A Trip Back to Psych Class

Sigmund Freud. Alfred Kinsey. Carl Jung. All are great psychologists in their own right. Many who are unfamiliar with or unbelieving in psychology will wonder a few things: What are the great achievements of psychology? What are the greatest, or at least the most revealing, psychological experiments that have been done? It’s time we find out.

Brainz.org, a website teeming with current and up-to-date psychology news, released a list of the 10 Most Revealing Psychological Experiments. I will examine the top four, as I think they are the most interesting, so put on your learning caps, readers.

1. Lord of the Flies: Social identity theory

Chances are good that if you went to high school, you read the famous novel by William Golding about a group of boys who try to survive by themselves on an island. There are no adults, no governing power, just them. This experiment is originally called the Robbers Cave Experiment, and at number one on the countdown, is the most powerful of all human-based research projects.

The site explains that this experiment “demonstrates just how easily an exclusive group identity is adopted and how quickly the group can degenerate into prejudice and antagonism toward outsiders.”

2. The Stanford prison experiment: Power corrupts

The object of this infamous experiment, mimicked in countless movies and TV shows, was to test the evil of humans. Psychologist Philip Zimbardo divided his participants into two groups labeled "prisoners" and "guards." A mock prison in a Stanford University basement was set up, and the prisoners were exposed to arrest, strip search, de-lousing, head shaving and other abuses by the club-wielding guards.

The prisoners eventually rebelled, and the guards became brutal. Before long, the prisoners were behaving meekly and with blind obedience, while the guards fully embraced their roles by taunting and abusing their charges. This one might be scientific confirmation of the idea that humans harbor evil tendencies. The planned 14-day experiment was halted after only six days due to increasing levels of abuse.

3. Obedience to authority: Human capacity for cruelty

In an experiment that proved humans will readily drop their morals when told to by an authoritative power, psychologist Stanley Milgram set the bar high for human-based researches.

His subjects were told they were to be the "teachers" to a "learner," who was behind a dark glass so the teachers could not see him. They asked the learners a series of questions and were told to deliver electric shocks to them if they got an answer wrong. The teachers were also told to increase the shock if the learners continued to get the answers wrong.

The screams and moans of pain from the unseen learner continued, and the subjects continued to deliver severe shocks if ordered to do so by the experimenter in the lab coat.

Sounds crazy, huh? It goes to show that under the pressure of authority, people will break moral codes to avoid being disobedient and to avoid possible punishment.

4. Conformity: Not believing your lying eyes

This test, conducted in 1951 by Solomon Asch, further examined the social identity theory — our number one experiment. His goal was to determine how much individual judgment is affected by the group.

After being asked a question and hearing other test subjects give deliberately wrong answers, undergraduates were asked to answer according to what they thought. Of the group, 50 percent gave the same wrong answer when their turn came. Only 25 percent of test subjects answered correctly, while 5 percent always went with the crowd.

The finding was that a third of people will ignore what they know to be true and go with a falsehood if they're in a group that insists on the falsehood being true. Next time you’re at work and you want that new intern to grab you coffee, tell him all the interns do it and he’d be an outsider if he didn’t. You’ll have a grande latte in front of you quicker than you can say A Clockwork Orange.

(That’s a little movie/psychology joke. If you don’t get it, well, sorry.)

There you have it. I hope this article was informative and interesting, and maybe a little mind-bending.