Why do we do the things we do? Despite our best attempts to
"know thyself," the truth is that we often know astonishingly little
about our own minds, and even less about the way others think. As
Charles Dickens once put it, “A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that
every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and
mystery to every other.”
Psychologists have long sought insights into how we perceive the
world and what motivates our behavior, and they've made enormous strides
in lifting that veil of mystery. Aside from providing fodder for
stimulating cocktail-party conversations, some of the most famous
psychological experiments of the past century reveal universal and often
surprising truths about human nature.
Here are 10 classic psychological studies that may change the way you understand yourself.
We all have some capacity for evil.
Arguably the most famous experiment in the history of psychology, the
1971 Stanford prison study put a microscope on how social situations
can affect human behavior. The researchers, led by psychologist Philip
Zimbardo, set up a mock prison in the basement of the Stanford psych
building and selected 24 undergraduates (who had no criminal record and
were deemed psychologically healthy) to act as prisoners and guards.
Researchers then observed the prisoners (who had to stay in the cells 24
hours a day) and guards (who shared eight-hour shifts) using hidden
cameras.
The experiment, which was scheduled to last for two weeks, had to be
cut short after just six days due to the guards' abusive behavior -- in
some cases they even inflicted psychological torture -- and the extreme
emotional stress and anxiety exhibited by the prisoners.
"The guards escalated their aggression against the prisoners,
stripping them naked, putting bags over their heads, and then finally
had them engage in increasingly humiliating sexual activities,"
Zimbardo told American Scientist.
"After six days I had to end it because it was out of control -- I
couldn't really go to sleep at night without worrying what the guards
could do to the prisoners."
We don't notice what's right in front of us.
Think you know what's going on around you? You might not be nearly as
aware as you think. In 1998, researchers from Harvard and Kent State
University targeted pedestrians on a college campus to determine how
much people notice about their immediate environments. In
the experiment,
an actor came up to a pedestrian and asked for directions. While the
pedestrian was giving the directions, two men carrying a large wooden
door walked between the actor and the pedestrian, completely blocking
their view of each other for several seconds. During that time, the
actor was replaced by another actor, one of a different height and
build, and with a different outfit, haircut and voice. A full half of
the participants didn't notice the substitution.
The experiment was one of the first to illustrate the phenomenon of
"change blindness," which shows just how selective we are about what we
take in from any given visual scene -- and it seems that we rely on
memory and pattern-recognition significantly more than we might think.
Delaying gratification is hard -- but we're more successful when we do.
A famous Stanford experiment
from the late 1960s tested preschool children's ability to resist the
lure of instant gratification -- and it yielded some powerful insights
about willpower and self-discipline. In the experiment, four-year-olds
were put in a room by themselves with a marshmallow on a plate in front
of them, and told that they could either eat the treat now, or if they
waited until the researcher returned 15 minutes later, they could have
two marshmallows.
While most of the children said they'd wait, they often struggled to
resist and then gave in, eating the treat before the researcher
returned,
TIME reports.
The children who did manage to hold off for the full 15 minutes
generally used avoidance tactics, like turning away or covering their
eyes. The implications of the children's behavior were significant:
Those who were able to delay gratification were much less likely to be
obese, or to have
drug addiction or behavioral problems by the time they were teenagers, and were more successful later in life.
We can experience deeply conflicting moral impulses.
A famous 1961 study by Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram tested
(rather alarmingly) how far people would go to obey authority figures
when asked to harm others, and the intense internal conflict between
personal morals and the obligation to obey authority figures.
Milgram wanted to conduct the experiment to
provide insight into how Nazi war criminals
could have perpetuated unspeakable acts during the Holocaust. To do so,
he tested a pair of participants, one deemed the "teacher" and the
other deemed the "learner." The teacher was instructed to administer
electric shocks to the learner (who was supposedly sitting in another
room, but in reality was not being shocked) each time they got questions
wrong. Milgram instead played recordings which made it sound like the
learner was in pain, and if the "teacher" subject expressed a desire to
stop, the experimenter prodded him to go on. During the first
experiment, 65 percent of participants administered a painful, final
450-volt shock (labeled "XXX"), although many were visibly stressed and
uncomfortable about doing so.
While the study has commonly been seen as a warning of blind
obedience to authority, Scientific American recently revisited it,
arguing that the results were more suggestive of deep moral conflict.
"Human moral nature includes a propensity to be empathetic, kind and
good to our fellow kin and group members, plus an inclination to be
xenophobic, cruel and evil to tribal others,"
journalist Michael Shermer wrote. "The shock experiments reveal not blind obedience but conflicting moral tendencies that lie deep within."
Recently, some commenters have called Milgram's methodology into
question, and one critic noted that records of the experiment performed
at Yale suggested that
60 percent of participants actually disobeyed orders to administer the highest-dosage shock.
We're easily corrupted by power.
There's a psychological reason behind the fact that those in power
sometimes act towards others with a sense of entitlement and disrespect.
