Psychology Experiments With Fascinating Results

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mattstaff
Apr 18, 2020 7:00 PM EDT

This weird and educational AskReddit thread has folks sharing various psychology experiments that turned up interesting results. A whole lot of these results just illustrate a larger picture that our brains are these strange instruments that are doing the best they can, in a reality they're taking their best guesses at. Some studies are more unsettling than others, so proceed at your own risk. 

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  • 01
    Text - ehbacon23 • 1y I'm late but nobody has said it yet. The self-fulfilling prophecy studies are very important to social psychology and their findings have many real world applications. Basically they brought together a group of kids and formed a class with a real teacher. They gave the kids a test for overall academic skill at the start of the course, but didnt really use the scores. Instead they told the teachers that a few students, picked at random, were very brilliant and scores very hi
    via u/nahhhgeorge
  • 02
    Text - mhssotr13 • 1y Not entirely sure it fits into the category but the Rosenhan Experiment. 13 people feigned mental illnesses to get into mental hospitals and all were admitted with different diagnoses. They then assumed their normal personalities but to be released they all had to admit that they were mentally ill. There was a second part where a hospital challenged Rosenhan to send multiple fake patients to the hospital and they would rate their patients on a scale of whether they think th
    via u/nahhhgeorge
  • 03
    Text - respectfullydissent • 1y The Monopoly Study by Paul Piff. He basically brought two strangers into the lab together and had them play a game of Monopoly together. He randomly assigned one participant to start the game with twice as much money than the other and that participant also got to roll both dice to get around the board (i.e., the other participant started with half the money and could only roll one dice). At the end of the game when he asked the participants who started with more
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  • 04
    Text - hateboresme • 1y The Three Christs of Ypsilanti Psychologist forces three people who believe that they are Jesus Christ to live together. It does not go well. The psychologist, Milton Rokeach, had heard of a case where two women who believed that they were Mary, mother of Christ, were forced to live together and one of them broke free from their delusion. So he figured, three Christs...what would happen. They were angry at each other. Often had physical fights. They eventually started get
    via u/nahhhgeorge
  • 05
    Text - MegosAlpha • 1y I'm a huge fan of Milgram's Small World Experiment. It is more sociology than psychology, but I still think it is really cool. Milgram sends out 160 letters containing the name and address of a stockbroker in Boston to people in Omaha, Nebraska. They had to send it to someone they thought would get the letter closer, but they couldn't mail it directly to the stockbroker. Interestingly, most people that sent on the letter sent it on to the same group of people on the 5th de
    via u/nahhhgeorge
  • 06
    Text - mitzimitzi • 1y 1 Award If you stare into a dimly lit (i.e. candle-lit) mirror for 10+ minutes you start to see hallucinations. What individuals see tends to vary, but they've used this as a test to simulate schizophrenia before because some see monsters / deformities / general weird shit. I did a variation of it for a mate at uni and completely wimped out of it. After my face started not looking like my face anymore (I had a complete dissociation) I stopped looking and just waited out th
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  • 07
    Text - JThoms • 1y I loved learning about infant development. My favorite was probably the development of depth perception or perhaps the fear of heights. We're not born with it but, if I recall correctly, we develop it within the first year or so. Scientists created a raised square platform, half of the floor was wood and the other glass. The actual surface of the floor, 1 meter or so below, was white with red polka dots. At varying intervalsof age the babies would be brought in and placed on t
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  • 08
    Text - danbish96 • 1y Reconsolidation: when you retrieve a memory from your long term memory it is susceptible to being manipulated. This can lead to to memories being totally changed from the source. This is why eyewitness accounts cannot be fully seen as true. This knowledge is also being used to help people with PTSD by changing the negative memories they have of their particular trauma.
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  • 09
    Text - IGotSatan • 1y 1 Award The influence of the colour red in sports: Judges were shown a video of a Tae Kwon Do match and awarded more points to the red competitor (versus the blue competitor). When the colours were digitally reversed, judges awarded more points to the other, now red, competitor.
