Psychology is a very broad scientific movement and consists of many specializations. Each of these specializations has been strengthened over the years by research that proved or disproved theories and hypotheses. Thousands upon thousands of studies are completed each year in psychology, but there are a handful that have had a lasting impact.
Some of these were dutifully carried out, within the limits of ethical and practical guidelines. Others pushed the boundaries of the field and created controversies that continue to this day. And still others were not designed as psychological experiments at all but ended up as beacons for psychology.
This is a list of the 25 most influential psychological experiments still taught to psychology students today:
1 : Classical conditioning of dogs by Ivan Pavlov
Performed in the 1890s at the Military Medical Academy in St. Petersburg, Russia.
Pavlov’s experiment with dogs turned out to be one of the most crucial experiments in all of psychology. His findings on conditioning led to a whole new branch of psychological research.
Pavlov began with the simple idea that there are things a dog does not need to learn. Dogs do not need to learn to produce saliva when they see food. In behaviorist terms, this reflex is an unconditioned response (a stimulus-response connection that does not require learning).
Pavlov outlined that there are unconditioned responses in the animal by presenting a dog with a bowl of food and then measuring its salivary secretions. In the experiment, Pavlov used a bell as a neutral stimulus because it does not elicit an innate response. When he fed his dogs, he also rang the bell. After several repetitions of this procedure, he tried only the bell itself. What he discovered was that the bell by itself now caused an increase in saliva levels.
The dog had learned to associate the bell and food, and this learning created a new behavior; the dog drooled when it heard the bell. Because this response was learned, or conditioned, it is called a conditioned response. The neutral stimulus became a conditioned stimulus.
This theory came to be known as classical conditioning and was further developed by experimenter and psychologist John Watson. It involves learning to associate an unconditioned stimulus that already triggers a particular response (a reflex) with a new (conditioned) stimulus so that the new stimulus triggers the same response.
2 : the ‘little Albert’ experiment by John B. Watson and Rosalie Rayner
Conducted in 1920 at Johns Hopkins University
Little Albert’s experiment is considered one of the most unethical psychological experiments of all time. The experiment was conducted in 1920 by John Watson and Rosalie Rayner of Johns Hopkins University. The hypothesis was that they could condition a nine-month-old child to develop irrational fear.
The experiment began by leaving a white rat with the baby, who initially had no fear of the animal. Watson then produced a loud noise by hitting a steel rod with a hammer each time Albert saw the rat. After pairing the noise and the appearance of the white rat several times, the boy began to cry and showed signs of fear every time the rat appeared in the room.
Watson also created similar conditioned reflexes with other animals and objects, such as rabbits and Santa’s beard, until Albert was afraid of everything. This study proved that classical conditioning also works on humans.
One of the main implications of this finding is that adult anxiety may be related to early childhood experiences.
3 : the sample study of Wendell Johnson and Mary Tudor
Conducted in 1939 at the University of Iowa
The monster study was given this negative title because the psychological future of a group of orphans was sacrificed for a scientific experiment.
Wendell Johnson and Mary Tudor selected twenty-two orphans, some who stuttered and some who did not. Tudor formed two experimental groups and two control groups. About half of the children received speech therapy with positive feedback, praising them for their speaking skills. The other half received speech therapy with negative feedback, where they were punished for every mistake they made.
Some children who received speech therapy with negative feedback kept the psychological effects for life and suffered speech problems for the rest of their lives. They became a living example of how important positive feedback is in teaching methods.
Although the original purpose of the study was to examine positive and negative feedback in speech therapy, the violent results of this sample study have had major implications in how we deal with feedback in early childhood teaching methods.
4 : the conformational research of Dr. Solomon Asch
Performed in 1951 at Swarthmore College
Dr. Solomon Asch conducted a landmark study to assess how likely a person is to conform to a norm when there is peer pressure to do so.
A group of participants were shown pictures with lines of different lengths and then asked a simple question: Which line is the longest? The tricky part of this study was that in each group, only one person was a real participant. The others were actors with a script. Most of the actors were instructed to give the wrong answer. Oddly enough, the only real participant almost always agreed with the majority, even though they knew they gave the wrong answer.
