psychology experiments 2016

11 Most Popular Psychology Studies of 2016

Foods that psychopaths like, new view of depression, memory tricks, surprising psychological effects of common drugs, and more…

Below are the most popular studies from PsyBlog published in 2016, in reverse order.

Click the links for more on each study:

11. Psychopaths and narcissists like bitter tasting foods

Having a preference for bitter tastes is linked to psychopathy, narcissism and everyday sadism.

A predilection for tonic water or coffee, therefore, could indicated some psychopathic tendencies in a person’s personality.

In contrast, people who  dislike bitter tastes tend to be more agreeable, the researchers discovered.

Bitter tastes may be particularly attractive to those with darker personalities because they enjoy sensation-seeking.

Darker personality types have a greater preference for the ups and downs of life.

10. A whole-body view of depression

Depression is more than a mental disorder , it affects the body’s ability to detoxify itself.

It should be seen as a systematic disease that affects the whole body, argues a new study in the  Journal of Clinical Psychiatry.

Accepting that depression affects the whole body could help explain why people experiencing depression are more likely to suffer from cancer, cardiovascular disease and to die younger.

All of these problems can be combated, however, by the usual treatments for depression: talk therapy and/or medication.

9. Why intense exercise is so good for depression

Intense exercise increases the levels of two common neurotransmitters that are linked to depression .

Gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) and glutamate are both involved in depression and other neuropsychiatric disorders.

The study’s results are encouraging, concluded Professor Maddock:

“We are offering another view on why regular physical activity may be important to prevent or treat depression. Not every depressed person who exercises will improve, but many will.”

8. Millennials are the most narcissistic generation ever

People born between 1988 and 1994 — so-called “millennials” — are the most narcissistic generation ever .

At least that is their view and the view of both their parents and grandparents.

Not that the label sits well with them, new research finds.

Mr Joshua Grubbs, a millennial himself who led the research, said:

“Millennials and older generations agree that millennials are the most narcissistic. They just disagree to the extent of the narcissism.”

7. Underweight women most attractive to men

Women who are almost underweight are most attractive to men , a recent study finds.

Dr Lobke Vaanholt, one of the study’s authors, said:

“Although most people will not be surprised that extreme thinness was perceived as the most attractive body type, since this prevails so heavily in media, culture and fashion, the important advance is that now we have an evolutionary understanding of why this is the case.”

From Texas to Tehran and from Dakar to Beijing, the results were the same.

As a woman’s BMI increased, they become progressively less attractive.

The simple reason men find a low BMI attractive is that it signals youth.

6. One question to instantly reveal someone’s personality

Asking someone what they think about other people reveals much about their own personality .

The reason is that people tend to see more of their own qualities in others.

The generous person sees others as generous and the selfish person sees others as selfish.

Dr Dustin Wood, the study’s first author, said:

“A huge suite of negative personality traits are associated with viewing others negatively. The simple tendency to see people negatively indicates a greater likelihood of depression and various personality disorders.”

5. The most reassuring thing you can say to the anxious

Dr Suma Chand, a clinical psychologist who helps people with phobias, says:

“The most reassuring thing I can say to anyone about fear is this: All emotions change. You will never stay in a panicky state for the rest of your life. Persevere, and the fear will dissolve.”

Fear and anxiety are emotions that can trap you, says Dr Chand:

“The more you feed it, the stronger it grows. Fear traps people. Fear puts you in a box. Your world gets smaller and smaller. After a while, you’re avoiding the discomfort of the fear itself, rather than the thing you fear.

Read on —>

4. Emotional responses most heritable from mother to daughter

The brain system governing the emotional response is most heritable from mother to daughter, but less so from mother to son, a new study finds .

Fathers, though, are less likely to pass on their emotional brain circuitry to either boys or girls.

The ‘corticolimbic system’ plays an important role in mood disorders, such as depression.

The corticolimbic system is made up of the amydala, hippocampus, anterior cingulate cortex and ventromedial prefrontal cortex.

The research could explain why depression is strongly heritable from mother to daughter.

3. Drawing pictures helps your memory

Drawing pictures of words helps build stronger and more reliable memories, new research finds.

The quality of the drawings themselves does not matter, the study also found.

This suggests everyone can benefit from the technique, whatever their artistic talent.

Mr Jeffrey Wammes, the study’s first author, said:

“Importantly, the quality of the drawings people made did not seem to matter, suggesting that everyone could benefit from this memory strategy, regardless of their artistic talent. In line with this, we showed that people still gained a huge advantage in later memory, even when they had just 4 seconds to draw their picture.”

2. Why smart people tend to be loners

The more that intelligent people socialise with their friends, the less satisfied they are with life, new research finds .

The finding challenges the accepted idea that socialising generally makes people happier.

It may be that for some people — especially those with high intelligence — socialising does not increase life satisfaction.

With intelligence comes more of a focus on long-term projects and goals.

Socialising may provide a distraction from these types of long-term satisfying projects.

1. Acetaminophen kills empathy

Acetaminophen — commonly known as Tylenol in the US and paracetamol elsewhere — reduces people’s empathy for the pain of others.

Acetaminophen is an ingredient in over 600 different medications, including being the main constituent of Tylenol.

The ubiquitous painkiller does not just kill pain, it also kills our fellow-feeling.

Dr Dominik Mischkowski, the study’s first author, said:

“These findings suggest other people’s pain doesn’t seem as big of a deal to you when you’ve taken acetaminophen. Acetaminophen can reduce empathy as well as serve as a painkiller.”

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

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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.

Listen instead... or scroll to keep reading

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]

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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....

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Psychological Experiments Online

Psychological Experiments Online is a multimedia collection that synthesizes the most important psychological experiments of the 20th and 21st centuries, fostering deeper levels of understanding for students and scholars alike. These experiments have far-reaching impacts on fields as diverse as sociology, business, advertising, economics, political science, law, ethics, and the arts.

Featured Experiments

Behavioral Study of Obedience

Milgram is most famous for his controversial Obedience Study, performed at Yale University in 1961. He was inspired to perform this study by the defense commonly used at the WWII Nuremburg War Criminals Trials, that the Nazi officers and guards implementing the Holocaust had just been “following orders.” Milgram’s Behavioral Study of Obedience tested the extent to which random American civilians could be convinced to inflict pain upon their fellow citizens when ordered to do so by a perceived authority figure. The results of this study horrified the psychological community, the general public, and the study participants themselves once the true nature of the study was explained. This study was one of the driving forces behind the creation of Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) to review proposed scientific experiments using human subjects, and approve or veto their implementation.

Robbers Cave Experiment

The Robbers Cave Experiment was named after its location, as it took place at a boys summer camp in Robbers Cave State Park, Oklahoma. Sherif identified 22 psychologically-normal, white, middle-class, eleven- and twelve-year-old boys from Connecticut to take part in the experiment. The boys were divided into two groups and Sherif studied how conflict and prejudice were first fostered and then reduced. Sherif concluded that groups have their own biases, prejudices, and culture. The Robbers Cave experiment was most helpful in showing that superordinate goals for both groups can help resolve issues and create peace.

Visual Cliff Experiment

In 1960, following their work with sensory-perception in rats, Gibson and Walk hypothesized that depth perception is inherent knowledge as opposed to a learned process. Their experiment consisted of placing an infant on the visual-cliff apparatus: simply described as a table whose edge has been extended by a piece of solidly fixed Plexiglas. The parent or caregiver would call out to the child from across the Plexiglas. If the child was reluctant to cross the Plexiglas, or “cliff”, to go to its parents, the experimenters assumed that the child was able to perceive depth. The study was published that same year in Scientific American and has come to be one of psychology’s most well-known experiments.

Stanford Prison Experiment

The Stanford Prison Experiment was scheduled to run for two weeks, with the intent of studying situational influences on human behavior. The experiment was shut down after just six days due to how extreme those influences turned out to be. The experiment was conducted from August 14 to August 20, 1971, funded by the US Office of Naval Research, and showed that the random assignment of “prisoner” and “guard” to 24 male college students made a major impact on their psychology and behavior, fostering depression among the prisoners and sadism among the guards.

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The 25 Most Influential Psychological Experiments in History

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• Published 2017

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The Practice of Experimental Psychology: An Inevitably Postmodern Endeavor

The aim of psychology is to understand the human mind and behavior. In contemporary psychology, the method of choice to accomplish this incredibly complex endeavor is the experiment. This dominance has shaped the whole discipline from the self-concept as an empirical science and its very epistemological and theoretical foundations, via research practice and the scientific discourse to teaching. Experimental psychology is grounded in the scientific method and positivism, and these principles, which are characteristic for modern thinking, are still upheld. Despite this apparently stalwart adherence to modern principles, experimental psychology exhibits a number of aspects which can best be described as facets of postmodern thinking although they are hardly acknowledged as such. Many psychologists take pride in being “real natural scientists” because they conduct experiments, but it is particularly difficult for psychologists to evade certain elements of postmodern thinking in view of the specific nature of their subject matter. Postmodernism as a philosophy emerged in the 20th century as a response to the perceived inadequacy of the modern approach and as a means to understand the complexities, ambiguities, and contradictions of the times. Therefore, postmodernism offers both valuable insights into the very nature of experimental psychology and fruitful ideas on improving experimental practice to better reflect the complexities and ambiguities of human mind and behavior. Analyzing experimental psychology along postmodern lines begins by discussing the implications of transferring the scientific method from fields with rather narrowly defined phenomena—the natural sciences—to a much broader and more heterogeneous class of complex phenomena, namely the human mind and behavior. This ostensibly modern experimental approach is, however, per se riddled with postmodern elements: (re-)creating phenomena in an experimental setting, including the hermeneutic processes of generating hypotheses and interpreting results, is no carbon copy of “reality” but rather an active construction which reflects irrevocably the pre-existing ideas of the investigator. These aspects, analyzed by using postmodern concepts like hyperreality and simulacra, did not seep in gradually but have been present since the very inception of experimental psychology, and they are necessarily inherent in its philosophy of science. We illustrate this theoretical analysis with the help of two examples, namely experiments on free will and visual working memory. The postmodern perspective reveals some pitfalls in the practice of experimental psychology. Furthermore, we suggest that accepting the inherently fuzzy nature of theoretical constructs in psychology and thinking more along postmodern lines would actually clarify many theoretical problems in experimental psychology.

Introduction

Postmodernism is, in essence, an attempt to achieve greater clarity in our perception, thinking, and behavior by scrutinizing their larger contexts and preconditions, based on the inextricably intertwined levels of both the individual and the society. Psychology also studies the human mind and behavior, which indicates that psychology should dovetail with postmodern approaches. In the 1990s and early 2000s, several attempts were made to introduce postmodern thought as potentially very fruitful ideas into general academic psychology ( Jager, 1991 ; Kvale, 1992 ; Holzman and Morss, 2000 ; Holzman, 2006 ). However, overall they were met with little response.

Postmodern thoughts have been taken up by several fringe areas of academic psychology, e.g., psychoanalysis ( Leffert, 2007 ; Jiménez, 2015 ; but see Holt, 2005 ), some forms of therapy and counseling ( Ramey and Grubb, 2009 ; Hansen, 2015 ), humanistic ( Krippner, 2001 ), feminist and gender ( Hare-Mustin and Marecek, 1988 ; Sinacore and Enns, 2005 ), or cultural psychology ( Gemignani and Peña, 2007 ).

However, there is resistance against suggestions to incorporate postmodern ideas into the methodology and the self-perception of psychology as academic—and scientific!—discipline. In fact, postmodern approaches are often rejected vehemently, sometimes even very vocally. For instance, Gergen (2001) argued that the “core tenets” of postmodernism are not at odds with those of scientific psychology but rather that they can enrich the discipline by opening up new possibilities. His suggestions were met with reservation and were even outright rejected on the following grounds: postmodernism, “like anthrax of the intellect, if allowed [our italics] into mainstream psychology, […] will poison the field” ( Locke, 2002 , 458), that it “wishes to return psychology to a prescientific subset of philosophy” ( Kruger, 2002 , 456), and that psychology “needs fewer theoretical and philosophical orientations, not more” ( Hofmann, 2002 , 462; see also Gergen ’s, 2001 , replies to the less biased and more informed commentaries on his article).

In the following years, and continuing the so-called science wars of the 1990s ( Segerstråle, 2000 ), several other attacks were launched against a perceived rise or even dominance of postmodern thought in psychology. Held(2007 ; see also the rebuttal by Martin and Sugarman, 2009 ) argued that anything postmodern would undermine rationality and destroy academic psychology. Similarly, postmodernism was identified—together with “radical environmentalism” and “pseudoscience” among other things—as a “key threat to scientific psychology” ( Lilienfeld, 2010 , 282), or as “inimical to progress in the psychology of science” ( Capaldi and Proctor, 2013 , 331). The following advice was given to psychologists: “We [psychologists] should also push back against the pernicious creep of these untested concepts into our field” ( Tarescavage, 2020 , 4). Furthermore, the term “postmodern” is even employed as an all-purpose invective in a popular scientific book by psychologist Steven Pinker (2018) .

Therefore, it seems that science and experimental psychology on the one hand and postmodern thinking on the other are irreconcilable opposites. However, following Gergen (2001) and Holtz (2020) , we argue that this dichotomy is only superficial because postmodernism is often misunderstood. A closer look reveals that experimental psychology contains many postmodern elements. Even more, there is reason to assume that a postmodern perspective may be beneficial for academic psychology: First, the practice of experimental psychology would be improved by integrating postmodern thinking because it reveals a side of the human psyche for which experimental psychology is mostly blind. Second, the postmodern perspective can tell us much about the epistemological and social background of experimental psychology and how this affects our understanding of the human psyche.

A Postmodern Perspective on Experimental Psychology

Experimental psychology and the modern scientific worldview.

It lies within the nature of humans to try to find out more about themselves and their world, but the so-called Scientific Revolution of the early modern period marks the beginning of a new era in this search for knowledge. The Scientific Revolution, which has led to impressive achievements in the natural sciences and the explanation of the physical world (e.g., Olby et al., 1991 ; Henry, 1997 ; Cohen, 2015 ; Osterlind, 2019 ), is based on the following principle: to “measure what can be measured and make measurable what cannot be measured.” This famous appeal—falsely attributed to Galileo Galilei but actually from the 19th century ( Kleinert, 2009 )—illustrates the two fundamental principles of modern science: First, the concept of “measurement” encompasses the idea that phenomena can be quantified, i.e., expressed numerically. Second, the concept of “causal connections” pertains to the idea that consistent, non-random relationships can be established between measurable phenomena. Quantification allows that relationships between phenomena can be expressed, calculated, and predicted in precise mathematical and numerical terms.

However, there are two important issues to be aware of. First, while it is not difficult to measure “evident” aspects, such as mass and distance, more complex phenomena cannot be measured easily. In such cases, it is therefore necessary to find ways of making these “elusive” phenomena measurable. This can often only be achieved by reducing complex phenomena to their simpler—and measurable!—elements. For instance, in order to measure memory ability precisely, possible effects of individual preexisting knowledge which introduce random variance and thus impreciseness have to be eliminated. Indeed, due to this reason, in many memory experiments, meaningless syllables are used as study material.

Second, it is not difficult to scientifically prove a causal relationship between a factor and an outcome if the relationship is simple, that is, if there is only one single factor directly influencing the outcome. In such a case, showing that a manipulation of the factor causes a change in the outcome is clear evidence for a causal relationship because there are no other factors which may influence the outcome as well. However, in situations where many factors influence an outcome in a complex, interactive way, proving a causal relationship is much more difficult. To prove the causal effect of one factor in such a situation the effects of all other factors—called confounding factors from the perspective of the factor of interest—have to be eliminated so that a change in the outcome can be truly attributed to a causal effect of the factor of interest. However, this has an important implication: The investigator has to divide the factors present in a given situation into interesting versus non-interesting factors with respect to the current context of the experiment. Consequently, while experiments reveal something about local causal relationships, they do not necessarily provide hints about the net effect of all causal factors present in the given situation.

