Michael A Britt - Psych Experiments

Salivating dogs, confused cats, superstitious pigeons, insightful gorillas, aggressive children, fearful adultsthe 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 oldlike B. F. Skinners work with pigeonsdoesnt mean its old fashioned or wrong. Its still quite useful. And just because were using an MRI scan on our brains doesnt necessarily mean we understand what were looking at. We look back at Sigmund Freuds work and think about how silly some of it was. But a hundred years from now well look back at what were doing today and think the same thing.

In this book well take a look at some of the most famous and some of the lesser-known studies in the history of psychology. I think youll 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 well re-create in this book).

What if you showed up to assist an experimenter and he said that your job was to sit in a mens 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 were... 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.

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 peoples minds when they very strongly believe something like this and then the world doesnt 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 youll see in this book, cognitive dissonance is at work almost every day in your life.

Not many studies can claim to have been inspired by a Bible story, but John M. Darley and C. Daniel Batsons 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 wouldnt you know itparticipants 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 doesnt happen and what to do to get help when you need it.