The results of this research are important when we study the social interactions between individuals in groups. This study is a famous example of the temptation many of us feel to conform to a norm during group situations, and it shows that people often find it more important to be the same as others than to be right.
5 : the Robbers Cave Experiment by Muzafer Sherif
Conducted in 1954 at the University of Oklahoma
This experiment, which studied group conflict, is considered by most people to be far outside the lines of ethical research. The study was so driven by the researchers that it is questionable whether the results have any value. But the Robbers Cave Experiment has long been very influential in psychology.
University of Oklahoma researchers divided 22 11- and 12-year-old boys from similar backgrounds into two groups. The two groups were taken to separate areas of a summer camp facility in Robbers Cave where they could bond as social units.
Once the two groups were allowed contact, they showed signs of prejudice and hostility toward each other. To increase the conflict between the groups, the researchers had them compete with each other in a series of activities. This created even more hostility, and eventually the groups refused to eat in the same room.
In the final phase of the experiment, the rival groups became friends. The fun activities the researchers had planned, such as shooting firecrackers and watching movies, didn’t work at first, so they created teamwork exercises that forced the two groups to work together. Eventually, the children left for home together on the bus.
The Robbers Cave experiment is considered groundbreaking by social psychologists, and is still considered one of the best-known examples of realistic conflict theory.
The biggest problem with the theory is the degree of interference by the researchers with the experiment, and the fact that a precursor to the same experiment with a very different outcome was covered up.
6 : The Hawthorne Effect by Henry A. Landsberger
Performed in 1955 at Hawthorne Works in Chicago, Illinois.
The Hawthorne effect was examined in a 1955 study by Henry Landsberger. This effect assumes that human subjects in an experiment change their behavior because they are being studied.
Landsberger analyzed data from experiments conducted between 1924 and 1932 by Elton Mayo at the Hawthorne Works near Chicago. The company had commissioned studies to evaluate whether the level of light in a building changed the productivity of workers.
What Mayo discovered was that the level of light made no difference in productivity because workers increased their efficiency when the amount of light was switched from a low to a high level or vice versa.
The researchers noted a tendency for workers’ efficiency levels to increase each time a variable was manipulated. The study showed that efficiency changed because workers were aware that they were being supervised.
Interviews revealed that, according to the workers, the decisive factor that made them more efficient was a visible improvement in their social relationship. Without realizing it, it appeared that the researchers had improved the work atmosphere by having the workers participate in the experiment.
The Hawthorne Effect is one of the most difficult biases to investigate, eliminate or discount in experiments.
7: The magic number seven by George A. Miller
Conducted in 1956 at Princeton University.
The magic-number seven experiment, often referred to as “Miller’s Law,” assumes that the number of objects an average human can hold in working memory is 7 ± 2. This means is that the capacity of human memory usually contains sets of words or concepts ranging from 5-9.
The magic-number-seven experiment was published in 1956 by cognitive psychologist George A. Miller of Princeton University’s Department of Psychology in Psychological Review.
In the article, Miller discussed a confluence of the limits of one-dimensional absolute judgment and the limits of short-term memory. In a one-dimensional absolute-judgment task, a person is presented with a number of stimuli that vary on one dimension (such as 10 different tones that vary only in pitch) and responds to each stimulus with a corresponding response (previously learned).
Performance is nearly perfect up to five or six different stimuli, but decreases as the number of different stimuli increases. This means that a human’s maximum performance on one-dimensional absolute judgment can be described as an information repository with a maximum capacity of about 2- to 3-bits of information, with the ability to distinguish between four and eight alternatives.
This information about the limits of the capacity to process information became one of the most cited papers in psychology.
8 : Festinger and Carlsmith’s cognitive-dissonance experiment
Conducted in 1957 at Stanford University
Cognitive dissonance is the unpleasant tension you experience when contradicting beliefs, ideas or opinions or when acting contrary to your own. People strive to reduce dissonance therefore adjust their beliefs or behavior.