The adoption of the principles of modern science has also changed psychology. Although the beginnings of psychology—as the study of the psyche —date back to antiquity, psychology as an academic discipline was established in the mid to late 19th century. This enterprise was also inspired by the success of the natural sciences, and psychology was explicitly modeled after this example by Wilhelm Wundt—the “father of experimental psychology”—although he emphasized the close ties to the humanities as well. The experiment quickly became the method of choice. There were other, more hermeneutic approaches during this formative phase of modern psychology, such as psychoanalysis or introspection according to the Würzburg School, but their impact on academic psychology was limited. Behaviorism emerged as a direct reaction against these perceived unscientific approaches, and its proponents emphasized the scientific character of their “new philosophy of psychology.” It is crucial to note that in doing so they also emphasized the importance of the experiment and the necessity of quantifying directly observable behavior in psychological research. Behaviorism quickly became a very influential paradigm which shaped academic psychology. Gestalt psychologists, whose worldview is radically different from behaviorism, also relied on experiments in their research. Cognitive psychology, which followed, complemented, and partly superseded behaviorism, relies heavily on the experiment as a means to gain insight into mental processes, although other methods such as modeling are employed as well. Interestingly, there is a fundamental difference between psychoanalysis and humanistic psychology, which do not rely on the experiment, and the other above-mentioned approaches as the former focus on the psychic functioning of individuals, whereas the latter focus more on global laws of psychic functioning across individuals. This is reflected in the fact that psychological laws in experimental psychology are established on the arithmetic means across examined participants—a difference we will elaborate on later in more detail. Today, psychology is the scientific —in the sense of empirical-quantitative—study of the human mind and behavior, and the experiment is often considered the gold standard in psychological research (e.g., Mandler, 2007 ; Goodwin, 2015 ; Leahey, 2017 ).

The experiment is closely associated with the so-called scientific method ( Haig, 2014 ; Nola and Sankey, 2014 ) and the epistemological tenets philosophy of positivism—in the sense as Martin (2003) ; Michell (2003) , and Teo (2018) explain—which sometimes exhibit characteristics of naïve empiricism. Roughly speaking, the former consists of observing, formulating hypotheses, and testing these hypotheses in experiments. The latter postulates that knowledge is based on sensory experience, that it is testable, independent of the investigator and therefore objective as it accurately depicts the world as it is. This means that in principle all of reality can not only be measured but eventually be entirely explained by science. This worldview is attacked by postmodern thinkers who contend that the world is far more complex and that the modern scientific approach cannot explain all of reality and its phenomena.

The Postmodern Worldview

Postmodern thinking (e.g., Bertens, 1995 ; Sim, 2011 ; Aylesworth, 2015 ) has gained momentum since the 1980s, and although neither the term “postmodernism” nor associated approaches can be defined in a unanimous or precise way, they are characterized by several intertwined concepts, attitudes, and aims. The most basic trait is a general skepticism and the willingness to question literally everything from the ground up—even going so far as to question not only the foundation of any idea, but also the question itself. This includes the own context, the chosen premises, thinking, and the use of language. Postmodernism therefore has a lot in common with science’s curiosity to understand the world: the skeptical attitude paired with the desire to discover how things really are.

Postmodern investigations often start by looking at the language and the broader context of certain phenomena due to the fact that language is the medium in which many of our mental activities—which subsequently influence our behavior—take place. Thus, the way we talk reveals something about how and why we think and act. Additionally, we communicate about phenomena using language, which in turn means that this discourse influences the way we think about or see those phenomena. Moreover, this discourse is embedded in a larger social and historical context, which also reflects back on the use of language and therefore on our perception and interpretation of certain phenomena.

Generally speaking, postmodern investigations aim at detecting and explaining how the individual is affected by societal influences and their underlying, often hidden ideas, structures, or mechanisms. As these influences are often fuzzy, contradictory, and dependent on their context, the individual is subject to a multitude of different causalities, and this already complex interplay is further complicated by the personal history, motivations, aims, or ways of thinking of the individual. Postmodernism attempts to understand all of this complexity as it is in its entirety.

The postmodern approaches have revealed three major general tendencies which characterize the contemporary world: First, societies and the human experience since the 20th century have displayed less coherence and conversely a greater diversity than the centuries before in virtually all areas, e.g., worldviews, modes of thinking, societal structures, or individual behavior. Second, this observation leads postmodern thinkers to the conclusion that the grand narratives which dominated the preceding centuries and shaped whole societies by providing frames of references have lost—at least partially—their supremacy and validity. Examples are religious dogmas, nationalism, industrialization, the notion of linear progress—and modern science because it works according to certain fundamental principles. Third, the fact that different but equally valid perspectives, especially on social phenomena or even whole worldviews, are possible and can coexist obviously affects the concepts of “truth,” “reality,” and “reason” in such a way that these concepts lose their immutable, absolute, and universal or global character, simply because they are expressions and reflections of a certain era, society, or worldview.

At this point, however, it is necessary to clarify a common misconception: Interpreting truth, reality, or reason as relative, subjective, and context-dependent—as opposed to absolute, objective, and context-independent—does naturally neither mean that anything can be arbitrarily labeled as true, real, or reasonable, nor, vice versa, that something cannot be true, real, or reasonable. For example, the often-quoted assumption that postmodernism apparently even denies the existence of gravity or its effects as everything can be interpreted arbitrarily or states that we cannot elucidate these phenomena with adequate accuracy because everything is open to any interpretation ( Sokal, 1996 ), completely misses the point.

First, postmodernism is usually not concerned with the laws of physics and the inanimate world as such but rather focuses on the world of human experience. However, the phenomenon itself, e.g., gravity, is not the same as our scientific knowledge of phenomena—our chosen areas of research, methodological paradigms, data, theories, and explanations—or our perception of phenomena, which are both the results of human activities. Therefore, the social context influences our scientific knowledge, and in that sense scientific knowledge is a social construction ( Hodge, 1999 ).

Second, phenomena from human experience, although probably more dependent on the social context than physical phenomena, cannot be interpreted arbitrarily either. The individual context—such as the personal history, motivations, aims, or worldviews—determines whether a certain behavior makes sense for a certain individual in a certain situation. As there are almost unlimited possible backgrounds, this might seem completely random or arbitrary from an overall perspective. But from the perspective of an individual the phenomenon in question may be explained entirely by a theory for a specific—and not universal—context.

As described above, the postmodern meta-perspective directly deals with human experience and is therefore especially relevant for psychology. Moreover, any discipline—including the knowledge it generates—will certainly benefit from understanding its own (social) mechanisms and implications. We will show below that postmodern thinking not only elucidates the broader context of psychology as an academic discipline but rather that experimental psychology exhibits a number of aspects which can best be described as facets of postmodern thinking although they are not acknowledged as such.

The Postmodern Context of Experimental Psychology

Paradoxically, postmodern elements have been present since the very beginning of experimental psychology although postmodernism gained momentum only decades later. One of the characteristics of postmodernism is the transplantation of certain elements from their original context to new contexts, e.g., the popularity of “Eastern” philosophies and practices in contemporary “Western” societies. These different elements are often juxtaposed and combined to create something new, e.g., new “westernized” forms of yoga ( Shearer, 2020 ).

Similarly, the founders of modern academic psychology took up the scientific method, which was originally developed in the context of the natural sciences, and transplanted it to the study of the human psyche in the hope to repeat the success of the natural sciences. By contrast, methods developed specifically in the context of psychology such as psychoanalysis ( Wax, 1995 ) or introspection according to the Würzburg School ( Hackert and Weger, 2018 ) have gained much less ground in academic psychology. The way we understand both the psyche and psychology has been shaped to a great extent by the transfer of the principles of modern science, namely quantitative measurement and experimental methods, although it is not evident per se that this is the best approach to elucidate mental and behavioral phenomena. Applying the methods of the natural sciences to a new and different context, namely to phenomena pertaining to the human psyche , is a truly postmodern endeavor because it juxtaposes two quite distinct areas and merges them into something new—experimental psychology.

The postmodern character of experimental psychology becomes evident on two levels: First, the subject matter—the human psyche —exhibits a postmodern character since mental and behavioral phenomena are highly dependent on the idiosyncratic contexts of the involved individuals, which makes it impossible to establish unambiguous general laws to describe them. Second, experimental psychology itself displays substantial postmodern traits because both its method and the knowledge it produces—although seemingly objective and rooted in the modern scientific worldview—inevitably contain postmodern elements, as will be shown below.

The Experiment as Simulacrum

The term “simulacrum” basically means “copy,” often in the sense of “inferior copy” or “phantasm/illusion.” However, in postmodern usage “simulacrum” has acquired a more nuanced and concrete meaning. “Simulacrum” is a key term in the work of postmodern philosopher Jean Baudrillard, who arguably presented the most elaborate theory on simulacra (1981/1994). According to Baudrillard, a simulacrum “is the reflection of a profound [‘real’] reality” (16/6). Simulacra, however, are more than identical carbon copies because they gain a life of their own and become “real” in the sense of becoming an own entity. For example, the personality a pop star shows on stage is not “real” in the sense that it is their “normal,” off-stage personality, but it is certainly “real” in the sense that it is perceived by the audience even if they are aware that it might be an “artificial” personality. Two identical cars can also be “different” for one might be used as a means of transportation while the other might be a status symbol. Even an honest video documentation of a certain event is not simply a copy of the events that took place because it lies within the medium video that only certain sections can be recorded from a certain perspective. Additionally, the playback happens in other contexts as the original event, which may also alter the perception of the viewer.

The post-structuralist—an approach closely associated with postmodernism—philosopher Roland Barthes pointed out another important aspect of simulacra. He contended that in order to understand something—an “object” in Barthes’ terminology—we necessarily create simulacra because we “ reconstruct [our italics] an ‘object’ in such a way as to manifest thereby the rules of functioning [⋯] of this object” ( Barthes, 1963 , 213/214). In other words, when we investigate an object—any phenomenon, either material, mental, or social—we have to perceive it first. This means that we must have some kind of mental representation of the phenomenon/object—and it is crucial to note that this representation is not the same thing as the “real” object itself. All our mental operations are therefore not performed on the “real” object but on mental representations of the object. We decompose a phenomenon in order to understand it, that is, we try to identify its components. In doing so, we effect a change in the object because our phenomenon is no longer the original phenomenon “as it is” for we are performing a mental operation on it, thereby transforming the original phenomenon. Identifying components may be simple, e.g., dividing a tree into roots, trunk, branches, and leaves may seem obvious or even “natural” but it is nevertheless us as investigators who create this structure—the tree itself is probably not aware of it. Now that we have established this structure, we are able to say that the tree consists of several components and name these components. Thus, we have introduced “new” elements into our understanding of the tree. This is the important point, even though the elements, i.e., the branches and leaves themselves “as they are,” have naturally always been “present.” Our understanding of “tree” has therefore changed completely because a tree is now something which is composed of several elements. In that sense, we have changed the original phenomenon by adding something—and this has all happened in our thinking and not in the tree itself. It is also possible to find different structures and different components for the tree, e.g., the brown and the green, which shows that we construct this knowledge.

Next, we can investigate the components to see how they interact with and relate to each other and to the whole system. Also, we can work out their functions and determine the conditions under which a certain event will occur. We can even expand the scope of our investigation and examine the tree in the context of its ecosystem. But no matter what we do or how sophisticated our investigation becomes, everything said above remains true here, too, because neither all these actions listed above nor the knowledge we gain from them are the object itself. Rather, we have added something to the object and the more we know about our object, the more knowledge we have constructed. This addition is what science—gaining knowledge—is all about. Or in the words of Roland Barthes: “the simulacrum is intellect added to object, and this addition has an anthropological value, in that it is man himself, his history, his situation, his freedom and the very resistance which nature offers to his mind” (1963/1972, 214/215).

In principle, this holds truth regarding all scientific investigations. But the more complex phenomena are, the more effort and personal contribution is required on behalf of the investigator to come up with structures, theories, or explanations. Paraphrasing Barthes: When dealing with complex phenomena, more intellect must be added to the object, which means in turn that there are more possibilities for different approaches and perspectives, that is, the constructive element becomes larger. As discussed previously, this does not mean that investigative and interpretative processes are arbitrary. But it is clear from this train of thought that “objectivity” or “truth” in a “positivist,” naïve empiricist “realist,” or absolute sense are not attainable. Nevertheless, we argue here that this is not a drawback, as many critics of postmodernism contend (see above), but rather an advantage because it allows more accurate scientific investigations of true-to-life phenomena, which are typically complex in the case of psychology.

The concepts of simulacra by Baudrillard and Barthes can be combined to provide a description of the experiment in psychology. Accordingly, our understanding of the concept of the “simulacrum” entails that scientific processes—indeed all investigative processes—necessarily need to duplicate the object of their investigation in order to understand it. In doing so, constructive elements are necessarily introduced. These elements are of a varying nature, which means that investigations of one and the same phenomenon may differ from each other and different investigations may find out different things about the phenomenon in question. These investigations then become entities on their own—in the Baudrillardian sense—and therefore simulacra.

In a groundbreaking article on “the meaning and limits of exact science” physicist Max Planck stated that “[a]n experiment is a question which science poses to nature, and a measurement is the recording of nature’s answer” ( Planck, 1949 , 325). The act of “asking a question” implies that the person asking the question has at least a general idea of what the answer might look like ( Heidegger, 1953 , §2). For example: When asking someone for their name, we obviously do not know what they are called, but we assume that they have a name and we also have an idea of how the concept “name” works. Otherwise we could not even conceive, let alone formulate, and pose our question. This highlights how a certain degree of knowledge and understanding of a concept is necessary so that we are able to ask questions about it. Likewise, we need to have a principal idea or assumption of possible mechanisms if we want to find out how more complex phenomena function. It is—at least at the beginning—irrelevant whether these ideas are factually correct or entirely wrong, for without them we would be unable to approach our subject matter in the first place.

The context of the investigator—their general worldview, their previous knowledge and understanding, and their social situation—obviously plays an important part in the process of forming a question which can be asked in the current research context. Although this context may be analyzed along postmodern lines in order to find out how it affects research, production of knowledge, and—when the knowledge is applied—possible (social) consequences, there is a much more profound implication pertaining to the very nature of the experiment as a means to gain knowledge.

Irrespective of whether it is a simple experiment in physics such as Galileo Galilei’s or an experiment on a complex phenomenon from social or cognitive psychology, the experiment is a situation which is specifically designed to answer a certain type of questions, usually causal relationships, such as: “Does A causally affect B?” Excluding the extremely complex discussion on the nature of causality and causation (e.g., Armstrong, 1997 ; Pearl, 2009 ; Paul and Hall, 2013 ), it is crucial to note that we need the experiment as a tool to answer this question. Although we may theorize about a phenomenon and infer causal relationships simply by observing, we cannot—at least according to the prevailing understanding of causality in the sciences—prove causal relationships without the experiment.

The basic idea of the experiment is to create conditions which differ in only one single factor which is suspected as a causal factor for an effect. The influence of all other potential causal relationships is kept identical because they are considered as confounding factors which are irrelevant from the perspective of the research question of the current experiment. Then, if a difference is found in the outcome between the experimental conditions, this is considered as proof that the aspect in question exerts indeed a causal effect. This procedure and the logic behind it are not difficult to understand. However, a closer look reveals that this is actually far from simple or obvious.

To begin with, an experiment is nothing which occurs “naturally” but a situation created for a specific purpose, i.e., an “artificial” situation, because other causal factors exerting influence in “real” life outside the laboratory are deliberately excluded and considered as “confounding” factors. This in itself shows that the experiment contains a substantial postmodern element because instead of creating something it rather re- creates it. This re-creation is of course based on phenomena from the “profound” reality—in the Baudrillardian sense—since the explicit aim is to find out something about this profound reality and not to create something new or something else. However, as stated above, this re-creation must contain constructive elements reflecting the presuppositions, conceptual-theoretical assumptions, and aims of the investigator. By focusing on one factor and by reducing the complexity of the profound reality, the practical operationalization and realization thus reflect both the underlying conceptual structure and the anticipated outcome as they are specifically designed to test for the suspected but hidden or obscured causal relationships.

At this point, another element becomes relevant, namely the all-important role of language, which is emphasized in postmodern thinking (e.g., Harris, 2005 ). Without going into the intricacies of semiotics, there is an explanatory gap ( Chalmers, 2005 )—to borrow a phrase from philosophy of mind—between the phenomenon on the one hand and the linguistic and/or mental representation of it on the other. This relationship is far from clear and it is therefore problematic to assume that our linguistic or mental representations—our words and the concepts they designate—are identical with the phenomena themselves. Although we cannot, at least according to our present knowledge and understanding, fully bridge this gap, it is essential to be aware of it in order to avoid some pitfalls, as will be shown in the examples below.

Even a seemingly simple word like “tree”—to take up once more our previous example—refers to a tangible phenomenon because there are trees “out there.” However, they come in all shapes and sizes, there are different kinds of trees, and every single one of them may be labeled as “tree.” Furthermore, trees are composed of different parts, and the leaf—although part of the tree—has its own word, i.e., linguistic and mental representation. Although the leaf is part of the tree—at least according to our concepts—it is unclear whether “tree” also somehow encompasses “leaf.” The same holds true for the molecular, atomic, or even subatomic levels, where there “is” no tree. Excluding the extremely complex ontological implications of this problem, it has become clear that we are referring to a certain level of granularity when using the word “tree.” The level of granularity reflects the context, aims, and concepts of the investigator, e.g., an investigation of the rain forest as an ecosystem will ignore the subatomic level.

