Great Experiments

[Tron]

Friends,

I'm a Neuroscience major so I've taken a few classes about psychology and behavior. I actually started out as a Physics major (but them I performed dismally in Calculus II), so I've had exposure to more mechanical experiments as well.

Nonetheless, I think social psychology experiments are the most fun and interesting. Things like the Stanford prison experiment and the "Rat Park" are incredibly clever and awesome, as far as I'm concerned.

I know a lot of 2+2ers have some sort of scientific background, so I'm sure lots of you have experiments that you hold dear for some reason or another, so why not share them?

Word.

[Tron]

By the way... I didn't want to post this in the body of the OP because that would have been lame, but I remember reading about an experiment a couple of months ago on del.icio.us or Damn Interesting or something (if I were able to remember accurately enough, I wouldn't be asking this), but the basic premise was that people really don't pay to their environments at all. A stranger would approach a person to ask for directions, and while they were speaking, their conversation would be broken up physically by workers carrying a door or something. While the workers walked past, the stranger would be replaced by an entirely different person! Some incredible amount of people failed to notice that they were talking to two different people.

Does anyone know what I'm talking about? Link? Pleeeaaase!

[guids]

We watched something on the Stanford prison experiment in HS, it was pretty interesting.


I personally like the experiment, with the kids throwing the balls back and forth, and you are supposed to count the number of times they throw them, then an ape walks through the scene.

[chopstick]

OP almost certainly knows about this, but perhaps some others do not:
Skinner Box

That's not a test, but a tool that has created some fairly awesome tests.


Here's an awesome test -
Rosenhan experiment

Basically Rosenhan had a bunch of people pretend to have mental illness in order to get admitted to psychiatric hospitals, then act as their normal selves, to see if the staff in the hospitals could tell the difference. The hospital staff admitted all of them, and something like a third of the actual patients were able to ID the fakers. Fantastic.


Others from the article:

Temerlin split 25 psychiatrists into two groups and had them listen to an actor acting in the picture of mental health. One group was told that the actor "was a very interesting man because he looked neurotic, but actually was quite psychotic" while the other was told nothing. Sixty percent of the former group diagnosed psychoses, most often schizophrenia, while none of the control group did so.

Loring and Powell gave 290 psychiatrists a transcript of a patient interview and told half of them that the patients were black and half white and concluded of the results that "Clinicians appear to ascribe violence, suspiciousness, and dangerousness to black clients even though the case studies are the same as the case studies for the white clients".


The Milgram experiment is another famous and awesome experiment - sometimes this is known as the "shock test" experiment.

Milgram devised the experiments to answer this question: "Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?"

Here are a bunch more.

[XXXNoahXXX]

I think it has been posted on here before, but I've always liked this one. Link to Video

Rules:

1) Pay attention to only the actors in the white shirts.

2) Count the number of both aerial and bounced passes, ONLY between the white-shirt actors.


Answer below in white:

<font color="white">Did you see the gorilla? If not watch the video again. If you did, you'll probably think anyone who didn't is crazy, but in my class only 75% did </font>

[Tron]

[ QUOTE ]
Rosenhan experiment

Basically Rosenhan had a bunch of people pretend to have mental illness in order to get admitted to psychiatric hospitals, then act as their normal selves, to see if the staff in the hospitals could tell the difference. The hospital staff admitted all of them, and something like a third of the actual patients were able to ID the fakers. Fantastic.

[/ QUOTE ]

I had forgotten about this; I LOVE this experiment. The second part is incredible: A hospital claimed that no fakers could be admitted to their hospital and that they would identify any fakers Rosenhan sent to the hospital over the next 3 months. At the end of 3 months, they had identified 41 fakers, and Rosenhan had sent... Zero.

[dylan's alias]

I saw the original footage in a class. It still scares me to think about it. The documentary clip here doesn't have the same impact.

From Wikipedia:

Milgram Experiment - Wikipedia

Video:

Milgram Experiment - youtube

[octopi]

Tron: You're a neuroscience major? Awesome. I just read about the prison experiment the other day in a novel and was intrigued. Coincidental you posted about it!

You're probably way more hip to many more experiments than just a lowly Bio Sci major, but I do have a special place in my heart for pharmacological and genetic-based studies. One of my favorites is this The Concord Prison experiment: Psilocybin was given to maximum security prisoners with the hopes it might break their negative thought patterns and actions and reduce their chances of returning to jail. It was a highly controversial study for a few reasons.

The researchers had high hopes, but in the end it looks like the prisoners had similar prison return rates to non treated prisoners. People often use this study as a reason for supporting 'illegal' drugs in psychological research, but often leave out the somewhat disappointing results found from the end of the 34 year study. I always find it most interesting how people use the results of studies in their arguments.

[dylan's alias]

Here's a 22 minute unedited clip.
Milgram Experiment


Edit:

Last time - here's the whole 45 minutes.

Milgram - complete video

[alebron]

My two favorite experiments:
Millikan Oil Drop Experiment: Measured the charge of an electron for the first time. Brilliant in design, and very very hard to execute correctly.

Michelson-Morley Experiment: Measured the speed of light so accurately that it proved that space is a vacuum. Invented the interferometer.

I also have a soft spot for the Penzias Wilson discovery of cosmic background radiation, but it's not really an experiment per se. I'd also add Alain Aspect's Bell Inequality experiment, but I really don't understand the experimental setup well enough.