sosial /psychology/sociology 2012

Famous experiments

Well known experiments and studies that have influenced social psychology include:

The Milgram Experiment: The experimenter (E) persuades the participant (T) to give what the participant believes are painful electric shocks to another participant (L), who is actually an actor. Many participants continued to give shocks despite pleas for mercy from the actor.

• The Asch conformity experiments from the 1950s, a series of studies that starkly demonstrated the power of conformity on people's estimation of the length of lines (Asch, 1955). On over a third of the trials, participants conformed to the majority, even though the majority judgment was clearly wrong. Seventy-five percent of the participants conformed at least once during the experiment.

• Muzafer Sherif's (1954) Robbers' Cave Experiment, which divided boys into two competing groups to explore how much hostility and aggression would emerge. Also known as realistic group conflict theory, because the intergroup conflict was induced through competition over resources.

• Leon Festinger's cognitive dissonance experiment, in which subjects were asked to perform a boring task. They were divided into 2 groups and given two different pay scales. At the end of the study, some participants were paid $1 to say that they enjoyed the task and another group of participants was paid $20 to say the same lie. The first group ($1) later reported liking the task better than the second group ($20). People justified the lie by changing their previously unfavorable attitudes about the task (Festinger & Carlsmith, 1959).

• The Milgram experiment, which studied how far people would go to obey an authority figure. Following the events of The Holocaust in World War II, the experiment showed that normal American citizens were capable of following orders to the point of causing extreme suffering in an innocent human being (Milgram, 1975).

• Albert Bandura's Bobo doll experiment, which demonstrated how aggression is learned by imitation (Bandura, et al., 1961). This was one of the first studies in a long line of research showing how exposure to media violence leads to aggressive behavior in the observers.

• The Stanford prison experiment, by Philip Zimbardo, where a simulated exercise between student prisoners and guards showed how far people would follow an adopted role. This was an important demonstration of the power of the immediate social situation, and its capacity to overwhelm normal personality traits (Haney, Banks, & Zimbardo, 1973).