How does this concern experimental psychology? Psychology studies intangible phenomena, namely mental and behavioral processes, such as cognition, memory, learning, motivation, emotion, perception, consciousness, etc. It is important to note that these terms designate theoretical constructs as, for example, memory cannot be observed directly. We may provide the subjects of an experiment a set of words to learn and observe later how many words they reproduce correctly. A theoretical construct therefore describes such relationships between stimulus and behavior, and we may draw conclusions from this observable data about memory. But neither the observable behavior of the subject, the resulting data, nor our conclusions are identical with memory itself.

This train of thought demonstrates the postmodern character of experimental psychology because we construct our knowledge. But there is more to it than that: Even by trying to define a theoretical construct as exactly as possible—e.g., memory as “the process of maintaining information over time” ( Matlin, 2012 , 505) or “the means by which we retain and draw on our past experiences to use this information in the present” ( Sternberg and Sternberg, 2011 , 187)—the explanatory gap between representation and phenomenon cannot be bridged. Rather, it becomes even more complicated because theoretical constructs are composed of other theoretical constructs, which results in some kind of self-referential circularity where constructs are defined by other constructs which refer to further constructs. In the definitions above, for instance, hardly any key term is self-evident and unambiguous for there are different interpretations of the constructs “process,” “maintaining,” “information,” “means,” “retain,” “draw on,” “experiences,” and “use” according to their respective contexts. Only the temporal expressions “over time,” “past,” and “present” are probably less ambiguous here because they are employed as non-technical, everyday terms. However, the definitions above are certainly not entirely incomprehensible—in fact, they are rather easy to understand in everyday language—and it is quite clear what the authors intend to express . The italics indicate constructive elements, which demonstrates that attempts to give a precise definition in the language of science result in fuzziness and self-reference.

Based on a story by Jorge Luis Borges, Baudrillard (1981) found an illustrative allegory: a map so precise that it portrays everything in perfect detail—but therefore inevitably so large that it shrouds the entire territory it depicts. Similarly, Taleb (2007) coined the term “ludic fallacy” for mistaking the model/map—in our context: experiments in psychology—for the reality/territory, that is, a mental or behavioral phenomenon. Similar to the functionality of a seemingly “imprecise” map which contains only the relevant landmarks so the user may find their way, the fuzziness of language poses no problems in everyday communication. So why is it a problem in experimental psychology? Since the nature of theoretical constructs in psychology lies precisely in their very fuzziness, the aim of reaching a high degree of granularity and precision in experimental psychology seems to be unattainable (see the various failed attempts to create “perfect” languages which might depict literally everything “perfectly,” e.g., Carapezza and D’Agostino, 2010 ).

Without speculating about ontic or epistemic implications, it is necessary to be aware of the explanatory gap and to refrain from identifying the experiment and the underlying operationalization with the theoretical construct. Otherwise, this gap is “filled” unintentionally and uncontrollably if the results of an experiment are taken as valid proof for a certain theoretical construct, which is actually fuzzy and potentially operationalizable in a variety of ways. If this is not acknowledged, words, such as “memory,” become merely symbols devoid of concrete meaning, much like a glass bead game—or in postmodern terminology: a hyperreality.

Experiments and Hyperreality

“Hyperreality” is another key term in the work of Jean Baudrillard (1981) and it denotes a concept closely related to the simulacrum. Accordingly, in modern society the simulacra are ubiquitous and they form a system of interconnected simulacra which refer to each other rather than to the real, thereby possibly hiding or replacing the real. Consequently, the simulacra become real in their own right and form a “more real” reality, namely the hyperreality. One may or may not accept Baudrillard’s conception, especially the all-embracing social and societal implications, but the core concept of “hyperreality” is nevertheless a fruitful tool to analyze experimental psychology. We have already seen that the experiment displays many characteristics of a simulacrum, so it is not surprising that the concept of hyperreality is applicable here as well, although in a slightly different interpretation than Baudrillard’s.

The hyperreal character of the experiment can be discussed on two levels: the experiment itself and the discourse wherein it is embedded.

On the level of the experiment itself, two curious observations must be taken into account. First, and in contrast to the natural sciences where the investigator is human and the subject matter (mostly) non-human and usually inanimate, in psychology both the investigator and the subject matter are human. This means that the subjects of the experiment, being autonomous persons, are not malleable or completely controllable by the investigator because they bring their own background, history, worldview, expectations, and motivations. They interpret the situation—the experiment—and act accordingly, but not necessarily in the way the investigator had planned or anticipated ( Smedslund, 2016 ). Therefore, the subjects create their own versions of the experiment, or, in postmodern terminology, a variety of simulacra, which may be more or less compatible with the framework of the investigator. This holds true for all subjects of an experiment, which means that the experiment as a whole may also be interpreted as an aggregation of interconnected simulacra—a hyperreality.

The hyperreal character becomes even more evident because what contributes in the end to the interpretation of the results of the experiment are not the actual performances and results of the individual subjects as they were intended by them but rather how their performances and results are handled, seen, and interpreted by the investigator. Even if the investigator tries to be as faithful as possible and aims at an exact and unbiased measurement—i.e., an exact copy—there are inevitably constructive elements which introduce uncertainty into the experiment. Investigators can never be certain what the subjects were actually doing and thinking so they must necessarily work with interpretations. Or in postmodern terms: Because the actual performances and results of the subjects are not directly available the investigators must deal with simulacra. These simulacra become the investigators’ reality and thus any further treatment—statistical analyses, interpretations, or discussions—becomes a hyperreality, that is, a set of interconnected simulacra which have become “real.”

On the level of the discourse wherein the experiment is embedded, another curious aspect also demonstrates the hyperreal character of experimental psychology. Psychology is, according to the standard definition, the scientific study of mental and behavioral processes of the individual (e.g., Gerrig, 2012 ). This definition contains two actually contradictory elements. On the one hand, the focus is on processes of the individual. On the other hand, the—scientific—method to elucidate these processes does not look at individuals per se but aggregates their individual experiences and transforms them into a “standard” experience. The results from experiments, our knowledge of the human psyche, reflect psychological functioning at the level of the mean across individuals. And even if we assume that the mean is only an estimator and not an exact description or prediction, the question remains open how de-individualized observations are related to the experience of an individual. A general mechanism, a law—which was discovered by abstracting from a multitude of individual experiences—is then ( re -)imposed in the opposite direction back onto the individual. In other words, a simulacrum—namely, the result of an experiment—is viewed and treated as reality, thus becoming hyperreal. Additionally, and simply because it is considered universally true, this postulated law acquires thereby a certain validity and “truth”—often irrespective of its actual, factual, or “profound” truth—on its own. Therefore, it can become impossible to distinguish between “profound” and “simulacral” truth, which is the hallmark of hyperreality.

Measuring the Capacity of the Visual Working Memory

Vision is an important sensory modality and there is extensive research on this area ( Hutmacher, 2019 ). Much of our daily experience is shaped by seeing a rich and complex world around us, and it is therefore an interesting question how much visual information we can store and process. Based on the development of a seminal experimental paradigm, Luck and Vogel (1997) have shown that visual working memory has a storage capacity of about four items. This finding is reported in many textbooks (e.g., Baddeley, 2007 ; Parkin, 2013 ; Goldstein, 2015 ) and has almost become a truism in cognitive psychology.

The experimental paradigm developed by Luck and Vogel (1997) is a prime example of an experiment which closely adheres to the scientific principles outlined above. In order to make a very broad and fuzzy phenomenon measurable, simple abstract forms are employed as visual stimuli—such as colored squares, triangles, or lines, usually on a “neutral,” e.g., gray, background—which can be counted in order to measure the capacity of visual working memory. Reducing the exuberant diversity of the “outside visual world” to a few abstract geometric forms is an extremely artificial situation. The obvious contrast between simple geometrical forms and the rich panorama of the “real” visual world illustrates the pitfalls of controlling supposed confounding variables, namely the incontrollable variety of the “real” world and how we see it. Precisely by abstracting and by excluding potential confounding variables it is possible to count the items and to make the capacity of the visual working memory measurable. But in doing so the original phenomenon—seeing the whole world—is lost. In other words: A simulacrum has been created.

The establishment of the experimental paradigm by Luck and Vogel has led to much research and sparked an extensive discussion how the limitation to only four items might be explained (see the summaries by Brady et al., 2011 ; Luck and Vogel, 2013 ; Ma et al., 2014 ; Schurgin, 2018 ). However, critically, several studies have shown that the situation is different when real-world objects are used as visual stimuli rather than simple abstract forms, revealing that the capacity of the visual working memory is higher for real-world objects ( Endress and Potter, 2014 ; Brady et al., 2016 ; Schurgin et al., 2018 ; Robinson et al., 2020 ; also Schurgin and Brady, 2019 ). Such findings show that the discourse about the mechanisms behind the limitations of the visual working memory is mostly about an artificial phenomenon which has no counterpart in “reality”—the perfect example of a hyperreality.

This hyperreal character does not mean that the findings of Luck and Vogel (1997) or similar experiments employing artificial stimuli are irrelevant or not “true.” The results are true—but it is a local truth, only valid for the specific context of specific experiments, and not a global truth which applies to the visual working memory in general . That is, speaking about “visual working memory” based on the paradigm of Luck and Vogel is a mistake because it is actually about “visual working memory for simple abstract geometrical forms in front of a gray background.”

Free Will and Experimental Psychology

The term “free will” expresses the idea of having “a significant kind of control [italics in the original] over one’s actions” ( O’Connor and Franklin, 2018 , n.p.). This concept has occupied a central position in Western philosophy since antiquity because it has far-reaching consequences for our self-conception as humans and our position in the world, including questions of morality, responsibility, and the nature of legal systems (e.g., Beebee, 2013 ; McKenna and Pereboom, 2016 ; O’Connor and Franklin, 2018 ). Being a topic of general interest, it is not surprising that experimental psychologists have tried to investigate free will as well.

The most famous study was conducted by Libet et al. (1983) , and this experiment has quickly become a focal point in the extensive discourse on free will because it provides empirical data and a scientific investigation. Libet et al.’s experiment seems to show that the subjective impression when persons consciously decide to act is in fact preceded by objectively measurable but unconscious physical processes. This purportedly proves that our seemingly voluntary actions are actually predetermined by physical processes because the brain has unconsciously reached a decision already before the person becomes aware of it and that our conscious intentions are simply grafted onto it. Therefore, we do not have a free will, and consequently much of our social fabric is based on an illusion. Or so the story goes.

This description, although phrased somewhat pointedly, represents a typical line of thought in the discourse on free will (e.g., the prominent psychologists Gazzaniga, 2011 ; Wegner, 2017 ; see Kihlstrom, 2017 , for further examples).

Libet’s experiment sparked an extensive and highly controversial discussion: For some authors, it is a refutation or at least threat to various concepts of free will, or, conversely, an indicator or even proof for some kind of material determinism. By contrast, other authors deny that the experiment refutes or counts against free will. Furthermore, a third group—whose position we adopt for our further argumentation—denies that Libet’s findings are even relevant for this question at all (for summaries of this complex and extensive discussion and various positions including further references see Nahmias, 2010 ; Radder and Meynen, 2013 ; Schlosser, 2014 ; Fischborn, 2016 ; Lavazza, 2016 ; Schurger, 2017 ). Libet’s own position, although not entirely consistent, opposes most notions of free will ( Roskies, 2011 ; Seifert, 2011 ). Given this background, it is not surprising that there are also numerous further experimental studies on various aspects of this subject area (see the summaries by Saigle et al., 2018 ; Shepard, 2018 ; Brass et al., 2019 ).

However, we argue that this entire discourse is best understood along postmodern lines as hyperreality and that Libet’s experiment itself is a perfect example of a simulacrum. A closer look at the concrete procedure of the experiment shows that Libet actually asked his participants to move their hand or finger “at will” while their brain activity was monitored with an EEG. They were instructed to keep watch in an introspective manner for the moment when they felt the “urge” to move their hand and to record this moment by indicating the clock-position of a pointer. This is obviously a highly artificial situation where the broad and fuzzy concept of “free will” is abstracted and reduced to the movement of the finger, the only degree of freedom being the moment of the movement. The question whether this is an adequate operationalization of free will is of paramount importance, and there are many objections that Libet’s setup fails to measure free will at all (e.g., Mele, 2007 ; Roskies, 2011 ; Kihlstrom, 2017 ; Brass et al., 2019 ).

Before Libet, there was no indication that the decision when to move a finger might be relevant for the concept of free will and the associated discourse. The question whether we have control over our actions referred to completely different levels of granularity. Free will was discussed with respect to questions such as whether we are free to live our lives according to our wishes or whether we are responsible for our actions in social contexts (e.g., Beebee, 2013 ; McKenna and Pereboom, 2016 ; O’Connor and Franklin, 2018 ), and not whether we lift a finger now or two seconds later. Libet’s and others’ jumping from very specific situations to far-reaching conclusions about a very broad and fuzzy theoretical construct illustrates that an extremely wide chasm between two phenomena, namely moving the finger and free will, is bridged in one fell swoop.

In other words, Libet’s experiment is a simulacrum as it duplicates a phenomenon from our day-to-day experience—namely free will—but in doing so the operationalization alters and reduces the theoretical construct. The outcome is a questionable procedure whose relationship to the phenomenon is highly controversial. Furthermore, the fact that, despite its tenuous connection to free will, Libet’s experiment sparked an extensive discussion on this subject reveals the hyperreal nature of the entire discourse because what is being discussed is not the actual question—namely free will—but rather a simulacrum. Everything else—the arguments, counter-arguments, follow-up experiments, and their interpretations—built upon Libet’s experiment are basically commentaries to a simulacrum and not on the real phenomena. Therefore, a hyperreality is created where the discourse revolves around entirely artificial phenomena, but where the arguments in this discussion refer back to and affect the real as suggestions are made to alter the legal system and our ideas of responsibility—which, incidentally, is not a question of empirical science but of law, ethics, and philosophy.

All of the above is not meant to say that this whole discourse is meaningless or even gratuitous—on the contrary, our understanding of the subject matter has greatly increased. Although our knowledge of free will has hardly increased, we have gained much insight into the hermeneutics and methodology—and pitfalls!—of investigations of free will, possible consequences on the individual and societal level, and the workings of scientific discourses. And this is exactly what postmodernism is about.

As shown above, there are a number of postmodern elements in the practice of experimental psychology: The prominent role of language, the gap between the linguistic or mental representation and the phenomenon, the “addition of intellect to the object,” the simulacral character of the experiment itself in its attempt to re-create phenomena, which necessarily transforms the “real” phenomenon due to the requirements of the experiment, and finally the creation of a hyperreality if experiments are taken as the “real” phenomenon and the scientific discourse becomes an exchange of symbolic expressions referring to the simulacra created in experiments, replacing the real. All these aspects did not seep gradually into experimental psychology in the wake of postmodernism but have been present since the very inception of experimental psychology as they are necessarily inherent in its philosophy of science.

Given these inherent postmodern traits in experimental psychology, it is puzzling that there is so much resistance against a perceived “threat” of psychology’s scientificness. Although a detailed investigation of the reasons lies outside the scope of this analysis, we suspect there are two main causes: First, an insufficient knowledge of the history of science and understanding of philosophy of science may result in idealized concepts of a “pure” natural science. Second, lacking familiarity with basic tenets of postmodern approaches may lead to the assumption that postmodernism is just an idle game of arbitrary words. However, “science” and “postmodernism” and their respective epistemological concepts are not opposites ( Gergen, 2001 ; Holtz, 2020 ). This is especially true for psychology, which necessarily contains a social dimension because not only the investigators are humans but also the very subject matter itself.

The (over-)reliance on quantitative-experimental methods in psychology, often paired with a superficial understanding of the philosophy of science behind it, has been criticized, either from the theoretical point of view (e.g., Bergmann and Spence, 1941 ; Hearnshaw, 1941 ; Petrie, 1971 ; Law, 2004 ; Smedslund, 2016 ) or because the experimental approach has failed to produce reliable, valid, and relevant applicable knowledge in educational psychology ( Slavin, 2002 ). It is perhaps symptomatic that a textbook teaching the principles of science for psychologists does not contain even one example from experimental psychology but employs only examples from physics, plus Darwin’s theory of evolution ( Wilton and Harley, 2017 ).

