Psych Experiments

From Pavlov's dogs to Rorschach's inkblots, put psychology's most fascinating studies to the test

Michael A Britt

• Publisher: Adams Media
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781440597084
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Psicologia sperimentale

Psychology's most famous theories--played out in real life! Forget the labs and lecture halls. You can conduct your very own psych experiments at home! Famous psychological experiments--from Freud's ego to the Skinner box--have changed the way science views human behavior. But how do these tests really work? In Psych Experiments, you'll learn how to test out these theories and experiments for yourself...no psychology degree required! Guided by Michael A. Britt, creator of popular podcast The Psych Files, you can conduct your own experiments when browsing your favorite websites (to test the "curiosity effect"), in restaurants (learning how to increase your tips), when presented with advertisements (you'd be surprised how much you're influenced by the color red), and even right on your smartphone (and why you panic when you can't find it). You'll even figure out how contagious yawning works! With this compulsively readable little book, you won't just read about the history of psychology--you'll live it!

Chapter 1

An Introduction to Psych Experiments

Salivating dogs, confused cats, superstitious pigeons, insightful gorillas, aggressive children, fearful adults—the list of fascinating psychological studies goes on and on. Research on humans is colorful, odd, brilliant, embarrassing, and sometimes difficult to watch. We have learned a lot and we have come a long way since Wilhelm Wundt (the “founder” of psychology back in 1879) had participants listening to metronomes tick and introspecting on the experience. Today we have sophisticated personality tests and MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) scans to look “inside the black box” of the brain while it thinks. But just because some research is “old”—like B. F. Skinner’s work with pigeons—doesn’t mean it’s “old fashioned” or wrong. It’s still quite useful. And just because we’re using an MRI scan on our brains doesn’t necessarily mean we understand what we’re looking at. We look back at Sigmund Freud’s work and think about how silly some of it was. But a hundred years from now we’ll look back at what we’re doing today and think the same thing.

Why Psych Experiments Matter

In this book we’ll take a look at some of the most famous and some of the lesser-known studies in the history of psychology. I think you’ll find it fun even if you never carry out any of the studies described here. Here are a few examples of the odd, the brilliant, and the important studies (some of which we’ll re-create in this book).

The Odd

What if you showed up to assist an experimenter and he said that your job was to sit in a men’s bathroom stall and videotape men as they stand at a urinal and pee? Yes, that study was actually carried out in the 1970s by R. Dennis Middlemist and his colleagues. Sounds odd, but they wanted to see what effect it has on us to have someone else nearby when we’re . . . eliminating. Not surprisingly perhaps, it does take longer for the “onset of micturition (peeing)” to occur when someone is nearby. You probably refer to this as an “invasion of your personal space.” This study, while indeed a little odd, has been enormously helpful to people who suffer from shy bladder syndrome.

The Surprising

Many people fear the end of the world. Sometimes they even have a specific date (remember December 12, 2012, when the world was supposed to come to an end?). What goes on in people’s minds when they very strongly believe something like this and then the world doesn’t come to an end? How do they deal with it? Leon Festinger and his colleagues decided to actually join an “end of the world” cult to find out what happened on that last day. This study taught us a lot about an idea called cognitive dissonance. As you’ll see in this book, cognitive dissonance is at work almost every day in your life.

The Brilliant

Not many studies can claim to have been inspired by a Bible story, but John M. Darley and C. Daniel Batson’s study did just that. They took the parable of the Good Samaritan and turned it into a psychological study. The parable describes several people who walked by a man who was clearly in need of help. Many people did not help. One did. So Darley set up a study in which participants (who were seminary students) were asked to give a brief talk about this parable. But wouldn’t you know it—participants had to walk to a building across campus to give the talk. And along the way, Darley and Batson placed a person on the ground who pretended to be in need of help. We learned a lot about situations in which helping does and doesn’t happen and what to do to get help when you need it.

The Influential

Many of us believe our memories to be accurate. We think we have “flashbulb memories” and we think that because we “saw it with our own eyes!” it must have happened just the way we recall it. Psychologist Elizabeth Loftus showed us just how inaccurate and easily influenced our memories can be. She showed participants recordings of car accidents and then later asked them what they saw. A simple change in wording was all that was needed to make people believe that they saw things that weren’t there or that did not happen. This research has been very influential (though perhaps not as much as psychologists would like) in the courts today when jurors examine evidence and come to their decisions.

