In 1961, Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University, conducted an experiment to test the conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscience. Milgram’s goal was to examine justifications for acts of genocide during World War II and whether obedience to superiors played a role in allowing people to act against their morals.

In this experiment, 40 participants were selected to participate in an “experiment on memory and learning”. Each participant was paired with an actor who was pretending to be another participant in the experiment. There was also an “experimenter” actor dressed in a lab coat who was the authoritative figure. A rigged drawing determined that the real participant would be the “teacher” and the actor would be the “learner”.

The teacher and learner were taken into an adjacent room by the experimenter and the learner was strapped to a chair with electrodes that appeared to connect back to an electroshock generator in the other room. The teacher and learner were then separated so they could still communicate, but not see one another. The teacher was then instructed to ask the learner multiple-choice questions and the learner would press a button to indicate their response. If the answer was incorrect, then the teacher would administer a shock increasing in 15-volt increments for each wrong answer. The maximum shock possible would be after 30 incorrect answers at 450 volts which was labeled “Danger: Severe Shock”.

The learner actor was never actually harmed. With each increasing shock level, a pre-recorded sound would be played with increasing pain level. The learner would also make additional protests or bang on the wall. When the highest voltages were reached, the learner would make no noise. If a participant asked to stop the experiment, the experimenter had a list of authoritative statements that they would say to keep the teacher going.

Milgram found that 65% of participants continued to the highest voltage level of 450 volts and every participant continued to at least 300 volts. However, every participant paused to question the experiment at least once and were uncomfortable continuing.

This study showed that ordinary people are likely to follow orders given to them by authority, even to the extent of killing an innocent person. Personally, I have always been skeptical of those in authority. When voting, I feel the need to be aware of the influence a candidate could potentially have over their constituents, such as myself, and I try to choose a candidate with good character and morals that align with my own. I believe this study shows the importance of aspects of democracy such as voting, checks and balances, and the balance of power between branches of government. With authority divided into many different sections and layers, it eliminates the ability for a dishonest or immoral official to have enough influence to have their constituents act against their morals. As shown in the study, people will obey authority. So, as Americans, we are lucky to have a democracy that prevents overwhelming influence from one particular branch or person.

In 2007, Gene Weingarten of the Washington Post conducted a study to test human priorities and how observant people are of what is going on around them. This study posed these several questions: Where, how, and when do we perceive beauty? What prompts us to stop to appreciate it? Do we recognize talent in an unexpected context?

In the experiment, premier violinist and Grammy-winning musician, Joshua Bell, using his violin worth $3.5 million, played six of the most intricate pieces ever written for violin in the Washington D.C. metro station. Two days prior he had sold out a theater in Boston where a seat on average cost $100. However, in the 45 minutes Bell played his violin, one thousand people came within close proximity of him with only seven stopping to listen. Twenty of the one thousand tossed a total of $32 in the violin case at his feet. This means 99.4% of those passing by did not stop to appreciate the incredible talent present.

Obviously, several factors impacted these results. Many people using the subway are on a schedule with places to be, and thus do not have the time to stop and listen. Also, the people passing through probably just associated Bell with the hundreds of other street performers they have heard in their lifetime and tuned him out. The greatest factor, however, was most likely the fact that many of those passing by may not like or appreciate classical music, even if it is played well. However, the number of people that stopped was extremely low; much less than Weingarten had predicted.

After the experiment, Weingarten noted that “If we do not have a moment to stop and listen to one of the best musicians in the world playing the best music ever written, how many other things are we missing?” This is a powerful question and I think it summarizes the entire motive of this experiment. Today, human beings are living such complex and busy lives that we often forget to appreciate the beauty of everyday life and the amazing things happening around us all the time. I tried to put myself into the shoes of those passing by in this experiment. Would I have stopped? Although it disappoints me, the answer is definitely not. I am constantly keeping myself busy and I fail to notice the intricate beauty of my environment and the talents of the people I surround myself with. Many of us are living our lives this way and I believe that learning to be more perceptive and appreciative of everyday beauty would greatly improve human wellness.