On the other hand, the postmodern perspective on experimental psychology provides insight into some pitfalls, as illustrated by the examples above. On the level of the experiment, the methodological requirements imply the creation of an artificial situation, which opens up a gap between the phenomenon as it is in reality and as it is concretely operationalized in the experimental situation. This is not a problem per se as long as is it clear—and clearly communicated!—that the results of the experiment are only valid in a certain context. The problems begin if the movement of a finger is mistaken for free will. Similarly, being aware that local causalities do not explain complex phenomena such as mental and behavioral processes in their entirety also prevents (over-) generalization, especially if communicated appropriately. These limitations make it clear that the experiment should not be made into an absolute or seen as the only valid way of understanding the psyche and the world.

On the level of psychology as an academic discipline, any investigation must select the appropriate level of granularity and strike a balance between the methodological requirements and the general meaning of the theoretical concept in question to find out something about the “real” world. If the level of granularity is so fine that results cannot be tied back to broader theoretical constructs rather than providing a helpful understanding of our psychological functioning, academic psychology is in danger of becoming a self-referential hyperreality.

The postmodern character of experimental psychology also allows for a different view on the so-called replication crisis in psychology. Authors contending that there is no replication crisis often employ arguments which exhibit postmodern elements, such as the emphasis on specific local conditions in experiments which may explain different outcomes of replication studies ( Stroebe and Strack, 2014 ; Baumeister, 2019 ). In other words, they invoke the simulacral character of experiments. This explanation may be valid or not, but the replication crisis has shown the limits of a predominantly experimental approach in psychology.

Acknowledging the postmodern nature of experimental psychology and incorporating postmodern thinking explicitly into our research may offer a way out of this situation. Our subject matter—the psyche —is extremely complex, ambiguous, and often contradictory. And postmodern thinking has proven capable of successfully explaining such phenomena (e.g., Bertens, 1995 ; Sim, 2011 ; Aylesworth, 2015 ). Thus, paradoxically, by accepting and considering the inherently fuzzy nature of theoretical constructs, they often become much clearer ( Ronzitti, 2011 ). Therefore, thinking more along postmodern lines in psychology would actually sharpen the theoretical and conceptual basis of experimental psychology—all the more as experimental psychology has inevitably been a postmodern endeavor since its very beginning.

Author Contributions

RM, CK, and CL developed the idea for this article. RM drafted the manuscript. CK and CL provided feedback and suggestions. All authors approved the manuscript for submission.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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Hidden Brain

When great minds think unalike: inside science's 'replication crisis'.

Shankar Vedantam

Maggie Penman

It started with a report published last year entitled, " Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science ." It's a rather unassuming title given the amount of hand wringing, head scratching, and eye rolling it's incited in what's come to be known as psychology's "replication crisis."

The report was authored by psychologist Brian Nosek and hundreds of other researchers. Together, they set out to replicate 100 psychology experiments published in three of the discipline's tippy-top journals. Their question: How many studies would hold up when someone else ran the same experiment?

After following the steps of the original scientists—recruiting subjects, administering tests, running statistical analyses—they came up with an unsettling figure: just 39 of the 100 experiments they ran produced the same results as in the originals. In other words, nearly two-thirds of psychology studies—on topics ranging from fear to teaching math—failed to replicate.

The so-called "crisis" seemed to be rejected as soon as it was declared with a swell of articles coming to psychology's defense with headlines like " Failure Is Moving Science Forwards ," " The Crisis In Social Psychology That Isn't ," and, most bluntly, " Psychology Is Not In Crisis ."

What's going on? This week, Hidden Brain looks at the "replication crisis" by zooming in on one seminal paper that was the focus of two replication efforts. One succeeded in replicating the original finding, the other failed.

The original study , authored by Margaret Shih, Todd Pittinsky, and Nalini Ambady in 1999, found that Asian women performed worse on a math test when primed to think about their female identity, but better when they were primed to think about their Asian identity.

Nearly two decades later, Nosek and the Reproducibility Project noticed that this study, which by then had been widely disseminated in textbooks and psychology education, had never itself been replicated. So he assigned two teams to run it again—one in Georgia and the other in California . They came back with different results. And this gets at one of the biggest questions explored in this episode: when scientific studies come to different conclusions, what should we think of as true?

Shankar talks to psychologists Dan Gilbert and "mathematical social scientist" Eric Bradlow about what we can learn from the replication crisis and how to think about scientific truths.

The Hidden Brain Podcast is hosted by Shankar Vedantam and produced by Kara McGuirk-Alison, Maggie Penman and Max Nesterak. Special thanks this week to Daniel Shuhkin. To subscribe to our newsletter, click here . You can also f ollow us on Twitter @hiddenbrain , @karamcguirk , @maggiepenman and @maxnesterak , and listen for Hidden Brain stories every week on your local public radio station.

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Ten famous psychology findings that have been difficult to replicate

Behavioural science is a difficult, messy endeavour.

16 September 2016

By Christian Jarrett

Every now and again a psychology finding is published that immediately grabs the world's attention and refuses to let go – often it's a result with immediate implications for how we can live more happily and peacefully, or it says something profound about human nature. Said finding then enters the public consciousness, endlessly recycled in pop psychology books and magazine articles.

Unfortunately, sometimes when other researchers have attempted to obtain these same influential findings, they've struggled. This replication problem doesn't just apply to famous findings, nor does it only affect psychological science. And there can be relatively mundane reasons behind failed replications, such as methodological differences from the original or cultural changes since the original was conducted.

But given the public fascination with psychology, and the powerful influence of certain results, it is arguably in the public interest to summarise in one place a collection of some of the most famous findings that have proven tricky to repeat. This is not a list of disproven or dodgy results. It's a snapshot of the difficult, messy process of behavioural science.

Power posing will make you act bolder

Put your hands on your hips, widen your stance. Do you feel bolder now? Harvard psychologist Amy Cuddy and others have published numerous studies that appear to show that our body position can affect our emotional feelings and the way we behave. One of the reasons this line of research has been so influential is because of Cuddy's inspirational TED talk " Your Body Language Shapes Who You Are " which has been viewed many millions of times.

In 2010, in  a paper  that's already been cited over 450 times, Cuddy and her colleagues Andy Yap and lead author Dana Carney showed that after adopting one of two power poses for just one minute (either legs on desk/hands behind head or feet apart leaning on a desk) participants made riskier bets and had higher testosterone and lower cortisol, compared with participants who spent one minute in a low power pose (sitting with hands in lap or standing embracing oneself).

However, whereas many studies have found expansive postures, such as power poses, affect how we feel, it's been much more difficult to replicate the finding that they affect our actual behaviour or our physiology. For instance, last year researchers led by Eva Ranehill at the University of Zurich  attempted to replicate  the effects of power posing on risk-taking behaviour with 200 participants (compared with the sample of 42 participants in Cuddy's research) and while participants who adopted power poses said they felt more powerful, they showed no differences in their testosterone or cortisol levels compared with the low-power pose participants, nor were they more willing to make risky bets. "Using a much larger sample size but similar procedures as Carney et al. did, we failed to confirm an effect of power posing," the replication team said.

Cuddy and her colleagues responded with  an overview  of 33 published studies that have shown psychological and physiological effects of power posing. But in  a paper  that's forthcoming in Psychological Science Joseph Simmons and Uri Simonsohn at the University of Pennsylvania have conducted a statistical analysis on these 33 published studies that they say shows "the existing evidence is too weak to justify a search for moderators or to advocate for people to engage in power posing to better their lives".

- See also 'A decade of power posing: Where do we stand?'

Smiling will make you feel happier

We know that feeling happy makes us smile, but can smiling make us happy? In 1988, researchers  reported  that participants found cartoons funnier when they held a pen between their teeth, forcing them to smile, as compared with when they held a pen between their lips, forcing them to pout. The finding appeared to be consistent with the facial-feedback hypothesis – the idea that our facial expression doesn't just reflect our feelings but also affects them – and according to Google Scholar it has been cited nearly 1500 times.

However, a replication attempt published this Summer by 17 independent labs and involving nearly two thousand participants found overall no effect of mouth position on people's rating of the funniness of cartoons. The replication team said their replication failure was "statistically compelling". The lead author of the 1988 study, Fritz Strack, said he was surprised by the null result and he highlighted a number of problems with the replication attempt, including the fact the participants were filmed during the study, which may have made them self-conscious and affected their emotions.

Self-control is a limited resource

One of the most influential psychological theories of modern times is that willpower is akin to a fuel – the more of it you use in one situation, the less you have left over to deal with other demands. Of the many dozens of studies that have demonstrated this principle, known as "ego depletion", one that was recently targeted for replication was published in  Psychological Science  in 2014 by Chandra Sripada and colleagues –  it showed  that performance on a task requiring self-control was impaired if it was preceded by an earlier task that also required self-control, but not if it was preceded by a non-demanding task (the study also demonstrated that this apparent effect of depleted self-control was ameliorated by earlier intake of the drug Ritalin, presumably through its neurochemical effects, but this aspect of the study was not part of this year's replication attempt).

The  replication effort , by 23 labs and involving nearly two thousand participants, repeated the sequential task procedure used by Sripada, to check whether the basic principle holds true that being drained by one self-control task impairs people's performance on a further test of self-control. In fact, overall, the combined results were not consistent with this idea. "… [I]f there is any [ego depletion] effect, it is close to zero," the replication researchers said. Their finding added to the outcome of a recent meta-analysis of 68 relevant published and 48 unpublished studies that found little support for the idea of willpower as a limited resource.

Responding to the failed replication , Roy Baumeister , who co-discovered and proposed the concept of ego-depletion, said that it was "misguided" and had been a mistake to focus on trying to replicate a study that had used new procedures, rather than more established means, for provoking depleted self-control.

Revising after your exams can improve your earlier performance

If I told you that I was planning to revise for my upcoming exam  after  the exam, you'd quite understandably probably think I was rather daft. And yet a series of studies published in the prestigious APA publication the  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology  (currently cited nearly 500 times) appeared to show that such a plan could work – among the bizarre findings that appeared to show established psychological effects working backwards in time, Darly Bem and his colleagues found that spending time learning words after a memory test actually boosted performance on that earlier memory test.

However, when Stuart Ritchie, Richard Wiseman and Chris French each independently attempted to  replicate this finding , in each case using Bem's original computer programme and materials, they were unsuccessful. "Our participants were no better at remembering the words they were about to see again than the words they would not, and thus none of our three studies yielded evidence for psychic powers," Ritchie and his colleagues said in a commentary for  The Psychologist .

But the controversy hasn't gone away. This year Bem and his colleagues  gathered together  all the data from 90 experiments from 33 laboratories in 14 countries that have attempted to replicate his surprising findings (including the retrospective effects of learning, but also the other backwards effects he documented). Overall, Bem says the totality of this evidence is overwhelmingly in favour of "pre-cognition" or "psi" being a real phenomenon. "The incompatibility of psi with our current conceptual model of physical reality may say less about psi than about the conceptual model of physical reality that most non-physicists, including psychologists, still take for granted—but which physicists no longer do," Bem and his team concluded.

Exposure to words pertaining to ageing will make you walk more slowly

The idea that our thoughts and behaviour can be influenced by the meaning and connotations of the words, symbols and objects around us, even when we're not paying attention to them, is known as "social priming". The findings in this field are fascinating but they are proving to be the most difficult effects to replicate in psychology.

A modern classic of the social priming literature – cited over 3700 times to date – was published in 1996 and involved participants unscrambling jumbled lists of words to form coherent sentences. When these word lists contained words pertaining to ageing and the elderly, participants on leaving the lab walked out more slowly than when the lists did not contain such words. Presumably the ageing-related words triggered related ideas in the participants' minds that led them to behave in a stereotypically more elderly way.

This makes for a neat story, but unfortunately this specific finding and others in the field have been tricky to repeat.  In 2012 , researchers at the Université Libre de Bruxelles and the University of Cambridge attempted to obtain the same effect on walking speed but failed. They only achieved the same outcome as the original research when they deliberately manipulated the expectations of the researchers who were interacting with the participants, to make them consistent with the earlier results.

John Bargh, the lead author of the 1996 classic, criticised the replication attempt and outlined a number of reasons why it might have failed, including that the replication researchers may have included too many ageing-related words thereby making the priming effect too obvious.

Cleaning your hands will wash away your guilt

"Out, damned spot!" cries a guilt-ridden Lady Macbeth, obsessively washing her hands in the hope it will clear her conscience. Many research findings have demonstrated the that the link between moral purity and physical cleanliness is more than metaphorical, and that when we're feeling guilty we're motivated to clean ourselves physically.

In one of the earliest examples of the "Macbeth Effect", Chen-Bo Zhong and Katie Liljenquist asked participants to hand-copy an account of either an ethical or an unethical deed (helping or sabotaging a work colleague, respectively), and then asked them to rate the desirability of various products. Those who'd written about an unethical deed rated hygiene-related products more highly, such as soap and toothpaste.

But in 2013, when researchers at the University of Oxford tried three times to replicate this effect with participants from the UK, USA and India, they failed on each occasion. Brian Earp and his colleagues did not claim that there is no link between physical and moral purity, nor did they dismiss the existence of a Macbeth Effect. But they said their replication failures call for a "careful reassessment of the evidence for a real-life 'Macbeth Effect' within the realm of moral psychology." The Oxford University research complemented another study from 2011 that  failed to replicate  more of Zhong and Liljenquist's findings on the Macbeth Effect, including the idea that physical cleaning reduces guilt and as a result makes people less likely to be altruistic.

Babies are born with the power to imitate

Pick up almost any introductory psychology book and inside you'll read about  research  conducted in the 1970s that appeared to show that humans are born with the power to imitate, complemented by black and white images of a man sticking his tongue out at a baby, and the tiny baby duly sticking out her tongue in response.

Earlier this year, however, a methodologically rigorous investigation found no evidence to support the idea that newborn babies can imitate. Janine Oostenbroek and her colleagues tested 106 infants four times between the ages of one week and nine weeks. The researcher performed a range of facial movements, actions or sounds for 60 seconds each including tongue protrusions, mouth opening, happy face, sad face, index finger pointing and mmm and eee sounds. Each baby's behaviour during these 60-second periods was filmed and later coded according to which faces, actions or sounds, if any, he or she performed during the different researcher displays.

Whereas many previous studies have compared babies' responses to only two or a few different adult displays, this study was more robust because the researchers checked to see if, for example, the babies were more likely to stick out their tongues when that's what the researcher was doing, as compared with when the researcher was doing any of the 10 other displays or sounds. There was no evidence that newborn babies can reliably imitate faces, actions or sounds. Across all the different displays, actions and sounds, there was no situation in which the babies consistently performed a given facial display, gesture or sound more when the researcher specifically did that same thing, than when the researcher was doing anything else.

Writing on The Conversation website , psychologist Richard Cook and PhD candidate Daniel Yon said the new results appeared to show that "Rather than being born with an innate ability to imitate, it therefore appears that human infants actually learn to imitate." They added that this shouldn't cause concern: "Instead, the new findings … suggest that cultural forces can profoundly shape our psychology. Many of the abilities that define us may not reside in our DNA, but may instead have their roots in the societies around us."

Big brother eyes make us behave more honestly

Imagine there was an honesty box in your coffee room at work, do you think it would make any difference to your behaviour if there was poster of staring eyes on the wall? A hugely influential  study  published in 2006 suggested that it would – that feeling watched, even by a  picture of eyes rather than an actual person, increases people's honesty. In fact, in the study, donations to the box were an average three-fold larger in the presence of an eye poster rather than a picture of flowers. The finding even inspired the West Midlands Police in the UK to launch a poster campaign featuring staring eyes and the strapline "We've got our eyes on criminals".

Unfortunately, the finding has proven difficult to replicate. For example,  in 2011  researchers at University of Bamberg, Germany tested the effects of the same poster materials on a larger sample of participants (138 people compared with 48 in the original), in this case in terms of how the participants said they would behave in various social situations, such as lending study materials to a fellow student who has been off sick. They found no evidence that the Big Brother eyes increased prosocial behaviour.

Furthermore, this year, two meta-analyses combined the data from over 50 studies involving collectively tens of thousands of participants and found no evidence overall that watching eyes boost people's generosity.

Sniffing the "cuddle hormone" will make you more trusting

Oxytocin is neurohormone produced by the hypothalamus in the brain and it's released when we hug or have sex, and there's some evidence that when we sniff it we become more trusting and empathic, hence its various nicknames including the "moral molecule" and "cuddle hormone". For example, in  a study  published in the prestigious journal  Nature , and that's been cited over 2500 times, researchers reported that after ingesting oxytocin nasally, participants were more willing to give money to a stranger in a financial game.