Cognitive dissonance was first investigated by Leon Festinger. He did an observational study of Marion Keech’s cult, which believed the earth would be destroyed by a flood before sunrise on Dec. 21.
The researchers expected that the failure of the prophecy to come true would cause a strong and painful sense of cognitive dissonance in the group. It would be difficult to completely let go of the ideas that had started it all. Marion Keech and the group were so deeply involved in the belief that they would put considerable effort into maintaining it.
The developments in the cult illustrate well how people can cope with cognitive dissonance. Festinger and his colleagues researched the group through observational participation and noted the following developments:
- Before Dec. 20. The group avoids publicity. Interviews are given only sparsely. Direct contact with Keech is reserved for those who can convince the group that they are true believers. The group develops a kind of belief system – fed by automatic messages from the planet Clarion – in which the details of the tidal wave, its reason and how the group will be saved are worked out.
- Dec. 20. The group expects an alien visitor to call them around midnight and take them to a ready spacecraft. As instructed, the group makes sure not to wear any metal objects. As midnight approaches, zippers, bras and other metallic garments are removed. Then they wait.
- 00:05, Dec. 21. No visitors. Someone in the group notes that on another clock it is still 23:55. The group agrees that it is not yet midnight.
- 00:10. The second clock also indicates midnight. Still no visitor comes. The group is dumbfounded. The tidal wave itself is no more than seven hours away from them.
- 04:00. The group sat silent for several hours in ultimate amazement. In vain, some attempts are made to give an acceptable explanation. Keech begins to cry.
- 04:45. Once again, Mrs. Keech receives an extraterrestrial message. The message reports that God has decided to spare the earth and not destroy it. The tidal wave will not happen. The small group, by watching all night, has spread so much light that God has spared the world.
- Afternoon, Dec. 21. Newspapers are called and the group wants to give interviews. In great contrast to its former shyness toward the press, the group begins an active campaign to spread its message across as wide an audience as possible.
From this observational study emerged an intriguing experiment conducted by Festinger and Carlsmith, in which participants were asked to perform a series of boring tasks, such as turning pins in a peg board for an hour. The participants’ initial attitude toward this task was very negative.
Then $1 or $20 was paid to tell a participant waiting in the lobby that the tasks were really interesting. Almost all participants agreed to walk into the waiting room and convince the next participant that the boring experiment would be fun.
When participants were later asked to evaluate the experiment, those who were paid only $1 to lie rated the tedious task as more enjoyable than those who were paid $20 to lie.
Paying only $1 is not enough incentive to lie, and so the participants who were paid $1 experienced cognitive dissonance. They could overcome that dissonance only by believing that the tasks were really interesting and enjoyable. A $20 payment is a good reason to lie and so there is no dissonance.
9 : Harry Harlow’s surrogate mother experiment
Conducted from 1957-1963 at the University of Wisconsin.
In a series of controversial experiments in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Harry Harlow studied the importance of a mother’s love for a child’s healthy development.
To do this, he separated rhesus macaques from their mothers a few hours after birth and had them raised by two “surrogate mothers.” One of the surrogate mothers was made of wire with a bottle for food; the other was made of soft terry cloth but had no food.
The researcher found that the baby monkeys spent much more time with the cloth mother than the wire mother. The monkeys who spent more time cuddling the soft surrogate mother also grew up healthier.
This experiment was the first to show that love and affection is a more important aspect of the parent-child relationship than meeting basic needs.
10 : the visual-cliff experiment of Eleanor Gibson and Richard Walk
Conducted in 1959 at Cornell University
In 1959, Eleanor Gibson and Richard Walk studied depth perception in infants. They wanted to know if depth perception is a learned behavior or if it is something we are born with.
Gibson and Walk studied 36 babies between the ages of six and 14 months, all of whom could crawl. The babies were placed one at a time on a visual cliff, an illusion of a sudden hole that is not there. The researchers placed a middle section between the shallow side and the deep side:
- Nine of the babies did not move away from the midsection.