In 1936, Dr. Wendell Johnson from the University of Iowa wanted to find out if stuttering was the result of biology or if it was a learned behavior. The Monster Study did not get its name because it involves actual monsters, but because of the unethical methods used in the experiment.

Twenty-two orphans were selected to participate in the study. Some of the orphans had stutters and some did not. All the participants were split up into two groups containing both orphans that stuttered and did not stutter. One group was labeled as the ‘normal speakers’ and the other group got labeled as the ‘stutterers’.

The orphans from each group were then brought in every few weeks for a five-month period and were evaluated on how they spoke. The ‘normal speakers’ were given positive speech therapy and were praised for their ability to speak well, even if they actually had a problem speaking. The ‘stutterers’ were given negative speech therapy and were told they spoke poorly and that they should never speak unless they can do it right.

Although the study was created with good intentions, the results showed the danger of its methods. The orphans that were in the ‘normal speakers’ group saw minimal improvement in their speech. The orphans in the ‘stutterers’ group had much worse results. Six of the orphans in the ‘stutterers’ group did not actually have a stutter, and of the six, five of them developed speech problems and became withdrawn or stopped speaking completely. The youngest of these six orphans was only 5 years old. The orphans in the ‘stutterers’ group also started to do worse in school.

Due to the unresolved psychological trauma caused to the ‘stutterers’ group, the results were never published and the orphan participants did not know they were a part of the experiment until sixty years after it occurred.

This study is extremely unsettling, and the fact that some participants developed lifelong negative effects is upsetting. The results, however, showed important implications not just in speech therapy, but in all methods of education, especially for younger children. Positive reinforcement in education, although showing little effect in this experiment, is important for the growth and well-being of children. I was lucky enough to grow up being taught by kind-hearted and passionate educators. This study shows the severe impact that a negative instructor can have on a student’s mental and physical health and proves how important educators are in our society.

In 1973, researchers from Princeton University created an experiment to investigate factors that inhibit selflessness and altruistic behavior. The factors they wanted to test were the relative haste of a person and how distracted their minds were on other things such as religious and spiritual matters.

So, seminary students were recruited and were told they were to be part of a study on religious education. The participants completed a personality questionnaire about their religion and then began fake experimental procedures. The fake experiments initially took place in one building, and after some time the participant was asked to go to another building for the second part of the experiment. On their way to the next building, there would be an actor who would pose as an injured victim in an alleyway. Before leaving, different participants were told different amounts of urgency for their walk, and participants were also told different tasks they would be doing when they arrived at the next building.

One of these tasks was to prepare a talk about seminary jobs and the other was to prepare a talk about the story of the Good Samaritan. Surprisingly, the task assigned to the participant did not show any effect on helping behavior. However, the amount of urgency told to the participant had a major effect on helping behavior. Also, there was no correlation between the participant’s religious beliefs and helping behavior.

The researchers concluded that thinking about certain “norms” does not imply that a person will act on them. The participant’s conflict between meeting the needs of the victim and the needs of the experimenters is what influenced their decision on whether to help or not.

I found this study particularly interesting because of my fascination with religion and its influence on human behavior. This study may seem to disprove the connection between religious affiliations and ethics, but I see these results more as showing the humanity in even the most devout person. I can confidently state that being religious does not inherently make a person good. However, I would argue that it has a substantial impact on a person’s recognition of certain ethics and on their life outlook.

Church is, from my perspective, a devotion of time every week to reaffirm a commitment to the good that we as humans strive to bring to the world. It carves an hour out of our busy lives to think about and give us a reason to be a good person. Through the past several decades, people have grown more cynical towards religion and towards the idea of attending church (for good reasons too). However, because of this, we have lost the ethical center of our communities that was present all the way through the 20^th century.

We all are easily distracted by the rush of life; this study has made that clear. I am by no means saying that people should feel obligated to attend church. However, I do believe that setting aside time every week to contemplate the idea of a higher purpose in life is essential to shaping our communities for the better.

In 1977, Lee Ross, a social psychology professor at Stanford University, conducted an experiment that focused on how humans can incorrectly conclude that others think the same way they do. Thus, they form a ‘false consensus’ between their own beliefs and the beliefs and preferences of others.