Findings like these have led to a lot of hype – the io9 website  went so far  as to brand oxytocin "the most amazing molecule in the world". However, the effects of the hormone have proved to be a lot more complex than originally realised. For example, in some contexts it can elicit envy and if someone has an aggressive nature it can even increase their intentions to be violent toward their partner.

Some of the positive effects of oxytocin have also turned out to be difficult to replicate. In 2015 researchers at the Université catholique de Louvain  attempted to replicate  their own finding that inhaling oxytocin increases participants' trust in a researcher not to open an envelope in which the participants have inserted confidential information. Twice the researchers failed to reproduce this effect leading them to conclude that "nothing can be taken for granted about oxytocin". One possibility they considered is that all previous demonstrations of the effects of intra-nasally administered oxytocin on behaviour have been false positive results. "Even though this is a chilling hypothesis, it is still plausible," they said.

Being reminded of money makes us selfish

Money symbolises materialism and market competition. So powerful are these connotations that when exposed to reminders of money, it changes our mindset to be more selfish and less interested in equality. That's according to several studies, including  a 2013 paper , led by Eugene Caruso and co-authored by Kathleen Vohs, that asked participants to complete one of two versions of a questionnaire about their personal details, one featuring a faint background image of a $100 bill. Participants exposed to the money imagery subsequently showed stronger endorsement of  the current political system and less sympathy for victims or socially disadvantaged groups.

However, as part of the  "Many Labs" Replication Project , 36 international psych labs attempted to replicate the effect of money reminders on endorsement of the existing political system and only one reported a significant effect. Separately a team led by Doug Rohrer  attempted to replicate  all of the findings obtained Caruso and colleagues, but with larger sample sizes, and failed in each case. "Although replication failures should be interpreted with caution," Rohrer's team said, "the sheer number of so many high-powered replication failures cast doubt on the money priming effects found by Caruso et al."

In  her response  Kathleen Vohs highlighted that over ten years, 165 studies from 18 countries have documented psychological effects of money reminders, and that perhaps one factor influencing the results is how important money is to the participants in question – she and her colleagues had tested students at the University of Chicago, an institution renowned for its economics scholars, whereas Rohrer had mostly tested people online via Amazon's Mechanical Turk and The University of California.

"Recently I read a quotation that is not about science but could well be," Vohs concluded. "It said that democracy is valuable because it 'doesn't think of itself as finished or perfect' – and neither does science. It takes many scholars and many attempts to figure out the way the world works."

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• Published: 03 March 2016

Psychology’s reproducibility problem is exaggerated – say psychologists

• Monya Baker  

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Reanalysis of last year's enormous replication study argues that there is no need to be so pessimistic.

Is psychology facing a ‘replication crisis’? Last year, a crowdsourced effort that was able to validate fewer than half of 98 published findings 1 rang alarm bells about the reliability of psychology papers . Now a team of psychologists has reassessed the study and say that it provides no evidence for a crisis.

“Our analysis completely invalidates the pessimistic conclusions that many have drawn from this landmark study,” says Daniel Gilbert, a psychologist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a co-author of the reanalysis, published on 2 March in Science 2 .

But a response 3 in the same issue of Science counters that the reanalysis itself depends on selective assumptions. And others say that psychology still urgently needs to improve its research practices.

Statistical criticism

In August 2015, a team of 270 researchers reported the largest ever single-study audit of the scientific literature. Led by Brian Nosek, executive director of the Center for Open Science in Charlottesville, Virginia, the Reproducibility Project attempted to replicate studies in 100 psychology papers. (It ended up with 100 replication attempts for 98 papers because of problems assigning teams to two papers.) According to one of several measures of reproducibility, just 36% could be confirmed ; by another statistical measure, 47% could 1 . Either way, the results looked worryingly feeble.

Both optimistic and pessimistic conclusions about reproducibility are possible, and neither are yet warranted

Not so fast, says Gilbert. Because of the way the Reproducibility Project was conducted, its results say little about the overall reliability of the psychology papers it tried to validate, he argues. “The number of studies that actually did fail to replicate is about the number you would expect to fail to replicate by chance alone — even if all the original studies had shown true effects."

Gilbert's team tries to calculate an expected replication rate based on the Reproduciblity Project's protocol. Some replication attempts weren't faithful copies of the original paper, for instance — making a replication less likely, Gilbert says. And each replication study was attempted just once, giving the project limited statistical power to confirm the original findings. To make his point, Gilbert refers to an earlier work by Nosek, called the Many Labs Replication Project, in which 36 separate laboratories tried to replicate 13 findings . That project validated 10 findings, but looking at any one lab’s replication effort might have suggested failure.

Overall, Gilbert’s team concludes, the Reproducibility Project failed to account for important sources of uncertainty in its analysis. “While no study is perfect, it is clear that the reproducibility of psychological studies is not as bad as the original Science article characterized,” says Kosuke Imai, a statistician at Princeton University in New Jersey.

Neither good nor bad

But the reanalysis does not show that psychology’s reproducibility rate is high, says Uri Simonsohn, a social psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. He notes that other statistical reassessments of the project (one of which was published in PLoS ONE last week 4 , and another of which Simonsohn has reported on the blog Data Colada ) both suggest that about one-third of the replications are inconclusive, in that they neither strongly confirm nor refute the original results.

In general, replication efforts are likely to be more-reliable guides to the existence (and magnitude) of effects in psychology experiments than are the original studies, says Andrew Gelman, a statistician at Columbia University in New York. That’s in part because what is published in the original studies tends to be the statistical ‘flukes’ that are left standing after the researchers have cast around to find publishable, positive results. In contrast, for replication projects analysis plans are put in place before a study begins.

Nosek says that he is glad to see other researchers poring over the data. But he and his co-authors respond in Science that Gilbert’s “optimistic assessment is limited by statistical misconceptions”. Although some of the Reproducibility Project's replications didn't faithfully copy the methods of the papers they were testing, in many cases the original authors endorsed the methods used, Nosek says. The Many Labs project is a misleading comparison, he and his co-authors say. And the Reproducibility Project used five measures of reproducibility that coalesced around similar values, which together suggest that most effects -- even if they do exist -- are likely to be much smaller than the original results suggested.

Nosek tells Nature that the Gilbert team has crafted an exploratory hypothesis that is very optimistic but cannot be seen as definitive. “Both optimistic and pessimistic conclusions about reproducibility are possible, and neither are yet warranted,” he and his co-authors conclude in their response.

Economics versus psychology

Another paper published today in Science reports results from a project to replicate economics studies 5 . It found that at least 11 of 18 studies could be reproduced, increasing to 14 when using different criteria to assess reproducibility. But Nosek, who was not involved in the study, says that it is hard to conclude from this that economics has a higher replication rate than psychology. Not only was the number of studies replicated small, he says, but the studies focused on simple relationships.

Nonetheless, the size of effects found in the replication and original studies are closer in the economics study than in the psychology one, says study author, Colin Camerer, a behavioural economist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. “It is like a grade of B+ for psychology versus A– for economics,” he says.“ There is room for improvement in both fields.”

Overall, knowing the exact replication rate for any discipline is not essential for knowing what needs to happen next, says Steve Lindsay, a psychologist at the University of Victoria in Canada and interim editor of the journal Psychological Science . “We have a lot of reasons to believe that a lot of psychologists have for a long time tended to systematically exaggerate the effects of what they publish,” he says; the real urgency is to improve bad practices.

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Stanford Prison Experiment: Zimbardo’s Famous Study

Saul McLeod, PhD

Editor-in-Chief for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MRes, PhD, University of Manchester

Saul McLeod, PhD., is a qualified psychology teacher with over 18 years of experience in further and higher education. He has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

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Olivia Guy-Evans, MSc

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Olivia Guy-Evans is a writer and associate editor for Simply Psychology. She has previously worked in healthcare and educational sectors.

On This Page:

• The experiment was conducted in 1971 by psychologist Philip Zimbardo to examine situational forces versus dispositions in human behavior.
• 24 young, healthy, psychologically normal men were randomly assigned to be “prisoners” or “guards” in a simulated prison environment.
• The experiment had to be terminated after only 6 days due to the extreme, pathological behavior emerging in both groups. The situational forces overwhelmed the dispositions of the participants.
• Pacifist young men assigned as guards began behaving sadistically, inflicting humiliation and suffering on the prisoners. Prisoners became blindly obedient and allowed themselves to be dehumanized.
• The principal investigator, Zimbardo, was also transformed into a rigid authority figure as the Prison Superintendent.
• The experiment demonstrated the power of situations to alter human behavior dramatically. Even good, normal people can do evil things when situational forces push them in that direction.

Zimbardo and his colleagues (1973) were interested in finding out whether the brutality reported among guards in American prisons was due to the sadistic personalities of the guards (i.e., dispositional) or had more to do with the prison environment (i.e., situational).

For example, prisoners and guards may have personalities that make conflict inevitable, with prisoners lacking respect for law and order and guards being domineering and aggressive.

Alternatively, prisoners and guards may behave in a hostile manner due to the rigid power structure of the social environment in prisons.

Zimbardo predicted the situation made people act the way they do rather than their disposition (personality).

To study people’s roles in prison situations, Zimbardo converted a basement of the Stanford University psychology building into a mock prison.

He advertised asking for volunteers to participate in a study of the psychological effects of prison life.

The 75 applicants who answered the ad were given diagnostic interviews and personality tests to eliminate candidates with psychological problems, medical disabilities, or a history of crime or drug abuse.

24 men judged to be the most physically & mentally stable, the most mature, & the least involved in antisocial behaviors were chosen to participate.

The participants did not know each other prior to the study and were paid $15 per day to take part in the experiment.

Participants were randomly assigned to either the role of prisoner or guard in a simulated prison environment. There were two reserves, and one dropped out, finally leaving ten prisoners and 11 guards.

Prisoners were treated like every other criminal, being arrested at their own homes, without warning, and taken to the local police station. They were fingerprinted, photographed and ‘booked.’

Then they were blindfolded and driven to the psychology department of Stanford University, where Zimbardo had had the basement set out as a prison, with barred doors and windows, bare walls and small cells. Here the deindividuation process began.

When the prisoners arrived at the prison they were stripped naked, deloused, had all their personal possessions removed and locked away, and were given prison clothes and bedding. They were issued a uniform, and referred to by their number only.

The use of ID numbers was a way to make prisoners feel anonymous. Each prisoner had to be called only by his ID number and could only refer to himself and the other prisoners by number.

Their clothes comprised a smock with their number written on it, but no underclothes. They also had a tight nylon cap to cover their hair, and a locked chain around one ankle.

All guards were dressed in identical uniforms of khaki, and they carried a whistle around their neck and a billy club borrowed from the police. Guards also wore special sunglasses, to make eye contact with prisoners impossible.

Three guards worked shifts of eight hours each (the other guards remained on call). Guards were instructed to do whatever they thought was necessary to maintain law and order in the prison and to command the respect of the prisoners. No physical violence was permitted.

Zimbardo observed the behavior of the prisoners and guards (as a researcher), and also acted as a prison warden.

Within a very short time both guards and prisoners were settling into their new roles, with the guards adopting theirs quickly and easily.

Asserting Authority

Within hours of beginning the experiment, some guards began to harass prisoners. At 2:30 A.M. prisoners were awakened from sleep by blasting whistles for the first of many “counts.”

The counts served as a way to familiarize the prisoners with their numbers. More importantly, they provided a regular occasion for the guards to exercise control over the prisoners.

The prisoners soon adopted prisoner-like behavior too. They talked about prison issues a great deal of the time. They ‘told tales’ on each other to the guards.

They started taking the prison rules very seriously, as though they were there for the prisoners’ benefit and infringement would spell disaster for all of them. Some even began siding with the guards against prisoners who did not obey the rules.

Physical Punishment

The prisoners were taunted with insults and petty orders, they were given pointless and boring tasks to accomplish, and they were generally dehumanized.

Push-ups were a common form of physical punishment imposed by the guards. One of the guards stepped on the prisoners” backs while they did push-ups, or made other prisoners sit on the backs of fellow prisoners doing their push-ups.

Asserting Independence

Because the first day passed without incident, the guards were surprised and totally unprepared for the rebellion which broke out on the morning of the second day.

During the second day of the experiment, the prisoners removed their stocking caps, ripped off their numbers, and barricaded themselves inside the cells by putting their beds against the door.

The guards called in reinforcements. The three guards who were waiting on stand-by duty came in and the night shift guards voluntarily remained on duty.

Putting Down the Rebellion

The guards retaliated by using a fire extinguisher which shot a stream of skin-chilling carbon dioxide, and they forced the prisoners away from the doors. Next, the guards broke into each cell, stripped the prisoners naked and took the beds out.

The ringleaders of the prisoner rebellion were placed into solitary confinement. After this, the guards generally began to harass and intimidate the prisoners.

Special Privileges

One of the three cells was designated as a “privilege cell.” The three prisoners least involved in the rebellion were given special privileges. The guards gave them back their uniforms and beds and allowed them to wash their hair and brush their teeth.

Privileged prisoners also got to eat special food in the presence of the other prisoners who had temporarily lost the privilege of eating. The effect was to break the solidarity among prisoners.

Consequences of the Rebellion

Over the next few days, the relationships between the guards and the prisoners changed, with a change in one leading to a change in the other. Remember that the guards were firmly in control and the prisoners were totally dependent on them.

As the prisoners became more dependent, the guards became more derisive towards them. They held the prisoners in contempt and let the prisoners know it. As the guards’ contempt for them grew, the prisoners became more submissive.

As the prisoners became more submissive, the guards became more aggressive and assertive. They demanded ever greater obedience from the prisoners. The prisoners were dependent on the guards for everything, so tried to find ways to please the guards, such as telling tales on fellow prisoners.

Prisoner #8612

Less than 36 hours into the experiment, Prisoner #8612 began suffering from acute emotional disturbance, disorganized thinking, uncontrollable crying, and rage.

After a meeting with the guards where they told him he was weak, but offered him “informant” status, #8612 returned to the other prisoners and said “You can”t leave. You can’t quit.”

Soon #8612 “began to act ‘crazy,’ to scream, to curse, to go into a rage that seemed out of control.” It wasn’t until this point that the psychologists realized they had to let him out.

A Visit from Parents

The next day, the guards held a visiting hour for parents and friends. They were worried that when the parents saw the state of the jail, they might insist on taking their sons home. Guards washed the prisoners, had them clean and polish their cells, fed them a big dinner and played music on the intercom.

After the visit, rumors spread of a mass escape plan. Afraid that they would lose the prisoners, the guards and experimenters tried to enlist help and facilities of the Palo Alto police department.

The guards again escalated the level of harassment, forcing them to do menial, repetitive work such as cleaning toilets with their bare hands.

Catholic Priest

Zimbardo invited a Catholic priest who had been a prison chaplain to evaluate how realistic our prison situation was. Half of the prisoners introduced themselves by their number rather than name.

The chaplain interviewed each prisoner individually. The priest told them the only way they would get out was with the help of a lawyer.

Prisoner #819

Eventually, while talking to the priest, #819 broke down and began to cry hysterically, just like two previously released prisoners had.

The psychologists removed the chain from his foot, the cap off his head, and told him to go and rest in a room that was adjacent to the prison yard. They told him they would get him some food and then take him to see a doctor.

While this was going on, one of the guards lined up the other prisoners and had them chant aloud:

“Prisoner #819 is a bad prisoner. Because of what Prisoner #819 did, my cell is a mess, Mr. Correctional Officer.”

The psychologists realized #819 could hear the chanting and went back into the room where they found him sobbing uncontrollably. The psychologists tried to get him to agree to leave the experiment, but he said he could not leave because the others had labeled him a bad prisoner.

Back to Reality

At that point, Zimbardo said, “Listen, you are not #819. You are [his name], and my name is Dr. Zimbardo. I am a psychologist, not a prison superintendent, and this is not a real prison. This is just an experiment, and those are students, not prisoners, just like you. Let’s go.”

He stopped crying suddenly, looked up and replied, “Okay, let’s go,“ as if nothing had been wrong.

An End to the Experiment

Zimbardo (1973) had intended that the experiment should run for two weeks, but on the sixth day, it was terminated, due to the emotional breakdowns of prisoners, and excessive aggression of the guards.

Christina Maslach, a recent Stanford Ph.D. brought in to conduct interviews with the guards and prisoners, strongly objected when she saw the prisoners being abused by the guards.

Filled with outrage, she said, “It’s terrible what you are doing to these boys!” Out of 50 or more outsiders who had seen our prison, she was the only one who ever questioned its morality.

