:
• Ordinary people can behave in ”evil” ways under the influence of an authority
• Limitations:
• Milgram did not stick to the planned procedure, e.g., he put more pressure on the
teacher(s) than he was supposed to
• Some participants suspected that the learner was not getting real shocks
• Could people behave in “evil” ways even without the presence of an authority, for
example, due to their setting?
Stanford Prison Experiment
• Prisoner #819
• Wanted medical attention, taken outside of his cell to rest
• Other prisoners started chanting that Prisoner #819 was “a bad prisoner”
• Prisoners had accepted their roles and forgot that the prison was not real
• Experiment ended after 6 days due to the inhumane conditions created by the
guards
Stanford Prison Experiment
“To show that normal people could behave in pathological ways even without the
external pressure of an experimenter-authority, my colleagues and I put college
students in a simulated prison setting and observed the power of roles, rules, and
expectations.
Young men selected because they were normal on all the psychological dimensions we
measured became hostile and sadistic, verbally and physically abusing others—if they
enacted the randomly assigned role of all-powerful mock guards. Those randomly
assigned to be mock prisoners suffered emotional breakdowns, irrational thinking, and
behaved self-destructively.
This planned 2-week simulation had to be ended after 6 days because the inhumanity of
the “evil situation” had totally dominated the humanity of the “good” participants.”
Stanford Prison Experiment
Assignment 5
• Research Paper: Debunking the Stanford Prison Experiment (Le Texier, 2019)
• Compares Zimbardo’s accounts of the experiment with information from the
archives of Stanford University
• Task: Read sections from the text and answer questions using what we just learned
and what the text states
• Submit through Edupage before our next lesson