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  • 10
    Text - omgyoucunt • 1y 3 1 Award There have been some experiments conducted, but the negativity effect/negativity bias is really sad to me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negativity_bias It basically says that negative things have a greater emotional and psychological toll on our health than positive/neutral things. So you got an A on a test, that's great. But you totally fail a test, and the world crumbles and it's a total disaster. A hundred things can go right and work perfectly throughout the
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  • 11
    Text - swedishyeetballs • 1y 3 2 Awards Mice were put on two sides of a wall with a door in. Only the right mouse could open the door. Slowly, they filled the left mouse's room with water and eventually when right mouse saw them in danger, they opened the door. However, mice that had previously been on he left side and were now on the right (mice who had previously been "wetted") opened the door considerably faster because they knew how unpleasant it was to be in the other scenario. Basically mi
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  • 12
    Text - poopyinthepants • 1y It's not that psychopaths lack empathy, but rather, they have the manual settings. A specific region of the brain lights up when people experience empathy. For most people it's an automatic, subconscious, response. But in a study where they showed emotional videos to psychopaths and non while scanning their brains, psychopaths would only light that region of the brain when specifically asked to feel for the character, while the control participants would light up auto
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  • 13
    Text - I just recently heard of blind-sightedness during one of my cognitive psychology classes. Basically the area of the brain that processes what our eyes see is located at the back of the head, just where your skull starts to get smaller, towards your neck. Because of this, if you hit your head back there quite often everything will go black for a moment before sight returns again. Sometimes though, following severe trauma to this area of the brain (like after falling off a ladder onto a cur
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  • 14
    Text - EnormousChord • 1y The Car Crash Experiment. It demonstrated that the way investigators word a question has an immediate effect on the subject's memory of an event. It was part of a suite of studies by Elizabeth Loftus (with various other co-researchers) that began to call in to question the veracity of eyewitness accounts.
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  • 15
    Text - Extrasherman• 1y One time I participated in a paid research experiment. I was basically tricked into thinking I was drunk. I was placed in a room with 2 other people and we were instructed to drink vodka with cranberry juice over a period of time while we socialized. After we drank I was placed in a room where I had to read some flashing words on a computer. I felt pretty drunk at this point. When the researcher came back into the room he gave me my car keys and said I was never actually
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  • 16
    Text - gerik_sinovercos • ly 3 1 Award Solomon Asch's experiment on conformity. He set up a test wherein he would show 3 lines of different lengths to 5 or 6 individuals (I forgot the exact number) who had to state which line was the longest of the 3. The thing is, only the last individual is the participant and the others are actors paid to answer in a specific manner. For the first few questions, they choose the correct answer, but later on they start choosing the wrong one. The participants a
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  • 17
    Text - memesandreams • 1y Aron and Dutton (1974) - Misattribution of arousal. Men who had just walked across bridge (either steady or unsteady) were approached by a female psychology student, posing to do a project on the effects of exposure to scenic attractions on creative expression. The men had to complete a questionnaire and write a short dramatic story about a picture she provided and she gave them her phone number if they had more questions. Men who walked across the shaky bridge were mor
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  • 18
    Text - elee0228 • 1y The phantom limb experiment is pretty fascinating. Basically, you can be tricked into feeling something that's not there. Here's an article about the experiment.
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  • 19
    Text - NS-11A • 1y Not just one experiment, but a whole thesis and series of works supporting it: According to the Just world Fallacy we expect good or bad things to happen to people for a reason and go to pretty interesting length to make up for the lack of justice. Like someone winning the lottery and us thinking they deserve it.
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  • 20
    Text - AverageJames23 • 1y Not a psychologist, but the one where given a choice between sitting down doing nothing and shocking oneself, people tend to choose the shock. Ergo, we would choose pain over boredom.
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  • 21
    Text - poopellar • 1y I don't know the name of it but apparently two people become closer if they survive through something together. Not even actual 'surviving death' scenarios but anything that has you on your toes and heart racing, like a roller coaster.
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  • 22
    Text - Avylx • 1y Wegner and his white bears. Essentially, people who were instructed to not think about a white bear, found themselves thinking about it more than those actively trying to think about one. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Ironic_process_theory
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  • 23
    Text - Schnass • 1y Dunning-Kruger effect is one of my favourites. Basically, people with less expertise in a field will over- estimate their abilities in the given field because they don't know enough to see the limits of their expertise. At the same time, experts tend to under-estimate their abilities because they know too well what they don't know.
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  • 24
    Text - ndphillips • 1y There was an experiment to measure the dopamine (ie happiness) hit your brain takes when eating something you're craving. The dopamine builds with the anticipation and peaks right as you take the first bite. Then, after the first moment it's in your mouth, the dopamine levels begin to decrease. This showed that many times we are desiring (edited to show the distinction made by poster below:) *the attainment of the thing more than the thing itself. (Edit:) Not to proselytiz
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  • 25
    Text - laprycon • 1y The Rosenthal Effect: The prejudice and expectations you have towards a student/contestant/etc. highly dictates his performance in the long run. Look it up (aka Pygmalion Effect).