- All 27 babies who did move were hanging to the o shallow side when their mothers called them from the shallow side.
- Three of the babies were crawling off the visual cliff toward their mother when they were called from the deep side.
- When they were called from the deep end, the other 24 children crawled to the shallow end or cried because they could not cross the visual cliff and reach their mother.
What this study helped to show is that depth perception is probably innate.
11 : the viewing room of Robert L. Fantz
Conducted in 1961 at the University of Illinois
Robert L. Fantz’s study is among the simplest but most important in the field of child development and vision. In 1961, when this experiment was conducted, there were very few ways to study what was going on in an infant’s head.
Fantz realized that the best way to figure out this puzzle was to simply watch babies’ actions and reactions. He understood the fundamental factor that when something matters people generally look at it.
To test this concept, Fantz set up a display board with two pictures. One picture showed a bulls eye and the other the outline of a human face. This board was hung in a room where a baby could lie down safely and see both pictures.
Fantz then looked through a hole from behind the board, invisible to the baby, to see what the baby was looking at. This study showed that a two-month-old baby looked at the human face twice as much as the bulls eye. This suggests that human babies have some degree of pattern and shape selection.
Prior to this experiment, babies were thought to live in a chaotic world in which they could not detect logic or patterns.
12 : Stanley Milgram Experiment
Conducted in 1961 at Stanford University
This 1961 study by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram was designed to measure people’s willingness to obey authority figures when instructed to perform actions contrary to their morals. The study was based on the premise that humans will naturally follow authority figures.
The participants were told they were participating in a study of memory. They were asked to watch another person take a memory test. They were instructed to press a button that gave an electric shock every time the person gave a wrong answer. The person taking the test was an actor who did not actually receive shocks but pretended they did.
The researchers asked the participants to keep increasing the voltage the shocks delivered, and most of them obeyed even though the person taking the memory test seemed to be in a lot of pain. Some ended up administering a voltage that would be equivalent to a lethal electric shock.
This experiment showed that people are conditioned to obey authority and will usually do so even if it goes against their natural morals or common sense.
13 : Dr. Alburt Bandura’s Bobo-Doll experiment
Conducted between 1961-1963 at Stanford University
In the early 1960s, a debate began about how genetics, environmental factors and social learning determine a child’s development, the nature-nurture debate. This debate continues to this day. Albert Bandura conducted the Bobo Doll Experiment to prove that human behavior is largely based on social imitation rather than inherited genetic factors.
In his landmark study, he split participants into three groups: one group was exposed to a video of an adult role model showing aggressive behavior toward a specific (Bobo) doll; another group was exposed to a video of an adult role model playing with the doll and the third group formed a control group and saw no video.
The children watched their assigned video and were then sent to a room with the same doll they had seen in the video. Children exposed to the aggressive model were more likely to show aggressive behavior toward the doll, while the other groups showed little aggressive behavior.
The number of derived physical aggressions exhibited by the boys in the aggressive-video group was 38.2 and the girls in that group was 12.7.
The study showed that boys showed more aggression when exposed to aggressive male role models than boys exposed to aggressive female role models. When exposed to aggressive male role models, the average number of aggressive cases by boys was 104 compared to 48.4 aggressive cases by boys exposed to aggressive female role models.
The results for the girls showed similar findings but were less drastic. When exposed to aggressive female role models, the average number of aggressive cases by girls was 57.7 compared to 36.3 aggressive cases by girls exposed to aggressive male role models.
The results with gender differences supported Bandura’s secondary prediction that children will be more strongly influenced by same-sex role models.
14 : emotion experiments by Stanley Schachter and Jerome E. Singer
Conducted in 1962 at Columbia University
In 1962, Schachter and Singer conducted a groundbreaking experiment to prove their theory of emotion.
In the study, a group of 184 male participants were injected with epinephrine, a hormone that causes arousal, including increased heart rate, trembling and rapid breathing.
