When you talk about psychology, you quickly think of a therapist, a sofa and a depressed-looking patient lying at length talking about his problems. An image that was once created by Sigmund Freud, but which is certainly not always the case. In addition to clinical psychologists, who indeed talk to people (although not necessarily with sofas), there are also psychologists who conduct experiments and observe people’s behavior. There are a number of studies that always stand out when talking about psychological experiments. These experiments were bizarre, ahead of their time, or had striking results that caused a stir.
Stanford Prison experiment
In the 1970s, Philip Zimbardo was curious about why people behaved rudely. In his opinion, this kind of behavior was rooted in the personality of certain people, so that not everyone would be capable of it . He designed a kind of prison scenario in the basements of Stanford University and asked a group of healthy, normal men to participate. He divided this group into two subgroups: guards and prisoners. The experiment would take two weeks.
To everyone’s surprise, the experiment had to be stopped after just six days. The men in the study appeared to be completely absorbed in their role as guard or prisoner. The guards, wearing reflective sunglasses and carrying batons to keep the prisoners in line, unceremoniously used their position of power and abused the prisoners (psychologically), for example by having the prisoners repeat the assigned identification numbers so that they could not carry more than were their number. And, contrary to expectations, the prisoners meekly endured this treatment.
Even Zimbardo realized how carried away he was by the role he had assumed as the head of the prison; he initially simply allowed the (mental) abuse to continue. According to him, this just showed how powerfully influential role-taking is, and how important the role of a situation is (contrary to the expectation that it was dependent on personality).
Milgram experiment
Not only the situation, but also the presence of an authority is of great importance in whether or not certain behavior is performed. This was evident from a study conducted by Stanley Milgram. He had test subjects come to a laboratory, where they, together with another person (who participated in the experiment), were picked up from a waiting room and then seated behind a device with a large number of buttons. The other person was placed in an adjacent room.
The intention was that the subject would listen to the other person, who had to name a number of words from a rehearsed list. When the other person made a mistake, the subject had to give him a shock via the device. For each subsequent error, a heavier shock was administered, eventually reaching 450 volts. All this for the benefit of learning through punishment. It was examined how far a test subject would go in this regard.
Unexpectedly, but certainly shockingly, 65% of the test subjects turned out to go as far as 450 Volts, which would mean a fatal shock. They did not do this without inconvenience, but nevertheless they turned the switch. The presence of an authority, the research in his lab coat, was enough to go as far as the last button.