A
2003 study
published in the journal Psychological Review put students into groups
of three to write a short paper together. Two students were instructed
to write the paper, while the other was told to evaluate the paper and
determine how much each student would be paid. In the middle of their
work, a researcher brought in a plate of five cookies. Although
generally the last cookie was never eaten, the "boss" almost always ate
the fourth cookie -- and ate it sloppily, mouth open.
"When researchers give people power in scientific experiments, they
are more likely to physically touch others in potentially inappropriate
ways, to flirt in more direct fashion, to make risky choices and
gambles, to make first offers in negotiations, to speak their mind, and
to eat cookies like the Cookie Monster, with crumbs all over their chins
and chests,"
psychologist Dacher Keltner, one of the study's leaders, wrote in an article for UC Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center.
We seek out loyalty to social groups and are easily drawn to intergroup conflict.
This classic
1950s social psychology experiment
shined a light on the possible psychological basis of why social groups
and countries find themselves embroiled in conflict with one another --
and how they can learn to cooperate again.
Study leader Muzafer Sherif took two groups of 11 boys (all age 11)
to Robbers Cave State Park in Oklahoma for "summer camp." The groups
(named the "Eagles" and the "Rattlers") spent a week apart, having fun
together and bonding, with no knowledge of the existence of the other
group. When the two groups finally integrated, the boys started calling
each other names, and when they started competing in various games, more
conflict ensued and eventually the groups refused to eat together. In
the next phase of the research, Sherif
designed experiments
to try to reconcile the boys by having them enjoy leisure activities
together (which was unsuccessful) and then having them solve a problem
together, which finally began to ease the conflict.
We only need one thing to be happy.
The 75-year Harvard Grant study --one of the most comprehensive
longitudinal studies ever conducted -- followed 268 male Harvard
undergraduates from the classes of 1938-1940 (now well into their 90s)
for 75 years, regularly collecting data on various aspects of their
lives. The universal conclusion? Love really
is all that matters, at least when it comes to determining long-term happiness and life satisfaction.
The study's longtime director, psychiatrist George Vaillant,
told The Huffington Post
that there are two pillars of happiness: "One is love. The other is
finding a way of coping with life that does not push love away." For
example, one participant began the study with the lowest rating for
future stability of all the subjects and he had previously attempted
suicide. But at the end of his life, he was one of the happiest. Why? As
Vaillant explains, “He spent his life searching for love.”
We thrive when we have strong self-esteem and social status.
Achieving fame and success isn't just an ego boost -- it could also
be a key to longevity, according to the notorious Oscar winners study.
Researchers from Toronto's Sunnybrook and Women's College Health
Sciences Centre found that Academy Award-winning actors and directors
tend to live longer than those who were nominated but lost, with winning actors and actresses outliving their losing peers by nearly four years.
"We are not saying that you will live longer if you win an Academy Award,"
Donald Redelmeier, the lead author of the study, told ABC News.
"Or that people should go out and take acting courses. Our main
conclusion is simply that social factors are important ... It suggests
that an internal sense of self-esteem is an important aspect to health
and health care."
We constantly try to justify our experiences so that they make sense to us.
Anyone who's taken a freshman Psych 101 class is familiar with
cognitive dissonance, a theory which dictates that human beings have a
natural propensity to avoid psychological conflict based on
disharmonious or mutually exclusive beliefs. In an often-cited
1959 experiment,
psychologist Leon Festinger asked participants to perform a series of
dull tasks, like turning pegs in a wooden knob, for an hour. They were
then paid either $1 or $20 to tell a "waiting participant" (aka a
researcher) that the task was very interesting. Those who were paid $1
to lie rated the tasks as more enjoyable than those who were paid $20.
Their conclusion? Those who were paid more felt that they had sufficient
justification for having performed the rote task for an hour, but those
who were only paid $1 felt the need to justify the time spent (and
reduce the level of dissonance between their beliefs and their behavior)
by saying that the activity was fun. In other words, we commonly tell
ourselves lies to make the world appear a more logical, harmonious
place.
We buy into stereotypes in a big way.
Stereotyping various groups of people based on social group,
ethnicity or class is something nearly all of us do, even if we make an
effort not to -- and it can lead us to draw unfair and potentially
damaging conclusions about entire populations. NYU psychologist John
Bargh's experiments on
"automaticity of social behavior"
revealed that we often judge people based on unconscious stereotypes --
and we can't help but act on them. We also tend to buy into stereotypes
for social groups that we see ourselves being a part of. In one study,
Bargh found that a group of participants who were asked to unscramble
words related to old age -- "Florida," "helpless" and "wrinkled" --
walked significantly slower down the hallway after the experiment than
the group who unscrambled words unrelated to age. Bargh repeated the
findings in two other comparable studies that enforced stereotypes based
on race and politeness.
"Stereotypes are categories that have gone too far,"
Bargh told Psychology Today.
"When we use stereotypes, we take in the gender, the age, the color of
the skin of the person before us, and our minds respond with messages
that say hostile, stupid, slow, weak. Those qualities aren't out there
in the environment. They don't reflect reality."