Zimbardo (2008) later noted, “It wasn’t until much later that I realized how far into my prison role I was at that point — that I was thinking like a prison superintendent rather than a research psychologist.“

This led him to prioritize maintaining the experiment’s structure over the well-being and ethics involved, thereby highlighting the blurring of roles and the profound impact of the situation on human behavior.

Here’s a quote that illustrates how Philip Zimbardo, initially the principal investigator, became deeply immersed in his role as the “Stanford Prison Superintendent (April 19, 2011):

“By the third day, when the second prisoner broke down, I had already slipped into or been transformed into the role of “Stanford Prison Superintendent.” And in that role, I was no longer the principal investigator, worried about ethics. When a prisoner broke down, what was my job? It was to replace him with somebody on our standby list. And that’s what I did. There was a weakness in the study in not separating those two roles. I should only have been the principal investigator, in charge of two graduate students and one undergraduate.”

According to Zimbardo and his colleagues, the Stanford Prison Experiment revealed how people will readily conform to the social roles they are expected to play, especially if the roles are as strongly stereotyped as those of the prison guards.

Because the guards were placed in a position of authority, they began to act in ways they would not usually behave in their normal lives.

The “prison” environment was an important factor in creating the guards’ brutal behavior (none of the participants who acted as guards showed sadistic tendencies before the study).

Therefore, the findings support the situational explanation of behavior rather than the dispositional one.

Zimbardo proposed that two processes can explain the prisoner’s “final submission.”

Deindividuation may explain the behavior of the participants; especially the guards. This is a state when you become so immersed in the norms of the group that you lose your sense of identity and personal responsibility.

The guards may have been so sadistic because they did not feel what happened was down to them personally – it was a group norm. They also may have lost their sense of personal identity because of the uniform they wore.

Also, learned helplessness could explain the prisoner’s submission to the guards. The prisoners learned that whatever they did had little effect on what happened to them. In the mock prison the unpredictable decisions of the guards led the prisoners to give up responding.

After the prison experiment was terminated, Zimbardo interviewed the participants. Here’s an excerpt:

‘Most of the participants said they had felt involved and committed. The research had felt “real” to them. One guard said, “I was surprised at myself. I made them call each other names and clean the toilets out with their bare hands. I practically considered the prisoners cattle and I kept thinking I had to watch out for them in case they tried something.” Another guard said “Acting authoritatively can be fun. Power can be a great pleasure.” And another: “… during the inspection I went to Cell Two to mess up a bed which a prisoner had just made and he grabbed me, screaming that he had just made it and that he was not going to let me mess it up. He grabbed me by the throat and although he was laughing I was pretty scared. I lashed out with my stick and hit him on the chin although not very hard, and when I freed myself I became angry.”’

Most of the guards found it difficult to believe that they had behaved in the brutal ways that they had. Many said they hadn’t known this side of them existed or that they were capable of such things.

The prisoners, too, couldn’t believe that they had responded in the submissive, cowering, dependent way they had. Several claimed to be assertive types normally.

When asked about the guards, they described the usual three stereotypes that can be found in any prison: some guards were good, some were tough but fair, and some were cruel.

A further explanation for the behavior of the participants can be described in terms of reinforcement.  The escalation of aggression and abuse by the guards could be seen as being due to the positive reinforcement they received both from fellow guards and intrinsically in terms of how good it made them feel to have so much power.

Similarly, the prisoners could have learned through negative reinforcement that if they kept their heads down and did as they were told, they could avoid further unpleasant experiences.

Critical Evaluation

Ecological validity.

The Stanford Prison Experiment is criticized for lacking ecological validity in its attempt to simulate a real prison environment. Specifically, the “prison” was merely a setup in the basement of Stanford University’s psychology department.

The student “guards” lacked professional training, and the experiment’s duration was much shorter than real prison sentences. Furthermore, the participants, who were college students, didn’t reflect the diverse backgrounds typically found in actual prisons in terms of ethnicity, education, and socioeconomic status.

None had prior prison experience, and they were chosen due to their mental stability and low antisocial tendencies. Additionally, the mock prison lacked spaces for exercise or rehabilitative activities.

Demand characteristics

Demand characteristics could explain the findings of the study. Most of the guards later claimed they were simply acting. Because the guards and prisoners were playing a role, their behavior may not be influenced by the same factors which affect behavior in real life. This means the study’s findings cannot be reasonably generalized to real life, such as prison settings. I.e, the study has low ecological validity.

One of the biggest criticisms is that strong demand characteristics confounded the study. Banuazizi and Movahedi (1975) found that the majority of respondents, when given a description of the study, were able to guess the hypothesis and predict how participants were expected to behave.

This suggests participants may have simply been playing out expected roles rather than genuinely conforming to their assigned identities.

In addition, revelations by Zimbardo (2007) indicate he actively encouraged the guards to be cruel and oppressive in his orientation instructions prior to the start of the study. For example, telling them “they [the prisoners] will be able to do nothing and say nothing that we don’t permit.”

He also tacitly approved of abusive behaviors as the study progressed. This deliberate cueing of how participants should act, rather than allowing behavior to unfold naturally, indicates the study findings were likely a result of strong demand characteristics rather than insightful revelations about human behavior.

However, there is considerable evidence that the participants did react to the situation as though it was real. For example, 90% of the prisoners’ private conversations, which were monitored by the researchers, were on the prison conditions, and only 10% of the time were their conversations about life outside of the prison.

The guards, too, rarely exchanged personal information during their relaxation breaks – they either talked about ‘problem prisoners,’ other prison topics, or did not talk at all. The guards were always on time and even worked overtime for no extra pay.

When the prisoners were introduced to a priest, they referred to themselves by their prison number, rather than their first name. Some even asked him to get a lawyer to help get them out.

Fourteen years after his experience as prisoner 8612 in the Stanford Prison Experiment, Douglas Korpi, now a prison psychologist, reflected on his time and stated (Musen and Zimbardo 1992):

“The Stanford Prison Experiment was a very benign prison situation and it promotes everything a normal prison promotes — the guard role promotes sadism, the prisoner role promotes confusion and shame”.

Sample bias

The study may also lack population validity as the sample comprised US male students. The study’s findings cannot be applied to female prisons or those from other countries. For example, America is an individualist culture (where people are generally less conforming), and the results may be different in collectivist cultures (such as Asian countries).

Carnahan and McFarland (2007) have questioned whether self-selection may have influenced the results – i.e., did certain personality traits or dispositions lead some individuals to volunteer for a study of “prison life” in the first place?

All participants completed personality measures assessing: aggression, authoritarianism, Machiavellianism, narcissism, social dominance, empathy, and altruism. Participants also answered questions on mental health and criminal history to screen out any issues as per the original SPE.

Results showed that volunteers for the prison study, compared to the control group, scored significantly higher on aggressiveness, authoritarianism, Machiavellianism, narcissism, and social dominance. They scored significantly lower on empathy and altruism.

A follow-up role-playing study found that self-presentation biases could not explain these differences. Overall, the findings suggest that volunteering for the prison study was influenced by personality traits associated with abusive tendencies.

Zimbardo’s conclusion may be wrong

While implications for the original SPE are speculative, this lends support to a person-situation interactionist perspective, rather than a purely situational account.

It implies that certain individuals are drawn to and selected into situations that fit their personality, and that group composition can shape behavior through mutual reinforcement.

Contributions to psychology

Another strength of the study is that the harmful treatment of participants led to the formal recognition of ethical  guidelines by the American Psychological Association. Studies must now undergo an extensive review by an institutional review board (US) or ethics committee (UK) before they are implemented.

Most institutions, such as universities, hospitals, and government agencies, require a review of research plans by a panel. These boards review whether the potential benefits of the research are justifiable in light of the possible risk of physical or psychological harm.

These boards may request researchers make changes to the study’s design or procedure, or, in extreme cases, deny approval of the study altogether.

Contribution to prison policy

A strength of the study is that it has altered the way US prisons are run. For example, juveniles accused of federal crimes are no longer housed before trial with adult prisoners (due to the risk of violence against them).

However, in the 25 years since the SPE, U.S. prison policy has transformed in ways counter to SPE insights (Haney & Zimbardo, 1995):

• Rehabilitation was abandoned in favor of punishment and containment. Prison is now seen as inflicting pain rather than enabling productive re-entry.
• Sentencing became rigid rather than accounting for inmates’ individual contexts. Mandatory minimums and “three strikes” laws over-incarcerate nonviolent crimes.
• Prison construction boomed, and populations soared, disproportionately affecting minorities. From 1925 to 1975, incarceration rates held steady at around 100 per 100,000. By 1995, rates tripled to over 600 per 100,000.
• Drug offenses account for an increasing proportion of prisoners. Nonviolent drug offenses make up a large share of the increased incarceration.
• Psychological perspectives have been ignored in policymaking. Legislators overlooked insights from social psychology on the power of contexts in shaping behavior.
• Oversight retreated, with courts deferring to prison officials and ending meaningful scrutiny of conditions. Standards like “evolving decency” gave way to “legitimate” pain.
• Supermax prisons proliferated, isolating prisoners in psychological trauma-inducing conditions.

The authors argue psychologists should reengage to:

• Limit the use of imprisonment and adopt humane alternatives based on the harmful effects of prison environments
• Assess prisons’ total environments, not just individual conditions, given situational forces interact
• Prepare inmates for release by transforming criminogenic post-release contexts
• Address socioeconomic risk factors, not just incarcerate individuals
• Develop contextual prediction models vs. focusing only on static traits
• Scrutinize prison systems independently, not just defer to officials shaped by those environments
• Generate creative, evidence-based reforms to counter over-punitive policies

Psychology once contributed to a more humane system and can again counter the U.S. “rage to punish” with contextual insights (Haney & Zimbardo, 1998).

Evidence for situational factors

Zimbardo (1995) further demonstrates the power of situations to elicit evil actions from ordinary, educated people who likely would never have done such things otherwise. It was another situation-induced “transformation of human character.”

• Unit 731 was a covert biological and chemical warfare research unit of the Japanese army during WWII.
• It was led by General Shiro Ishii and involved thousands of doctors and researchers.
• Unit 731 set up facilities near Harbin, China to conduct lethal human experimentation on prisoners, including Allied POWs.
• Experiments involved exposing prisoners to things like plague, anthrax, mustard gas, and bullets to test biological weapons. They infected prisoners with diseases and monitored their deaths.
• At least 3,000 prisoners died from these brutal experiments. Many were killed and dissected.
• The doctors in Unit 731 obeyed orders unquestioningly and conducted these experiments in the name of “medical science.”
• After the war, the vast majority of doctors who participated faced no punishment and went on to have prestigious careers. This was largely covered up by the U.S. in exchange for data.
• It shows how normal, intelligent professionals can be led by situational forces to systematically dehumanize victims and conduct incredibly cruel and lethal experiments on people.
• Even healers trained to preserve life used their expertise to destroy lives when the situational forces compelled obedience, nationalism, and wartime enmity.

Evidence for an interactionist approach

The results are also relevant for explaining abuses by American guards at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

An interactionist perspective recognizes that volunteering for roles as prison guards attracts those already prone to abusive tendencies, which are intensified by the prison context.

This counters a solely situationist view of good people succumbing to evil situational forces.

Ethical Issues

The study has received many ethical criticisms, including lack of fully informed consent by participants as Zimbardo himself did not know what would happen in the experiment (it was unpredictable). Also, the prisoners did not consent to being “arrested” at home. The prisoners were not told partly because final approval from the police wasn’t given until minutes before the participants decided to participate, and partly because the researchers wanted the arrests to come as a surprise. However, this was a breach of the ethics of Zimbardo’s own contract that all of the participants had signed.

Protection of Participants

Participants playing the role of prisoners were not protected from psychological harm, experiencing incidents of humiliation and distress. For example, one prisoner had to be released after 36 hours because of uncontrollable bursts of screaming, crying, and anger.

Here’s a quote from Philip G. Zimbardo, taken from an interview on the Stanford Prison Experiment’s 40th anniversary (April 19, 2011):

“In the Stanford prison study, people were stressed, day and night, for 5 days, 24 hours a day. There’s no question that it was a high level of stress because five of the boys had emotional breakdowns, the first within 36 hours. Other boys that didn’t have emotional breakdowns were blindly obedient to corrupt authority by the guards and did terrible things to each other. And so it is no question that that was unethical. You can’t do research where you allow people to suffer at that level.”

“After the first one broke down, we didn’t believe it. We thought he was faking. There was actually a rumor he was faking to get out. He was going to bring his friends in to liberate the prison. And/or we believed our screening procedure was inadequate, [we believed] that he had some mental defect that we did not pick up. At that point, by the third day, when the second prisoner broke down, I had already slipped into or been transformed into the role of “Stanford Prison Superintendent.” And in that role, I was no longer the principal investigator, worried about ethics.”

However, in Zimbardo’s defense, the emotional distress experienced by the prisoners could not have been predicted from the outset.

Approval for the study was given by the Office of Naval Research, the Psychology Department, and the University Committee of Human Experimentation.

This Committee also did not anticipate the prisoners’ extreme reactions that were to follow. Alternative methodologies were looked at that would cause less distress to the participants but at the same time give the desired information, but nothing suitable could be found.

Withdrawal 

Although guards were explicitly instructed not to physically harm prisoners at the beginning of the Stanford Prison Experiment, they were allowed to induce feelings of boredom, frustration, arbitrariness, and powerlessness among the inmates.

This created a pervasive atmosphere where prisoners genuinely believed and even reinforced among each other, that they couldn’t leave the experiment until their “sentence” was completed, mirroring the inescapability of a real prison.

Even though two participants (8612 and 819) were released early, the impact of the environment was so profound that prisoner 416, reflecting on the experience two months later, described it as a “prison run by psychologists rather than by the state.”

Extensive group and individual debriefing sessions were held, and all participants returned post-experimental questionnaires several weeks, then several months later, and then at yearly intervals. Zimbardo concluded there were no lasting negative effects.

Zimbardo also strongly argues that the benefits gained from our understanding of human behavior and how we can improve society should outbalance the distress caused by the study.

However, it has been suggested that the US Navy was not so much interested in making prisons more human and were, in fact, more interested in using the study to train people in the armed services to cope with the stresses of captivity.

Discussion Questions

What are the effects of living in an environment with no clocks, no view of the outside world, and minimal sensory stimulation?

Consider the psychological consequences of stripping, delousing, and shaving the heads of prisoners or members of the military. Whattransformations take place when people go through an experience like this?

The prisoners could have left at any time, and yet, they didn’t. Why?

After the study, how do you think the prisoners and guards felt?

If you were the experimenter in charge, would you have done this study? Would you have terminated it earlier? Would you have conducted a follow-up study?

Frequently Asked Questions

What happened to prisoner 8612 after the experiment.

Douglas Korpi, as prisoner 8612, was the first to show signs of severe distress and demanded to be released from the experiment. He was released on the second day, and his reaction to the simulated prison environment highlighted the study’s ethical issues and the potential harm inflicted on participants.

After the experiment, Douglas Korpi graduated from Stanford University and earned a Ph.D. in clinical psychology. He pursued a career as a psychotherapist, helping others with their mental health struggles.

Why did Zimbardo not stop the experiment?

Zimbardo did not initially stop the experiment because he became too immersed in his dual role as the principal investigator and the prison superintendent, causing him to overlook the escalating abuse and distress among participants.

It was only after an external observer, Christina Maslach, raised concerns about the participants’ well-being that Zimbardo terminated the study.

What happened to the guards in the Stanford Prison Experiment?

In the Stanford Prison Experiment, the guards exhibited abusive and authoritarian behavior, using psychological manipulation, humiliation, and control tactics to assert dominance over the prisoners. This ultimately led to the study’s early termination due to ethical concerns.

What did Zimbardo want to find out?

Zimbardo aimed to investigate the impact of situational factors and power dynamics on human behavior, specifically how individuals would conform to the roles of prisoners and guards in a simulated prison environment.

He wanted to explore whether the behavior displayed in prisons was due to the inherent personalities of prisoners and guards or the result of the social structure and environment of the prison itself.

What were the results of the Stanford Prison Experiment?

The results of the Stanford Prison Experiment showed that situational factors and power dynamics played a significant role in shaping participants’ behavior. The guards became abusive and authoritarian, while the prisoners became submissive and emotionally distressed.

The experiment revealed how quickly ordinary individuals could adopt and internalize harmful behaviors due to their assigned roles and the environment.

Banuazizi, A., & Movahedi, S. (1975). Interpersonal dynamics in a simulated prison: A methodological analysis. American Psychologist, 30 , 152-160.

Carnahan, T., & McFarland, S. (2007). Revisiting the Stanford prison experiment: Could participant self-selection have led to the cruelty? Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 33, 603-614.