To test this theory, Ross set up an experiment involving 320 of Stanford’s undergraduates and divided them into 4 groups of 80. Each group was told a brief story that had a clear behavioral choice such as whether to let a TV company use footage of you for their commercial or whether a large sum of money should be allocated to a space program. Participants were then required to fill out a questionnaire asking them which option they would choose, to guess which option other people would choose, and to describe the attributes of the people choosing either option.

Ross found that the participants, regardless of which option they would choose, would think that the majority of other people would choose the same as them. Also, when asked to describe the attributes of the people who chose the option opposite of their own, participants often made bold and sometimes negative predictions about their opposer’s personalities. This led Ross to discover the false consensus effect where individuals think that other people share their beliefs when they often do not.

The false consensus effect proves that people judge how others make their decisions based on how they themselves would make their own. It also shows that people may look down upon those that oppose their opinions. This could have serious implications when it comes to representative decision-making. In America, we are a representative democracy, so citizens do not do the decision-making, those that we elect do. Thus, a psychological barrier is imposed between the elected official and their constituents. Elected officials are human too, and although they are expected to vote on behalf of the wants/needs of their constituents, a false consensus could factor into their choice in voting on policy.

My ‘This I Believe’ podcast focused on the importance of listening to others, and this experiment ties in well with that theme. From a psychological standpoint, if we are not explicitly told another person’s belief, we are likely to subconsciously assume that their beliefs match our own. This can be damaging for relationships that lack communication. If we are willing to listen and understand the viewpoints of others, we can eliminate the influence of the false consensus effect. However, people simply do not have the time to listen to every other person, so it is important to keep in mind the presence of the false consensus effect and to assume that your opinion cannot speak for others.

In 1954, researchers at the University of Oklahoma were experimenting on intergroup conflict and co-operation. They selected twenty-two twelve-year-old boys and split them randomly into two groups of eleven. The two groups were balanced based on physical, mental, and social ability. Neither group knew that the other group existed. The individual groups were picked up by a bus and transported to a Boys Scouts camp in Robbers Cave State Park. The researchers went along as camp counselors.

Once at the camp, the groups were kept separate and went through team-building exercises to form social norms, leadership, and group structure. Each team chose their team name and were encouraged to bond in pursuit of cooperative discussion and action.

After five days of team bonding, the two groups were introduced to one another and put against one another in competitive games and challenges. The games were purposely chosen to frustrate the teams and the winners were given prizes. After five days of this, the teams became so aggressive towards one another that the researchers had to separate them. The researchers proceeded to individually ask the boys questions about the two teams. The boys’ answers tended to talk highly of their own team and lowly of the opposing team, clearly showing that conflict can cause prejudice and discrimination.

For the remaining six days, the researchers attempted to lessen the tension between the two groups. Fun activities such as watching movies and setting off firecrackers did not bring the two teams together like the researchers had hoped. So, the researchers made teamwork exercises where the two teams were forced to collaborate. After several problem-solving activities with superordinate goals, there was much less intergroup conflict. The researchers concluded that through cooperation, conflict and prejudice can be overcome.

The results of this experiment and their application to the real world could be criticized due to the lack of diversity in the participants (all white middle-class boys). However, I still feel that many of us have seen similar effects of conflict in our everyday lives. For example, the first thing that comes to my mind is the drastic political divide of our nation. Sometimes when we deliberate and take sides on political issues, we fail to see it as a collaborative task where the end goal is to make the world better. People often make harsh judgments towards people of the opposite political party and tend to see their ideas as superior. However, if we eliminate the competitiveness and divide caused by ideological differences, we can see that everyone just wants what is best for the nation. Cooperation between political parties could possibly lessen political tension and in turn, allow for more effective decision-making.

In 1965, Martin Seligman was conducting an experiment to study the relationship between fear and learning in dogs. This experiment was divided into two parts.

In the first part, Seligman would ring a bell before administering a small shock to a dog. This was repeated several times until the dog learned to associate the bell with the shocking sensation. Eventually, the dog would show fear-related behavior when the bell rang, which indicated its acknowledgment of the association between the shock and bell tone.

