Psychology-Careers.org5 of the Most Famous and Controversial Psychology Experiments
Psychologists have had a major impact on the way we understand our behavior. It is through rigorous research and experimenting that they gather the information to help us better understand the underlying processes that effect the way we act.
Below we have posted brief descriptions and links to some of the most famous, and often controversial, psychology experiments for you to look over. We hope they will give you some idea of how the work of psychologists in the past has had an impact on the way we think about ourselves today.
Stanford Prison Experiment
One of the most famous psychology experiments was conducted at Stanford University in 1971. Led by psychology professor, Phillip Zimbardo, the experiment was designed to study the psychological effects of becoming either a prisoner or a prison guard through role playing. The reason this experiment is widely known is the extent to which the subjects embodied their roles and the extremes they went to carry them out, including Zimbardo himself.
Milgram’s Experiment on Obedience to Authority
This experiment conducted at Yale University studied an individual’s willingness to challenge the abuse of power. The subjects played the role of a teacher and were directed to deliver increasingly more dangerous electric shocks to a student when a question was incorrectly answered. Although the shocks were not real and the student was savvy to the experiment, the high percentage of subjects who continued to increase the voltage without resistance brought notoriety and controversy to the experiment.
Asch Conformity Experiments
These experiments that studied conformity in groups were designed and executed by Solomon Asch in the early 1950s. The subject was put into a group that was entirely made up of confederates of the experiment and then asked to compare the lengths of lines. The confederates would all give bogus answers and only 29% of the real subjects would refuse to except the false majority. The results of these experiments have come to be known as the Asch Paradigm.
The Bobo Doll Experiment
Albert Bandura performed this experiment about learned aggression in the early 1960s. Children were shown an actor attacking a clown either in a live performance, a video, or a cartoon. The children responded by attacking a toy clown according to which version they had seen. The most aggressive were the ones who had seen the live version, while those who saw the video slightly less and so on. These experiments gave rise to a more serious questioning of the effects of violent media on children.
Rosenhan Experiment
In 1973, psychologist David Rosenhan conducted an experiment to test the validity of psychiatry. Rosenhan had eight graduates students fake mental illness and commit themselves to hospitals. All were accepted into hospitals across the United States and diagnosed with varying degrees of schizophrenia. In his findings he criticized the ability of psychiatrists to diagnosis patients as well as their dehumanizing treatment of patients.