The Psychology Experiments That Explain A Lot About Our Behavior

You and I are way more similar than we would like to admit. Humans share a lot of common traits like a common set of emotions and the capacity for self-awareness, instincts, reflexes, abstract thinking, or knowing right from wrong.

In fact, based on an examination of our DNA, any two human beings are 99.9 percent identical. So no wonder that there are so many social psychology experiments trying to predict and explain why people behave the way they do. Read on to learn about some of the bizarre or even cruel experiments that revealed the truth about ourselves.

Zimbardo's Prison Experiment (The Stanford Prison Experiment)

The essence of the Power of Context is that… our inner states are the result of our outer circumstances. - Malcom Gladwell

Once upon a time, in the early 1970s, a group of social scientists at Stanford University, led by Philip Zimbardo, decided to create a mock prison in the basement of the university's psychology building (because why not, right?).

This might sound bizarre to us today but back then, people could actually conduct experiments like this one. The experiment had a very clear goal - to find out why prisons are such awful places. Was it because prisons are full of nasty people, or was it because prisons are such nasty environments? In other words, are there specific situations so powerful that they can quickly change our behavior and make us dangerously unpredictable?

What Zimbardo found out shocked him. The guards, most of whom were students from good families, quickly became crueler and more sadistic. The experiment was supposed to run for two weeks. But people who played the guards were losing control so quickly that the experiment was ended in just 6 days.

In the end, Zimbardo concluded that there are some instances where you can take normal people from good families and powerfully affect their behavior merely by changing their current situation. For further discussion, deeper insights, and video clips of the actual experiment, see Zimbardo's website.

Milgram's Experiment

Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram also had a lot of fun in the 70s. His experiment was aimed at measuring the willingness of study participants, middle-aged men, to obey an authority figure who asked them to do things that conflicted with their personal beliefs.

The results? The experiment quickly found that a very high proportion of participants were ready to obey the instructions, even if reluctantly. The background, occupation, or level of education of the person didn't matter. When a man was asked to administer electric shocks to a "learner" (while thinking that he is assisting psychologists in another experiment), he would almost always agree to do it. Even when these fake electric shocks were gradually increasing, almost all participants kept "assisting in the experiment" and hurting innocent people.

For further reading, here is a curious article that explores how people would behave in the same experiment today:

How Would People Behave in Milgram's Experiment Today? - Behavioral Scientist

The 'Violinist in the Metro' Experiment

Do people really stop to appreciate the beauty of the world? Is it easy for us to tell the difference between a genius and an amateur? The 'Violinist in the Metro' experiment was able to answer both of these questions.

In 2007, famous violinist Josh Bell pretended to be a street musician at a busy Washington, D.C. subway station. Bell had just sold out a concert with an average ticket price of $100 each or more. So here he was, an acclaimed musician playing on a handcrafted violin worth more than $3.5 million, and yet almost nobody noticed him. Out of hundreds of people who hurried by, only a few stopped to listen and most of them were young children.

False Consensus Experiment

In fact, this was a series of experiments aimed at finding how people feel about their beliefs, options, or behaviors. Researches found out that we tend to believe that the majority of other people also agree with us and act the same way we do.

In one of the experiments, for example, the researchers asked participants to choose a way to respond to an imagined conflict. Then, they wanted them to estimate how many people would also select the same resolution. The result? Almost in all cases, people tended to believe that others would also choose the same option. This became known in psychology as the false consensus effect.

The Little Albert Experiment

Conducted 100 years ago, this somewhat cruel experiment proved that humans could be easily conditioned to enjoy or fear something. The researchers wanted to test a learning process called classical conditioning (when a person learns involuntary or automatic behaviors by association). To do so, they invited a nine-month-old kid and gave him a lot of white furry toys to play with. At first, the kid loved playing with them. However, when researchers started to make a loud noise behind the child's head to frighten him, a kid began to avoid those toys. After numerous trials, he felt afraid every time he saw white furry objects (poor Albert).

How To Conduct Your Own Psychology Experiment

Finally, here is the last curious article I just had to share. It's not like I'm going to conduct my own psychology experiment anytime soon (or encourage you to do the same), but I found it very interesting to see how researchers come up with their ideas and how many topics still remain unexplored.

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This article was originally published on Medium.com