In the second part of the experiment, the dogs that were conditioned in the first part to feel fear at the ring of a bell were placed in a crate with two compartments. The side of the crate the dogs were placed on had an electrified floor and the other side did not. The two compartments in the crate were divided by a low fence, which the dog could see and jump over easily. Seligman administered a shock from the floor and expected the dogs to jump to the other side. However, the conditioned dogs would simply sit down and accept the shocks from the floor. Non-conditioned dogs, who were not a part of the prior experiment, were then put into the crate, administered the same shock, and instead would immediately jump to the other side.

Seligman concluded that the conditioned dog had learned that trying to escape the shocks was futile, and thus would not try to escape it even in the new environment of the second experiment. He described this condition as learned helplessness and used it as a model for his future research in explaining depression.

Throughout my life, I have met many individuals who struggle with varying levels of depression and mental health issues, including members of my immediate family. I am so happy that mental health is becoming less and less of a taboo subject, however, it saddens me when I recognize the number of people that suffer from these mental health issues. Studies, such as this one done by Martin Seligman, show how easily someone can become accustomed to psychological damage and degradation. The conditioned dogs had an easy escape from the shocks directly in front of them, but they felt so helpless after several previous shocks that they accepted their state instead of reaching safety. This is directly applicable to humans struggling with depression who are unable to find an escape.

Hearing a loved one say that they are worthless and do not want to be alive is heart-wrenching, especially when you are able to see the incredible life ahead of them and they cannot seem to see or feel past their current emotional state. Although Seligman’s experiment may not be morally acceptable today (I mean no one wants a cute dog getting shocked), I hope that there is a push for breakthrough psychological research in the field of mental health. Increasing knowledge about diagnosis and treatment of mental health issues will lead to growth in acceptance and societal change that benefits those who struggle with their mental health.

Western Electric’s Hawthorne Works

In the 1920s and 1930s, a series of experiments were conducted at an electric company by the name of Western Electric’s Hawthorne Works in Hawthorne, Illinois. Research was commissioned by the electric company to determine whether there was a connection between the work environment and worker productivity. Researchers analyzed how altered lighting, the timing of breaks, and the length of the workday affected employee productivity.

The primary experiment that focused on the lighting of the work facility sought to determine whether increasing or decreasing the amount of light affected the productivity of workers during their shifts. The results showed that any change in lighting increased productivity during the experiment, but the productivity returned to normal after the experiment.

The additional experiments which studied the timing of breaks and the length of the workday found similar results. Any change to the environment led to an increase in productivity while the experiment took place.

The data from the Hawthorne experiment was more closely analyzed in 1955 by researcher Henry Landsberger. Landsberger concluded that the workers increased their productivity due to the increased attention from their supervisors. It was not the change in the environment that impacted productivity, the company output changed simply because employees were aware that they were under observation.

Landsberger described the results of his studies as the Hawthorne effect, a term that has remained in use in modern psychology for describing psychological factors that affect how people behave in an experiment. Some researchers in the twenty-first-century claim that original results of the Hawthorne experiment may have been overstated, however many other current researchers have concluded that research participation effects do exist.

I believe that understanding the Hawthorne effect and Hawthorne experiment is essential for minimizing bias not only in psychology, but in business, economics, and other fields that may design experiments to analyze people’s behavior. As shown in the case of the original experiment, the Hawthorne effect is particularly important in industrial and organizational psychology. When people are observed, they may know what the “researcher” is looking to find and thus either seek to help confirm or deny the researcher’s hypothesis.

I also believe that the Hawthorne effect proves that when a person is given attention or special treatment, even in the case of a study, they feel valued and thus an additional pressure to excel in their productivity. This is applicable to all of our everyday lives. If we give a friend or peer attention, they will most likely be more engaged with us and sacrifice more of their energy to us.

In 1974, psychologist Elizabeth Loftus was interested in studying whether misleading information can modify, change, or supplement an eyewitness’s memory. Loftus conducted two experiments in order to test this theory.