Participants in the study were told they were being injected with a new drug to test their eyesight. The first group of participants were informed about the possible side effects of arousal that the injection might cause, while the second group of participants were not told.
The participants were then placed in a room with someone they thought was another participant, but who was actually participating in the experiment. The researcher acted in one of two ways: euphoric or angry.
Participants who were not informed of possible effects of the injection were more likely to feel happier or angrier than those who were informed.
What Schachter and Singer were trying to understand was how cognition or thoughts affect human emotion. Their research illustrates the importance of how people interpret their physiological state, which is an important part of one’s emotions.
Although their cognitive theory of emotional arousal dominated the field for two decades, the study has been criticized for two main reasons: the magnitude of the effect seen in the experiment was not that significant and other researchers had difficulty repeating the experiment.
15 : the Kitty Genovese Case of the New York Police Department
Performed in 1964 in New York City
The Kitty Genovese murder case was never intended to be a psychological experiment. It did get picked up that way, and that had serious implications for psychology and many other fields.
According to a New York Times article, nearly forty neighbors witnessed the 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese in Queens, New York, but not a single neighbor called the police for help.
Psychological explained this phenomenon as a bystander effect or bystander effect, which states that the more bystanders present in a social situation, the less likely it is that someone will intervene and help. This hypothesis has led to changes in medicine, psychology and many other areas of research.
It was later discovered that many of the New York Times facts were exaggerated. There were probably only a dozen witnesses and records show that the police were called by neighbors.
Additionally, research on camera footage of incidents from 2019 suggests that in real situations, the bystander effect does not exist: the more bystanders present, the more likely it is that someone will help.
16 : Martin Seligman’s learned helplessness experiment
Conducted in 1967 at the University of Pennsylvania
In 1965, Martin Seligman and his colleagues researched classical conditioning, the process by which an animal or human associates one event with another.
Seligman’s experiment involved ringing a bell and then administering a mild shock to a dog. After some conditioning, the dog reacted as soon as it heard the bell as if shocked.
In the course of this study, something unexpected happened. Each dog was placed in a large crate divided down the middle with a low fence. The dog could look over it and jump. The floor on one side of the fence was electrified, but not on the other side of the fence.
Seligman placed each dog on the electrified side and gave it a slight shock. He expected the dog to jump to the non-shocked side of the fence. In an unexpected twist, however, the dogs simply lay down.
The hypothesis was that if the dogs learned from the first part of the experiment that there was nothing they could do to avoid the shocks, they gave up in the second part of the experiment. To prove this hypothesis, the e-researchers brought in a new set of dogs. These dogs did jump the fence.
This condition has been described as learned helplessness, where a person or animal does not try to get out of a negative situation because the past has taught them that they are helpless.
17 : Jane Elliott’s class experiment
Performed in 1968 in an Iowa classroom
Jane Elliott’s famous experiment was inspired by the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the inspiring life he led. The third grade teacher developed an exercise to help her Caucasian students understand the effects of racism and prejudice.
Elliott divided her class into two separate groups: blue-eyed students and brown-eyed students. On the first day, she labeled the blue-eyed group as the superior group, and from then on they had extra privileges. The brown-eyed children represented the minority group. She discouraged the groups from interacting with each other and selected individual students to highlight the negative characteristics of the children in the minority group.
What this exercise showed was that the children’s behavior changed almost immediately. The blue-eyed group of students performed better academically and even began to bully their brown-eyed classmates. The brown-eyed group had less self-confidence and worse academic performance.
The next day, she reversed the roles of the two groups and the blue-eyed students became the minority group. At the end of the experiment, the children were so relieved that they embraced each other and agreed that people should not be judged by outward appearances. This exercise has since been repeated many times with similar results.
18 : Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment
Conducted in 1971 at Stanford University
One of the most unethically conducted but also most cited experiments in the field of psychology is the Stanford Prison Experiment in which psychology professor Philip Zimbardo sought to study the assumption of roles in a contrived situation.