Drury, S., Hutchens, S. A., Shuttlesworth, D. E., & White, C. L. (2012). Philip G. Zimbardo on his career and the Stanford Prison Experiment’s 40th anniversary.  History of Psychology ,  15 (2), 161.

Griggs, R. A., & Whitehead, G. I., III. (2014). Coverage of the Stanford Prison Experiment in introductory social psychology textbooks. Teaching of Psychology, 41 , 318 –324.

Haney, C., Banks, W. C., & Zimbardo, P. G. (1973). A study of prisoners and guards in a simulated prison . Naval Research Review , 30, 4-17.

Haney, C., & Zimbardo, P. (1998). The past and future of U.S. prison policy: Twenty-five years after the Stanford Prison Experiment.  American Psychologist, 53 (7), 709–727.

Musen, K. & Zimbardo, P. (1992) (DVD) Quiet Rage: The Stanford Prison Experiment Documentary.

Zimbardo, P. G. (Consultant, On-Screen Performer), Goldstein, L. (Producer), & Utley, G. (Correspondent). (1971, November 26). Prisoner 819 did a bad thing: The Stanford Prison Experiment [Television series episode]. In L. Goldstein (Producer), Chronolog. New York, NY: NBC-TV.

Zimbardo, P. G. (1973). On the ethics of intervention in human psychological research: With special reference to the Stanford prison experiment.  Cognition ,  2 (2), 243-256.

Zimbardo, P. G. (1995). The psychology of evil: A situationist perspective on recruiting good people to engage in anti-social acts.  Japanese Journal of Social Psychology ,  11 (2), 125-133.

Zimbardo, P.G. (2007). The Lucifer effect: Understanding how good people turn evil . New York, NY: Random House.

Further Information

• Reicher, S., & Haslam, S. A. (2006). Rethinking the psychology of tyranny: The BBC prison study. The British Journal of Social Psychology, 45 , 1.
• Coverage of the Stanford Prison Experiment in introductory psychology textbooks
• The Stanford Prison Experiment Official Website

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)

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More From Forbes

The top ten brain science and psychology studies of 2015.

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The pace of research seems to accelerate more every year, and 2015 saw its share of major studies across several categories of brain science and psychology. This Top 10 list isn’t meant to be exhaustive (and it isn't ranked in any particular order), but is rather a survey of the top research covered here at Neuropsyched along with a few additional studies that had an impact. A number of these studies also serve as prelude to research we'll see in the coming year.

1.Brain Powers Change as You Age

Science bolstered the ever-changing-brain theory in 2015 by showing that mental abilities don’t all collectively peak and begin rolling downhill at any one age, or even during one or two decades. Instead, they fluctuate across a span of ages, with a couple peaking well into our elder years. The findings came from a study that included over 50,000 people with ages ranging from the teens to their 70s. Mental abilities like brain processing speed peaked early on, around age 18, while vocabulary skills continued developing into the 60s and 70s. Remembering things we see (visual working memory) peaks around age 25, while short-term memory doesn’t take full form until around 35. One of the most interesting mental abilities the study tracked has to do with our ability to read other people – how well we identify which emotions are percolating or absent in the person across the table. The researchers found that this ability doesn’t take shape until we’re in our 40s, and continues maturing for a couple of decades well into our 60s.

Quoting study co-author Laura Germine: “The brain seems to continue to change in dynamic ways through early adulthood and middle age,” and that the current study “paints a different picture of the way we change over the lifespan than psychology and neuroscience have traditionally painted.”

2. Alzheimer’s Clues Appear Much Earlier than We Thought

A handful of studies in 2015 hinted at early clues to the development of Alzheimer’s disease. One study published in the journal Neurology showed that late middle-age memory failures can predict Alzheimer’s as much as 18 years before diagnosis. Participants were given tests of mental ability and memory every three years for 18 years. Those who scored lowest on the memory and thinking tests during the first year of the study were 10 times more likely to develop the disease.

Another study published in the journal Science used fMRI to identify early signs of the disease appearing in the brain’s internal GPS system, within a region called the  entorhinal cortex  that plays a major role in memory and navigation. Look for more studies to build on these findings in 2016.

3. Missing Link Between the Brain and Immune System Identified

How the brain rids itself of toxins has been a point of debate for some time. The prevailing theory is that the brain doesn’t use the body’s lymphatic system, but rather has its own garbage removal system that appears to come online when we sleep. A study conducted by University of Virginia researchers in 2015 found that the brain does, in fact, use the body’s lymphatic system, but with a previously unidentified network of blood vessels in the meninges (the membranes surrounding the brain and spinal cord). The study was conducted in mice but the same vessels were also identified in human samples. It’s possible that abnormalities in these vessels may play a role in various neurological diseases like multiple sclerosis and schizophrenia. If that finding is confirmed, the network of vessels could become an early treatment target for these and other diseases.  Look for additional studies to build on this one in the next year.

AFP PHOTO / MIGUEL MEDINA (Photo credit should read MIGUEL MEDINA/AFP/Getty Images)

4. Loneliness is Destructive to the Mind and Body

Two studies came out in 2015 showing a convincing link between loneliness and both mental and physical debilitation. One of the studies focused on the effects of loneliness on 8,300 adults age 65 and older who participated  in the  U.S. Health  and  Retirement  Study from 1998 to 2010. Participants in the study were assessed every two years across a range of factors, including levels of depression, loneliness, memory, cognitive function and social network status. About 1,400 of the participants (17%) reported loneliness at the start of the study, and roughly half of that group also reported clinically significant depression. Over the 12-year study, participants reporting loneliness experienced 20% faster cognitive decline than other participants. This result held true regardless of factors like demographics, socioeconomic status and the presence of other debilitating health conditions. Higher levels of depression also correlated significantly with more rapid cognitive decline.

In another study funded by the National Institutes of Health, loneliness (defined as a “perceived social isolation”) was linked to a 14% increase in premature death among older adults. More studies along these lines are set to publish in 2016.

5. Popular Over-the-Counter Drugs Linked to Increased Risk of Dementia

Researchers published a bombshell study in JAMA Internal Medicine in 2015 showing that four common medications are linked to a significantly increased risk of developing dementia in older adults. The study followed 3,434 people over the age of 65 for seven years. None of the participants showed signs of dementia at the start of the study period. During the seven years, almost 800 of the participants developed dementia (637 developed Alzheimer’s disease; the rest were afflicted with other forms of dementia). After controlling for a range of other factors, the researchers were able to link heightened risk of dementia to a daily dose of four medications: Diphenhydramine  (the active ingredient in many over-the-counter antihistamines); Chlorpheniramine  (another popular over-the-counter antihistamine); Oxybutynin (a prescription medication for bladder conditions); and Doxepin  (an older prescription antidepressant from the class of meds called tricylics).

All of the drugs in question are  anticholinergics  – meaning they block a neurotransmitter called  acetylcholine  in the nervous system. Common side effects of taking anticholinergics include drowsiness, blurred vision and memory loss. People suffering from Alzheimer’s disease typically have low brain levels of acetylcholine, and previous  research  has shown a link between taking anticholinergic drugs and increased risk of dementia in older adults. While the study didn’t prove a cause-and-effect relationship, the correlation was strong and of particular concern for older adults.

6. Middle-Age Americans Are Dying and We Don’t Know Why

While not strictly speaking a brain science or psych study, research by two economists uncovered an alarming finding with a distinctly psychological dimension. Economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton reported “a marked increase in the all-cause mortality of middle-aged white non-Hispanic men and women in the United States between 1999 and 2013. This change reversed decades of progress in mortality and was unique to the United States; no other rich country saw a similar turnaround.” The researchers focused specifically on mortality rates for 45-to-54 year olds.

The impact of this study has nothing to do with firm conclusions, because the study itself doesn’t point to specific causes for the trend. And some statisticians are still wrestling with the data to determine exactly what it tells us beyond surface-level speculation. But study co-author Angus Deaton, who was also the 2015 Nobel laureate in economics, thinks he knows at least part of what the data is telling us: “Drugs and alcohol, and suicide . . . are clearly the proximate cause.” Why those factors are increasing among this specific group is the question. More to come on this in the coming year, no doubt.

7. The More Time You Spend On Facebook, The More Likely You’ll Be Depressed

One of the biggest ironies of our time is that social media—the technology that promised to connect us to the world—may be a significant factor in elevating rates of loneliness and depression. A 2015 study published in the  Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology  added to the chorus, but also helped clarify the issue by pinpointing the lynchpin between social media use and depression – social comparison . The researchers think that the social comparisons we make between ourselves and all of our online “friends” showing off the very best parts of their lives is the heart of the matter.

The study found that people who spend the most time on Facebook, men and women, consistently showed more depressive symptoms, and social comparison with peers surfaces as the main reason why. Another way to frame the findings – the personal public relations jobs people do on Facebook are having an impact, and not the sort I think we were hoping for in the early days of the technology. Maybe in 2016 we can start ignoring more online PR and take back some of the emotional ground we’ve yielded to social media.

8. We’re Getting Closer to Blood Testing for Mental Health Disorders

While still quite preliminary, a breakthrough study in 2015 showed that biomarkers for suicidal tendencies can be identified in blood tests. Researchers from Indiana University developed a questionnaire and a blood test that together predicted with 92 percent accuracy who among a group of 108 men would develop suicidal thoughts. Considering that only about 2 percent of people suffering from depression commit suicide (and depression is the leading cause of suicide), having a method that can detect who’s most likely to go there would be immensely useful to mental health professionals. On a broader scale, tests like these may also eventually show tendencies for developing depression and other psychiatric disorders, which would put a much finer point on identifying the best treatment options earlier on. Having said that, this area of research is controversial and in its infancy, so much more to come on all of the above – but the beginnings of something potentially quite big have emerged.

9. Diet Can Influence Your Chances of Developing Depression

Each year more research comes out linking inflammation at the cellular level to a host of badness, including heart disease, diabetes, some forms of cancer, and, more recently, depression. And we’ve also found that inflammation is strongly linked to lifestyle factors, with diet high among them. While the connective details are still not entirely clear, research from 2015 indicates that changing your diet to something closer to the Mediterranean Diet (which has known anti-inflammatory effects) can lower your risk of depression. The study suggests that even moderately following the diet can cut the risk by way of, it’s thought, lowering cellular inflammation. With inflammation research exploding, we’ll hear more about this and other linkages soon.

10. We Can Stop Wasting Time Talking About Birth Order

I always like to include one study in these lists that kicks a pop psych myth squarely in its tookis. This year that honor goes to research that challenged the long-held belief that birth order has a major effect on the relative personality and intelligence of siblings. Researchers studied 377,000 high school students to find out how much birth order affected their personality development and intelligence. They found that firstborns do have slightly higher IQs than their later-born siblings, but only one point higher – a statistically significant but practically meaningless difference. Firstborns also tend to score higher on certain  personality traits  like extroversion, agreeableness and conscientiousness, but the differences between their scores and those of later-borns are, according to the researchers, “infinitesimally small.” Overall, the association between birth order and personality was statistically .02, which is well below the level of perception.

According to study co-author Brent Roberts, professor of psychology at the University of Illinois, “In some cases, if a drug saves 10 out of 10,000 lives, for example, small effects can be profound. But in terms of personality traits and how you rate them, a .02 correlation doesn’t get you anything of note. You are not going to be able to see it with the naked eye. You’re not going to be able to sit two people down next to each other and see the differences between them. It’s not noticeable by anybody.”

You can find David DiSalvo on  Twitter , Facebook ,  Google Plus , and at his website  daviddisalvo.org .

Also on Forbes:

The Top Ten Brain Science and Psychology Studies of 2013

The Top Ten Brain Science and Psychology Studies of 2012

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• 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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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What psychology’s crisis means for the future of science

The field is currently undergoing a painful period of introspection. It will emerge stronger than before.

by Brian Resnick

In 1998, psychologists found evidence of a tantalizing theory: We all have a finite mental store of energy for self-control and decision-making. Resisting temptations, or making tough decisions, saps this energy over time.

Willpower is like a muscle, the argument goes. When it’s tired, we’re less focused; we give in to temptation and make shoddy decisions that hurt us later. The original 1998 experiment used chocolate chip cookies, radishes, and an impossible quiz to elegantly illustrate this. Participants who were told to eat radishes and resist cookies gave up on the quiz faster that the people who were allowed to eat the cookies.

Over the years, the theory has been tested in hundreds of peer-reviewed studies, with countless stand-ins for the chocolate, radishes, and the quiz. Scientists have shown how diminished willpower can affect our ability to hold on to a handgrip, sap our motivation to help another in need, and even negatively impact athletic performance.

This huge body of research has helped ego depletion, as psychologists call it, and its offshoot decision fatigue , become the basis for best-selling books , TED talks , and countless life hacks. In an age where temptations and decisions pummel us at warp speed, it’s become an empowering concept. If we know how the system works, we can game it: President Obama famously doesn’t pick out his suits, for fear that it might deplete some of his decision-making capabilities.

But the whole theory of ego depletion may be on the brink of collapse.

Slate’s Daniel Engber reports on an upcoming study in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science that found in a test with more than 2,000 participants across more than 20 labs, “a zero-effect for ego depletion: No sign that the human will works as it’s been described, or that these hundreds of studies amount to very much at all.”

How could hundreds of peer-reviewed studies possibly be so wrong? There may be a way to explain it, and it’s shaking researchers to their cores.

Every time scientists conduct an experiment, there’s a chance they’ll find a false positive. But here’s the scary thing: Psychologists are now realizing their institutions are structured so it’s more likely that false positives will make it through to publication than inconclusive results.

“We’re now learning that there’s so much bias in the published literature that the meta-analyses can’t be trusted,” Simine Vazire, a professor of psychology and the editor in chief of the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, tells me.

This had led to a painful period of introspection for psychology, leaving researchers bewildered, even scared. What if more fundamental research findings — findings that have spurred books, self-help guides, and countless articles — don’t hold up to scrutiny? Does psychology lose its validity as a science?

“Any good science should always be looking at its methods, its statistics, but in a bigger sense, its institutions”

Michael Inzlicht, a psychology professor at the University of Toronto, is a co-author on the forthcoming ego depletion paper. While he’s not ready to discuss it in depth (“I do not think it’s wise to talk about this until people can actually read the paper for themselves,” he tells me in an email), he did clarify that the result won’t spell the absolute death of ego depletion theory. “There would need to be a few more of these massive replication failures to support a claim like that,” he says.

But beyond the demise of the theory, for Inzlicht the results represent something greater, and sadder. He’s worked on ego depletion for most of a decade. His studies have been published in top journals. “I’m in a dark place,” he writes in a recent blog post. “Have I been chasing puffs of smoke for all these years?”

Depending on whom you ask, this moment is either a crisis for the science or a revolution to hold researchers and journals more accountable for flimsy conclusions.

For psychologists, the problem is not going to go away anytime soon. Nor are the solutions easy. But there’s a chance that this fire will be cleansing — and that the science of psychology will emerge from this period stronger, more effective, and more trustworthy.

Psychology’s crisis goes far beyond this one theory

It’s not just ego depletion.

In recent years, psychologists have been forced to reexamine many of the discipline’s most famous and influential findings.

Over the past decade , studies started to trickle into the literature suggesting that major discoveries in psychology may be the result of experimenter bias. In one paper, psychologists showed that standard statistical practices could be used to make just about any effect appear significant . Look no further for proof than when The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology published a result finding people were capable of precognition, which most scientists would say is impossible.

Then it became apparent these problems weren’t just on the fringes of the science but had infected some of the field’s most celebrated findings.

In 2012, social priming — an influential theory that explains how subliminal cues influence our behavior — failed a replication test . The theory gained popularity after a 1996 experiment showed a surprising effect: Participants who completed a word puzzle filled with phrases related to the elderly actually started to behave differently. Researchers recorded them walking more slowly to an exit after the quiz.

Like ego depletion, the priming experiment inspired many offshoots. One popular test showed that when a person holds a cold drink during a conversation, he or she can perceive the other person as having a chillier personality. Another test found that if interviewers carry a heavy clipboard while talking to a job candidate, they think the candidate is more serious.

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These conclusions are the type that make one marvel at the mystery and complexity of the human brain. They make us wonder about our free will. (It was theories like these that led me to major in psychology in college.)

Social priming theory isn’t necessarily wrong. But when researchers failed to replicate the slow-walking result with more than double the number of participants, it cast doubt on both the conclusions and psychology’s ability to reliably test for them. Especially concerning was that in the replication test, experimenters only found the result — participants walking more slowly — when they were told this was the probable outcome.