In her first experiment, forty-five students were selected to partake in the experiment. Each participant was shown seven short videos of a traffic accident, presented in random order. After watching these videos, different participants were asked a similar question but with one word serving as the independent variable. The question asked was “About how fast were the cars going when they (contacted, hit, bumped, collided, smashed) each other?”.

This initial experiment found that the verb used affected the participant’s response in estimating the speed.

Those that were asked the question using the verb “contacted” reported the lowest speed estimate on average and those asked using the verb “smashed” reported the highest speed estimate on average. These results suggested that an eyewitness’s memory could be biased based on the wording of the question asked. However, Loftus still could not claim that the wording changed a participant’s perception and memory of an event.

So, a second experiment was conducted with 150 students. Each participant was shown a short film of a traffic accident. Participants were then asked a question in the same manner as the previous experiment about the speed of the cars during collision using different verbs. They then could leave and received a follow-up questionnaire one week following their initial questioning. Within the questionnaire, was a question asking the participant whether they recall seeing broken glass in the film (there was no broken glass in the film).

Those that were asked the question with the verb “smashed” were more likely to remember seeing broken glass in comparison with those asked using the verb “hit”. Loftus concluded that memory could be distorted by the wording of the question and misleading information.

Although the results of this study are fascinating and have important implications in scenarios such as police interviews of eyewitnesses, there are a lot of problems with the way this study was conducted which make its validity questionable. First, all the participants were students and were taken as an opportunity sample. In other words, the participants did not accurately represent the general population. Students are often less experienced drivers and thus could have been more susceptible to the misleading verb usage in comparison with an experienced driver. Secondly, the participants were shown videos of the accidents and therefore did not have the emotional impact of witnessing the accident in real life.

It is still interesting to see the way our brains are so interconnected, in this case between language and our memory. I think it is beneficial to recognize that the stories we are told and the memories we create can often be incomplete or altered by outside factors. Although based on the weaknesses of this experiment, maybe you’d rather believe that misleading information may have a greater influence in the lab rather than the real world.

In 1951, Dr. Solomon Asch, a professor at Swarthmore College, sought to evaluate how social pressure would influence a person to conform with a majority group. Each participant of the experiment was brought in amongst seven actors and was told they were there for a “vision test”. The group of eight were then showed pictures of lines of various lengths and were asked which line matched the standard line (a choice that was obvious).

The actors were told to confidently give the wrong answer and then the real participant would be the last one asked to respond. Surprisingly, about 32% of all participant’s answers would conform with the actor’s wrong answer and 75% of participants conformed at least once. Although this study had a biased sample of only white college men, its results still have validity. We all have felt the effects of peer pressure at some point in our life, and this experiment makes it evident how easy it is to submit to this pressure.

After reading this study, a long-forgotten memory of mine sparked back into my head. When I was in third grade, I was taking a standardized test which I believe was relatively important. Sitting at the desk across from mine was my best friend at the time who was also taking the test. The test was maybe an hour in length, and I was overwhelming confident in my answers and stood up to turn in my test. As I stood up, whether it was intentional or unintentional, I glanced at my best friend who was still hard at work on the last page. I happened to see his answer at the top of the page, which did not match the answer choice I had circled. I immediately sat down trying my best to not look suspicious. I reread the question which asked for the width of a door. I had circled 3 feet, but my friend had circled 3 meters. I sat there, staring at the classroom door for several minutes, completely puzzled. While I thought, my friend, as well as almost all the other students, were turning in their tests. Panic rushed through me, I changed my answer, and I turned it in. Guilt flowed through me like I had never experienced before, and the only thing keeping me from breaking was the fact that maybe my answer would be correct now.

I went home that afternoon and started tossing a baseball in my backyard with my father. I tried my best to casually bring up the question in our conversation. “Obviously 3 feet, why do you ask?” he said. After I heard those words, I took off for my room where a sobbed for several minutes. It taught me a hard (well, hard for a third grader), but valuable lesson.

The Asch Conformity study allowed me to understand the psychological stress affecting my young brain in this memory. The relevance of this study is apparent in most of our lives, no matter how old we are. It can be hard to trust ourselves instead of the majority or our friends. Whether it be our ideas on politics, religion, our favorite food, you name it, we should remind ourselves that those ideas are valid.