The Stanford Prison Experiment was designed to study the behavior of “normal” individuals when assigned a role of prisoner or guard. Students were recruited to participate and assigned the role of “guard” or “prisoner.” Zimbardo himself played the role of the guard.
The basement of the psychology building was the setting for the prison, and great care was taken to make it look and feel as realistic as possible. The prison guards were assigned to run a prison for two weeks. They were told not to physically assault any of the inmates during the study.
After a few days, the prison guards became verbally very abusive to the inmates, and many of the inmates became submissive to those in authority. The experiment had to be terminated prematurely because some of the participants showed disturbing signs of mental deterioration, according to Zimbardo.
The experiment was conducted very unethically, with Zimbardo often directing the experiment and pushing people to do things. The effects of the experiment were also never reproduced in a follow-up experiment.
19 : the marshmallow test by Walter Mischel
Conducted in 1972 at Stanford University
Walter Mischel of Stanford University wanted to investigate whether deferred compensation could be an indicator of future success.
In his Marshmallow Experiment, children ages four to six were taken into a room where a marshmallow was placed on the table in front of them. Before leaving each of the children alone in the room, the researcher informed them that they would be given a second marshmallow if the first marshmallow was still on the table after it was returned within 15 minutes.
The researcher recorded how long each child resisted eating the marshmallow and looked to see if this correlated with the child’s success in adulthood. A small number of the 600 children ate the marshmallow immediately and a third delayed the reward long enough to receive the second marshmallow.
In follow-up studies, Mischel found that those who delayed reward were significantly more competent and received higher SAT scores than their peers, meaning that this trait is likely to stay with a person for life.
This study seems simplistic but the findings outline some of the fundamental differences in individual characteristics that can predict later success.
20 : the good-samaritan experiment of John Darley and Daniel Batson
Conducted in 1973 at Princeton Theological Seminary (the researchers were from Princeton University).
In 1973, an experiment was set up by John Darley and Daniel Batson to investigate the possible causes underlying altruistic behavior. The experiment’s researchers established three hypotheses they wanted to test:
- People who think about religion and higher principles would not be more inclined to exhibit helping behavior than others.
- People in a hurry would be much less likely to exhibit helping behavior.
- People who are religious for personal gain would be less inclined to help than people who are religious because they want to gain spiritual and personal insights into the meaning of life.
Religious education students were told to move from one building to another. Some students had been told not to rush and others were informed that speed was of the essence. Some students went on to give a speech about helping others.
Between the two buildings was an actor who had been injured and seemed to need help. If the student was not in a hurry, nearly two-thirds stopped to offer help. If the student was in a hurry, this dropped to one in ten.
People who set out to give a speech about helping others stopped almost twice as often as others, showing that the individual’s thoughts were a factor in determining helping behavior.
Religious beliefs did not seem to make much difference on the results; being religious for personal gain, or as part of a spiritual quest, did not seem to have much noticeable effect on the amount of helping behavior displayed.
21: The car crash experiment of Elizabeth Loftus and John Palmer
Conducted in 1974 at the University of California.
Loftus and Palmer set out to prove how deceptive memories can be. The 1974 Car Crash Experiment was designed to evaluate whether the way questions formulated could influence or change an eyewitness’s memory.
Participants watched slides of a car accident and were asked to describe what had happened, as if they were eyewitnesses to the scene. Participants were placed in two groups and each group was questioned using different wording such as: “how fast was the car driving at the time of the collision” versus “how fast was the car driving when it hit the other car.”
The researchers concluded that using different verbs affected the participants’ memories of the accident. This experiment shows that memory can be easily distorted. Information accumulated by the brain after the incident can merge with the original memory, causing memory misrecall or memory reconstruction.
Adding false details to the memory of an event is called confabulation. This concept has very important implications for the questions used in police interviews of eyewitnesses.
22 : the false-consensus effect of Lee Ross
Conducted in 1977 at Stanford University
In 1977, a professor of social psychology at Stanford University named Lee Ross conducted an experiment focusing on how people can falsely conclude that others think the same as they do. They create a “false consensus” about the beliefs and preferences of others. Ross conducted a study to outline how the “false consensus effect” functions in humans.