Conceptual Replications

We’re not going to be carrying out a replication of Stanley Milgram’s research in which many participants actually believed that they were giving someone a lethal level of electric shock. Nor will we be locking participants into false jail cells and assigning them to roles of “Prisoner” and “Guard” (Philip Zimbardo). We won’t be delivering small electric shocks to dogs (Martin Seligman), entering ourselves into psychiatric facilities (David Rosenhan), or running rats in a maze or shaping the behavior of pigeons (Skinner). Nonetheless, we can still learn about the power of conformity, social roles, labeling, shaping, and helplessness by carrying out what are called “conceptual replications.” That is, we can still examine these important ideas by doing small studies that are different from the original ones but that could still demonstrate the existence of the phenomenon.

For example, we’ll be looking at these concepts, but we’ll be doing so in original ways:

• Cognitive Dissonance: Instead of following cult members around as Festinger did, we’ll look at how dissonance occurs when you shop online.
• Social Roles: Instead of creating a mock prison as Zimbardo did, we’ll see how social roles affect us when we’re just working as a group in a class discussion.
• Learned Helplessness: Instead of giving small shocks to dogs as Seligman did, we’ll examine the effects of helplessness by asking participants to solve anagrams—some of which are really hard to figure out.
• Rorschach Inkblots: Instead of giving inkblots to people to see if their interpretations of them indicate schizophrenia, we’ll examine the difficulty of scoring these inkblots by showing them to participants and assigning unusual names to the responses.
• Detecting Lies: You probably don’t have a polygraph machine lying around, but we can still explore how lies can be detected using a fun “story telling” approach.
• Behavior Modification: I’m going to assume that you also don’t have access to a “Skinner box” and a bunch of pigeons. Nevertheless, you can still experience the idea of behavior modification using a piano keyboard (you’ll find out).

Respect Your Participants

Even though the replications described here should be fun, if there’s one issue psychologists are fanatical about it is the care and respect for those people who agree to participate in our studies. For example, every college and university has an internal review board (IRB)—a group of people who read a proposal for every research study a psychologist would like to carry out. The IRB makes sure that these key components are a part of every study:

• Informed Consent: Every participant should be provided with enough information about the study to make a decision as to whether or not they wish to participate.
• Freedom to Withdraw: No one is ever forced, fooled, or coerced into participating in a psychological study. While many colleges and universities require Psychology 101 students to participate in research as a learning experience, those below the age of eighteen and those who simply do not wish to participate have the option of doing an alternative assignment (such as writing a short paper on a topic of their interest).
• Debriefing and Follow-Up: Once the study is over, all participants are entitled to know exactly what the study was about, how to find out the results if they’re interested, and who to contact if they have any questions or concerns about their participation in the study. Some studies, in order to really find what they’re looking for, require some amount of deception or at least leaving out important information so that participants will act in as natural a way as possible. However, once the study is done, everything is explained to the participants.

Is It Ethical?

As investigators of human behavior, researchers must weigh the potential to learn something very important against the potential for risk to participants. This is the “ethical dilemma” that the IRB must assess when they read a proposal.

Risks

What are the potential risks to participants? In addition to risks of bodily harm, could participants suffer undue stress during the study? Is it possible that they’ll leave the study feeling bad about themselves? Anxious? Sad? Ideally, we want participants to leave the study with a positive feeling about having contributed to our understanding of the human condition. But any study could stir up emotions in participants that the researchers (that’s you) didn’t anticipate. Some situations have obvious concerns, such as research on childhood abuse in which you’re going to ask people questions about their pasts that they might not want to think about. Other situations are more subtle. Suppose you’re interested in memory and you ask people to memorize words on a list. Sounds harmless, but some subjects might do poorly on the task and if they’re older, they might begin to worry about whether they’re coming down with Alzheimer’s disease because they had a parent who had it. This is one reason debriefing and follow-up contact info are always provided to participants in case they have concerns or worries that pop up later on.

Benefits

What are the benefits to humankind of this research? Typically, an IRB will focus on seeing if the risks to your participants are minimal. However, some risk might not be unavoidable, such as when researchers try out a new drug and don’t know exactly which dosage is best or what the side effects could be. In cases like this, IRB members have to ask themselves, “Are we going to learn something here that is so important that it’s worth such risks?” It’s an important and difficult question.