The crisis intensified this past August when a group of psychologists called the Open Science Collaboration published a report in the Science with evidence of an overarching problem: When 270 psychologists tried to replicate 100 experiments published in top journals, only around 40 percent of the studies held up. The remainder either failed or yielded inconclusive data. What’s more, the replications that did work showed weaker effects than the original papers.

How experimenters skew their own experiments

A combination of factors pressure scientific journals to publish studies that may overstate their conclusions.

“Ultimately, after the ugliness is over —and I don’t expect that this is the end of it — the science will end up being better”

First there’s publication bias. The basic idea here is that journals tend to accept papers that find a positive conclusion. A scientist can run two experiments: One works, one doesn’t. The one that works is submitted to the journal; the one that doesn’t stays in a drawer. (A study in the Journal of Experimental Political Science finds evidence to suggest that non-published studies replicate more reliably than published ones.)

Then there’s p-hacking , an array of statistical techniques scientists can use to make their results appear more significant than they actually are. (A p-value is a test of statistical significance.) One example: Researchers can stop collecting data when their results reach statistical significance. That would be like flipping a coin, getting three heads in a row, and then concluding that coin flips always end on heads.

A 2012 survey of 2,000 psychologists found these tactics are commonplace. Fifty percent admitted to only reporting studies that panned out (ignoring data that was inconclusive). Around 20 percent admitted to stopping data collection after they got the result they were hoping for. Most of the respondents thought their actions were defensible.

These researchers are succumbing to what’s known as confirmation bias: our human tendency to want to see the world as we predict it. They’re not necessarily trying to deceive. They’re just being human, and aren’t immune to the theories they lecture on.

A lot of these “p-hacks” then lead to the problem of underpowered studies — studies with samples sizes too small to really be reliable. And simply put, the less powered a study, the more prone it is to find a result that isn’t real.

A bit ironically, one victim of underpowered studies might be the mega-popular theory of power poses . In 2010 an experiment with 42 participants found evidence that people could be made to feel more powerful if they posed with an open, expansive posture. The theory inspired a TED talk that has been viewed more than 32 million times. It’s an appealing, digestible idea: one weird trick to feel more powerful!

But like ego depletion and social priming, power posing effects have failed to replicate with larger subject pools.( Clarification: A power pose replication test did find participants felt a subjective sense of power. But the test failed to find the hormonal and behavioral changes that made the original paper a blockbuster.)

The point of replication isn’t to shame researchers — it’s to build better science

With the Open Science Collaboration project and other large-scale replication projects like it , psychologists aren’t setting off to prove or disprove individual conclusions. Rather, they’re asking the question: What is the difference between the experiments that can be replicated and the ones that cannot?

The answer to that question is the key to solving the discipline’s core problem. If psychology finds it has to start from scratch evaluating its hypotheses, at least it will be able to do so in a manner that’s more methodologically sound.

“We never want to be at a point where every single study, every one, has to have five direct replications run,” says Sanjay Srivastava, a psychologist at the University of Oregon who blogs about issues in the field on his website the Hardest Science . “We want to know, ultimately, what are the signs of a healthy science?”

The August replication study already started to point toward the answers.

“I think psychology has a lot of potential ... but I’m not sure we have a lot of answers yet”

One thing scientists are learning is that studies with higher statistical power (a function of sample size) are more likely to reproduce. “If I go out and I see another study, and nobody’s run a replication, I can have more trust if the study has higher power,” Srivastava says.

Studies that yield highly significant results are more likely to reproduce than those that are just barely significant. And direct one-to-one effects are more likely to reproduce than complicated interactions.

The story of the replication crisis got a bit more complicated last week when a group of psychologists out of Harvard published a critique of the replication project, also in Science.

The paper was led by Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert (you’ll recognize him from Prudential commercials ), who has generally challenged the replication movement. His issue, in short, was that in the process of trying to replicate experiments, the Open Science Collaboration introduced enough error to render the replications meaningless. And on top of that, Gilbert and his co-authors asserted the “reproducibility of psychological science is quite high.”

A handful of researchers I spoke with found this argument unconvincing: If the Harvard authors wanted to prove that more replications and stricter adherence to protocols increased the replication rate, they should have conducted the experiments.

But it goes to show: Even the science of assessing science is a hotly debated work in progress.

And to be clear, a failed replication doesn’t mean the original study is wrong. It could be that the new experiment didn’t precisely recreate the conditions of the first. But then that raises the question: Should experiments be so sensitive that they fail with small adjustments?

“Replication is often more complicated in psychology [than other sciences] because we tend to study things that are not always directly observable,” Ingrid Haas, a professor of psychology and political science, writes me in an email. Behaviors like love, friendship, bravery, and trust often have to be coaxed out of psychology experiment participants through role playing. Those scenarios are extremely sensitive to changes in culture and context, and are difficult to recreate.

Psychology is becoming more humble

Behind the replication movement is an earnest desire to be more transparent and humble about scientific conclusions.

“I think psychology has a lot of potential,” Vazire says, “and I think we’re improving it as a tool to answer really important questions, but I’m not sure we have a lot of answers yet.”

Remember, she’s a psychologist and a journal editor.

Vazire isn’t the only one who thinks this way. I heard the same line from a few psychologists: The scientists don’t want the public’s trust just because they wear lab coats. They want to earn it. (An exception to this was Gilbert, who thinks the reproducibility crisis is overblown. “The average person cannot evaluate a scientific finding for themselves any more easily than they can represent themselves in court or perform surgery on their own appendix,” he wrote me.)

Brian Nosek, who co-founded the Center for Open Science at the University of Virginia and coordinated the replication paper in Science, believes the answer to the science’s problems is transparency.

“Transparency is making available the methodology, data, and process that one used to arrive at a scientific claim,” Nosek, who was the lead author on the August replication report, writes me in an email. “It means that anyone can evaluate and critique the research. Researchers willing to be transparent signal that they are open to scrutiny, and research that survives scrutiny may be more robust.”

“Humans desire certainty, and science infrequently provides it”

The biggest change Nosek and his like-minded colleagues are calling for is the preregistration of study designs. Usually researchers don’t have to tell anyone about their experimental designs until they publish results. This opens the door to all the p-hacks and biases mentioned above.

“Preregistration reduces my flexibility as a researcher to conduct many analyses and studies and report only a subset that happens to fit my preconceived views of what should occur,” Nosek explains. Registration will make it harder for scientist to cherry-pick data that makes them look good. It also will make it easier for other labs to replicate the tests.

Already changes are being made. More and more journals are requiring the preregistration of experiments, and are reviewing study designs more intensely.

“Generally I’m a pessimist,” Barbara Spellman, a former editor of Perspectives on Psychological Science, tells me. “But I do think ultimately, after the ugliness is over —and I don’t expect that this is the end of it — the science will end up being better.”

Vazire’s journal Social Psychology and Personality Science is paying more attention to statistical power, asking researchers to publish more of the data that was excluded in the final paper. “As we learn more and more about what kinds of studies and results are more likely to replicate, we know better how to evaluate submissions,” she says.

So how should we evaluate psychological claims?

“Any good science should always be looking at its methods, its statistics, but in a bigger sense, its institutions, the way it thinks about evidence,” Srivastava says.

It’s also important to remember: Replication issues aren’t limited to psychology . Biology and medicine has gone through similar trials. Psychology just has the privilege of being a very popular science for a general audience: Its conclusions are easier to fit into our boring, everyday lives.

It’s also a relatively young science. Freud’s spearheading work is barely 100 years old, and even now that’s considered to be more like literature than science. What will we know in a century that will make our current knowledge look quaint?

The truest thing written about psychology’s crisis was in the conclusion of the August report in Science. “Humans desire certainty, and science infrequently provides it,” it stated. “As much as we might wish it to be otherwise, a single study almost never provides definitive resolution for or against an effect and its explanation.”

This period of introspection isn’t just for psychologists. It’s also for the writers who report on its conclusions and the public who consumes psychology news. We need to become more skeptical, and we need to put individual pieces of research within a larger context. We should think before jumping to turn psychological conclusions into “news you can use.”

“You want to look for converging lines of evidence,” Srivastava says of evaluating psychological conclusions. A survey that finds people are happiest when they’re around friends is interesting. That finding is more convincing when an experiment also finds the same effect. When those experiments are replicated — both exactly and in new contexts — that’s even better.

“The thing you want to avoid is that you just found a bunch of patterns you can heap together into a story,” he says. (That’s true for all genres of journalism.) All the lines of evidence have to stand the test of replication.

These are troubling times for psychology, but there’s also reason for optimism. During this time of reappraisal, some textbooks may need to be rewritten, and some egos will be badly bruised. But psychology will have a more solid foundation.

“To be clear: I am in love with social psychology,” Inzlicht writes. And you have to be honest with those you love.

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The 20 Best Movies About Human Experiments

A relatively common trope in horror films and psychological thrillers, the concept of human experiments is truly horrific due to the realities of their existence. From World War II Nazi experiments to the birth of psychology field testing, the implantation of testing humans has resulted in a lot of suffering, but also a lot of knowledge about human behavior.

Therefore, the of human experimentation often results in two sides – that the overall good of knowledge counterbalances anything bad that can come out of the experiment, which is the mentality commonly seen in the experimenter, and the counterargument that nothing good can come out of anything bad is generally led by the subjects or victims.

From 1930’s Frankenstein to 1960’s French science fiction to today’s exploitation of horror films as seen in the “Saw” and “Human Centipede” franchises, the theme has had a long tradition.

20. Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS (1975)

Don Edmonds’ endeavour into the nazisploitation genre follows Ilsa (Dyanne Thorne), a Kommandant of a Nazi prison camp. She conducts sadistic scientific experiments to fellow women in order to prove to the higher ranked officers that women are more capable of enduring pain than men are, and therefore should be allowed to fight in the German armed forces, since the Nazi military are in dire need of reinforcements.

Besides torturing women, every night she chooses male prisoners and rapes them and after she finishes with them, she castrates and kills them.

Even though the film is not for the light-hearted and extremely exploitative (hence nazisploitation), the sex-addicted sadist Ilsa is patterned after real-life murderous female Nazi camp personnel Ilse Koch and Irma Grese.

Before the film begins, there is a notice saying: “The film you are about to see is based on documented fact. The atrocities shown were conducted as ‘medical experiments’ in special concentration camps throughout Hitler’s Third Reich.

Although these crimes against humanity are historically accurate, the characters depicted are composites of notorious Nazi personalities; and the events portrayed, have been condensed into one locality for dramatic purposes. Because of its shocking subject matter, this film is restricted to adult audiences only. We dedicate this film with the hope that these heinous crimes will never happen again.”

The film was followed by three sexploitation sequels, Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks (1976), Ilsa, the Wicked Warden (1977) and Ilsa, the Tigress of Siberia (1977).

19. Re-Animator (1985)

Stuart Gordon’s science fiction horror comedy loosely based on the H. P. Lovecraft episodic novella “Herbert West–Reanimator” follows Herbert West (Jeffrey Combs), a medical student, as he successfully brings his dead professor back to life, but finds that there are horrible side-effects which end up re-killing Gruber.

West moves away to continue his experiments with the help of fellow medical student, Dan Cain (Bruce Abbott), as they try convince the University’s Dean, Dr. Alan Halsey (Robert Sampson), about the possibilities of reanimation of the dead.

Originally, Gordon was going to adapt Lovecraft’s story for the stage, and then planned to make a half-hour television pilot, and then reformatted the pilot and the twelve episodes which were planned to follow to be maximized to an hour.

Eventually they decided on making a standard film since the majority of the horror fan bases were found to watch films more than television. Gordon and his writers, Dennis Paoli and William Norris, also intended it to be a period piece at the beginning of the 20th Century, but found it to be too over-budget and hence landed on adapting it to modern-day Chicago.

The fast pace, deadpan humour and bloody special-effects led to the integration of B-grade thrillers, surrealist art and 80s comedy and to an overall cult classic.

18. The Boys from Brazil (1978)

Franklin J. Schaffner’s British-American science fiction thriller based on the novel of the same name by Ira Levin follows young Barry Kohler (Steve Guttenberg) and retired Nazi hunter Ezra Lieberman (Laurence Olivier) as they track down a secret organization of Third Reich war criminals, including the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele (Gregory Peck), the infamous Auschwitz doctor, who are, themselves, tracking down 94 seemingly random men in different countries, including Austria, Germany, Denmark, Great Britain, the United States, and kill them.

Lieberman follows Kohler’s leads and begins travelling to investigate the suspicious deaths of these men. He meets their widows and is astonished to find an eerie resemblance in their adopted, black-haired, blue-eyed sons, who all have similar mannerisms despite being from different places and speaking various languages.

Lieberman also discovers strange similarities with regards to the assassinated men’s cold attitudes towards the boy, the mother’s affectionate bond, and the ages of the parents during the time of adoption. The reason behind the uncanny resemblance is astoundingly chilling as Schaffner utilises iconic actors to tell an original tale that reimagines history and questions the “what if” attitudes of World War II.

The film gained three Academy Award nominations in the following categories – Best Actor (Laurence Olivier), Film Editing (Robert Swink) and for Original Score (Jerry Goldsmith). Gregory Peck was also recognised at the Golden Globes, earning a nomination for Best Actor is a Drama.

17. The Sylvian Experiments (2010)

Hiroshi Takahashi’s Japanese horror follows two sisters, Miyuki and Kaori, who are daughters of two neurosurgeons, Etsuko Ōta and Yukio. They all see a documentary of a secret experiment where the Japanese, Manchu, and Russian subjects’ temporal lobes are electrified until the subjects are strangely able to project a blinding white light.

Years later, Etsuko plans on conducting a similar experiment and recruits her daughter, Miyuki, as well as others to commit mass suicide assisted by Etsuko’s assistant, Hattori, as part of their initiation into the experiment. Miyuki wakes up inside a facility and is told that she has died and is currently astral projecting.

After having lost contact with her sister for six months, Kaori tracks down her last movements as she sees and talks to her in her dreams. Soon, her mother takes Kaori to the facility to learn about the experiment.

Etsuko reveals that she and Kaori have always wanted to become enlightened by the true reality beyond the current one in order to achieve a spiritual evolution. Takahashi, known as a screenwriter of “Ring”, once again utilises the source of thought through video since the documentary they initially saw sparked off their quest for enlightenment through experimentation.

16. Exam (2009)

Stuart Hazeldine’s psychological thriller, set in a parallel version of present-time United Kingdom, follow eight candidates as they sit for an employment assessment exam for the company, DATAPREV.

The Invigilator explains that the exam is 80 minutes and consists of only one question, but there are three rules that if broken, lead to disqualification. They must not talk to him or the armed guard at the door, they must not “spoil” their paper, and they must not leave the room. Each desk contains a question paper with the word “candidate”, followed by a number, from one to eight.

Set in real time, the exam begins and it is revealed that the papers are blank. One candidate is immediately disqualified, leaving the remaining seven – nicknamed Black, White, Brown, Dark, Blonde, Brunette, and Deaf – referring to their skin and hair colours, to realize that they can talk to each other and work together.

“White”, who is arrogant and rude, takes control of the group as they try to figure out how to reveal any hidden questions on the paper. The group manipulates tricks and uses each other in hopes of their disqualification. The scenario soon becomes dangerous, but they cannot talk to the armed guard or the invigilator for help.

Nominated for a BAFTA for Outstanding Debut, Hazeldine’s film makes incredible use of a single location, a few actors, and a tense countdown clock to the end of the exam, and subsequently, the end of the film. With multiple twists and turns, one wonders what job could be so important for such a chillingly claustrophobic interview, and Hazeldine does not disappoint.

15. Dead Ringers (1998)

David Cronenberg’s psychological thriller based on the lives of Stewart and Cyril Marcus and on Bari Wood and Jack Geasland’s novel “Twins”, follow Elliot and Beverly Mantle (both played by Jeremy Irons) who are identical twins and gynecologists who specialise in female fertility treatment.

The more confident and cynical of the two, Elliot, seduces women patients and when he eventually gets bored of them, passes them off to the shy and passive Beverly, without the women even realising that they have switched.

However, soon Beverly gets a girl by himself, Claire Niveau (Genevieve Bujold), who realises the difference between the two brothers.

The two become close, but she soon leaves town for work, sending Beverly into a depressive episode and leading him to abuse prescription drugs, become slave to paranoid delusions and see “mutant women” with abnormal genitalia. He must “fix” these women and commissions metallurgical artist Anders Wolleck to create a set of strange gynecological instruments specifically for operating on these fictional, mutant women.

Cronenberg, who is a master of body horror, is no stranger to graphic imagery and psychological dishevelling. Another film of his which could fall under this list is “The Fly” (1986), which follows Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum), an eccentric scientist who has just successfully managed to create a teleportation device, and is anxious to use it himself.

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