In the first part of the study, participants were asked to read about situations in which conflict occurred. They were then told two alternative ways to respond to the situation. They were asked to do three things:
- to guess which option other people would choose
- to say which option they themselves would choose
- describe the characteristics of the person who would likely choose the first option and the second option
The study found that most subjects believed that other people would do the same as themselves, regardless of which of the two answers they actually chose for themselves.
The second observation to come out of this important study is that when participants were asked to describe the characteristics of people likely to make the choice opposite of their own, they made vehement and sometimes negative predictions about the personalities of those who did not share their choice.
23 : The halo effect by Richard E. Nisbett and Timothy DeCamp Wilson
Study conducted in 1977 at the University of Michigan
The Halo Effect states that people tend to assign other positive attributes to persons of whom they have a positive impression. Thus, a distorted picture emerges. For example, people who are physically attractive are also thought to be more intelligent, friendly and have better judgment, or vice versa. Nisbett and Wilson’s experiment aimed to find an answer to the question of whether people are aware of the halo effect.
In the experiment, university students participated in the study and were asked to evaluate a psychology teacher by watching him in a video interview. Students were randomly assigned to one of two groups, and each group was shown one of two different interviews with the same teacher who was a French-speaking Belgian and speaks English with a rather distinctive accent.
In the first video, the teacher presented himself as someone sympathetic, respectful of his students’ intelligence and motives, flexible in his approach to teaching and enthusiastic about his subject. In the second interview, he presented himself as much less sympathetic. He was cold and distrustful of students and was quite rigid in his teaching style.
After watching the videos, students were asked to rate the professor’s physical appearance, mannerisms and accent. They rated the professor on an 8-point scale. They were then told that the researchers were interested in knowing the extent to which how much they liked the teacher influenced the rating. Instead, other subjects were asked how much the characteristics they just rated influenced how much they liked the teacher.
After answering the questionnaire, the respondents were puzzled by their responses to the videotapes and to the questionnaire items. The students had no idea why they gave the teacher a much higher rating in one case. They were convinced that their judgment was based on appearance and accent, and that their sympathy for the speaker was not a factor.
The results showed that the subjects were clearly unaware of the halo effect and the influence of their global evaluation on the individual ratings.
24 : the invisible gorilla by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris
Conducted in 1999 at Harvard University
In 1999, Simons and Chabris conducted their famous elective attention awareness test at Harvard University.
Participants in the study were asked to watch a video and count how many passes occurred between white team basketball players. The video moves at a moderate pace and tracking the passes is a relatively easy task.
What most people don’t notice amid their counting is that in the middle of the test, a man in a gorilla suit walks onto the track and stood in the middle before walking off the screen.
The study showed that the majority of the subjects did not notice the gorilla at all, proving that people often overestimate their ability to multitask effectively.
What the study seeks to prove is that when people are asked to attend to one task they focus so strongly on that element that they may miss other important details.
25 : the violinist at the subway by staff of the Washington Post
Performed in 2007 in a Washington D.C. Metro Station.
An interesting study was conducted by the Washington Post staff to test how observant people are about what is going on around them.
During the study, pedestrians walked past a musician playing at the entrance to the subway stop. It was Joshua Bell, who just two days before his play at the subway stop played for a sold-out theater in Boston where seats averaged $100.
He played one of the most complicated pieces ever written, on a violin worth $3.5 million. In the 45 minutes that the musician played his violin, only 6 people stopped and stayed for a while. About 20 people gave him money, but continued their normal pace. He collected $32.
The study and subsequent Washington Post article were part of a social experiment that looked at perceptions, tastes and people’s priorities. Gene Weingarten wrote about the Washington Post’s social experiment and later won a Pulitzer Prize for his story.
Some of the questions addressed in the article are: Do we see the beauty around us? Do we stop to appreciate it? Do we recognize the talent in an unexpected context? It turns out that many of us are not as observant of our surroundings as we might like to think.