Psychology Studies and Ethical Dilemmas

Here are some examples of studies with some obvious and some not-so-obvious dilemmas:

Milgram’s Study of Authority

Will people obey an authority figure even if it means seriously hurting another person? You have probably heard of the study conducted by Stanley Milgram in which participants, instructed to act as “teachers,” gave shocks to “learners” when learners gave the wrong answer to questions. The study gave us some unsettling news about human beings and how we can do some hurtful things to others when told to do so by an authority figure. We also learned how and when blind obedience to authority can be decreased. Of course, no one was shocked in the Milgram study. The learners' yells of pain were pretend and they were recorded so that every participant heard the exact same recording. But still, this was a study that left many of the participants shaken to say the least. It was one of the studies that led to the establishment of the APA Code of Ethics. The study took place in the early 1960s and it was thought that while the findings were important, the study would never be replicated because of the potential for psychological harm to the participants. However, psychologist Jerry Burger came up with an ingenious way to replicate the study while significantly reducing the risks to participants. He looked carefully at Milgram’s research and found that 79 percent of the “teachers” who gave the “learner” a shock of 150 volts went all the way to giving 450 volts (a voltage level labeled XXX on the “shock machine”). So 150 volts was something of a turning point. If you were willing to go that far you would probably go all the way. So what if we replicate the study but stop at the 150-volt point? Why go any further? Burger’s IRB committee agreed to this thinking and the famous Milgram study was replicated in 2009. Burger provided a more extensive debriefing of his participants than Milgram did and the participants experienced much less stress. Unfortunately, it appears that not much has changed in the human psyche since Milgram’s time: Burger also found that about two-thirds of his participants did what they were told to do by an authority figure and administered 150 volts. Blind obedience to authority is apparently still with us.

Frustration and Creativity

Does frustration help people become more creative? Perhaps you’ve found yourself in a frustrating situation and it actually caused you t...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: An Introduction to Psych Experiments
• Classical Conditioning You Can Do Yourself: Maybe We’re Not So Different from Dogs After All
• How You Are Manipulated Into Paying More Money Than You Wanted
• Estimating Distances—More Psychology Than You Think
• Your Memory Is Better Than You Think
• How Eyewitnesses Can Be Misled
• Yes—Walking Through a Door Will Cause You to Forget
• The Method of Loci—One of the Most Powerful Memory Techniques
• Getting Workers to Be More Productive
• How You Can Improve Your Creative Ability
• Mental Sets Can Limit You Into One Way of Thinking
• Noticing a Face in the Crowd
• How to Think More Positively about Life
• How Psychiatric Labels Affect How We See People
• The Design of Everyday Things
• Beauty Is Apparently Not Just in the Eye of the Beholder
• How Roles Can Affect Us at a Deep Level
• When Trying Really Hard Makes No Difference
• How Anonymity Can Make Us Mean
• Why You Choose Your Romantic Partner Is Less Romantic Than You Think
• The Power of Conformity
• What Makes Us Truly Happy?
• Persuasion Tactics in a Restaurant
• Supernormal Stimuli
• Cognitive Dissonance: We See What We Want to See
• The Rorschach Inkblots
• How a Phone Conversation Is Different from In-Person
• Remembering What Never Happened
• How and When We Are Blind to Change
• Why Do You Remember Certain Things?
• How Physical Warmth Translates to Psychological Warmth
• Does Red Make You More Attractive?
• Our Bodies Influence Us More Than We Think
• When Trying to Look Good Looks Bad
• Brain Images and Persuasion
• Our Brains Love Curiosity
• How Your Behavior Is Shaped
• How Does Creativity Really Work?
• How Superstitions Really Work
• Where Discrimination Begins
• You’re Really Not Giving This Much Thought
• The Development of Moral Thinking
• How Children Think Differently As They Grow
• Persuading People by First Asking for the Impossible
• The Psychology of Humor
• A Better Way to Detect Lies
• Your Body Affects Your Thinking
• The Causes of Job Satisfaction
• A Psychological Booster Shot
• Perception Is More Than What We See
• Smartphones: Do They Hinder or Improve Our Life Experiences?
• Bibliography