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  • 26
    Text - Sunny_Roller • 1y If people have the upper hand they will put others down to keep it. An experiment told a class of kids that having blue eyes meant you were smarter, achieved more etc. All of a sudden kids with blue eyes formed their own groups. Things like bullying and exclusion of other eye colours started too. They repeated the experiment with different eye colours in different classes, all with the same results.
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  • 27
    Text - MarmosetSweat • 1y Split brain studies. One example: by providing differing information to each hemisphere of the brain in split brain individuals (those with a severed corpus callosum, meaning there's no communication between the two hemispheres) they found that people would actually physically grab their own hand with their other hand if they saw it making a "mistake". Basically each side of the brain controls one side of your body, and in split brain people you can actually make both s
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  • 28
    Text - poopitydoopityboop • 1y Disappointed this isn't in the top comments, will probably get buried. Michael of VSauce fame teamed up with a group of PhD candidates in the psychology department of McGill for his show MindField. They recruited three kids with different disorders: eczema with skin-picking disorder; ADHD; and chronic migraines after a concussion. The kids were each told they were going to be the first to receive a new experimental treatment for their condition, which consisted of
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  • 29
    Text - All three of the kids had markedly improved symptoms several weeks later. The girl with eczema pretty much entirely stopped picking her skin to the point that she felt comfortable wearing short sleeve shirts for the first time. The mother of the kid with ADHD reported that he was much more calm and not as hyperactive. The kid with chronic migraines went from having something like 5-10 debilitating migraines per day to absolute zero, as shown by the chart his mom kept to track them. Placeb
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  • 30
    Text - aleks_0981 • 1y Not quite psychology, but it very cool. Normally, if you try to mix blue light with yellow light (red and green), it turns out as white light. A scientist conducted an experiment where they would shine blue light in one eye of someone and yellow light in the other. The majority said that they just saw the light separately, but some said that they saw a new colour that they couldn't even describe. This also works with Cyan and red, and magenta and green.
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  • 31
    Text - palebluedot1988 • ly 3 2 Awards Hedonic Adaptation. Put simply, a person who had just won the lottery and another person who had just been paralysed took a survey to measure their life contentment. Obviously it was high and low, respectively. However, they both took the same survey a year later and both scored similarly. The point being that regardless what happens to you in life, good or bad, you will always adapt and spend most of your life feeling "neutral."
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  • 32
    Text - daniellayne • 1y "The Selective Laziness of Reasoning" is an article I found and then "partially replicated" in my research methods class during my undergraduate, it's so so great with a very interesting method and results that make you think about discussions and arguments a lot! Basically: The researchers presented participants with different syllogisms (logic puzzles like all men are mortal, socrates is a man, so socrates is moral etc.); and they asked them to provide their answers and
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  • 33
    Text - Tinfed47 • 1y Our psych class repeated an experiment where half the class held a pencil in between their teeth, and the other half balanced on their top lips. We then rated how funny we thought a comic strip was. Turns out using face muscles associated with smiling (pencil between teeth) made the comic strip subjectively funnier then those associated with frowning (pencil balanced on top lips). Choosing to smile or frown can change how you feel and perceive life.
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  • 34
    Text - el_supreme_duderino • 1y We make snap decisions seven seconds before we think we do. The decision is made by other parts of your brain leaving your prefrontal cortex (the part of your brain you use to think) to rationalize the decision. So you don't decide anything based on rational thought. You just try to explain your decision after it has been made.
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  • 35
    Text - KOnfuzion • 1y Another interesting experiment is the Loftus experiments of fake memories,and the power of suggestion. It's basically about implanting memories of events that have never taken place, or alter the subjects detail memory of the event. You can quite easily test this IRL. Find a busy picture of a village. Preferably cartoon, and vividly coloured. Allow a test subject to inspect the picture for 20-30 seconds, and let them know that you'll be asking questions. Turn the picture fa
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  • 36
    Text - wizzb • 1y 1 Award The Elevator Groupthink study, very amusing and sad at the same time. The experiment involved several actors entering an elevator with an oblivious participant. They then begin to perform a series of odd behaviours, such as they all stood facing the rear of the elevator. Inevitably, everyone else who got on ended up also facing the rear so as not to stand out from the rest. The study demonstrates how easily people succumb to group pressure to behave in a certain way.
    via u/nahhhgeorge
  • 37
    Text - there_ARE_watches • 1y Subjects were tested for introvert versus extrovert personality types. Prediction was that when placed in a sensory deprivation chamber the introverts would be able to handle it easily while the extroverts would not. Exactly the reverse was found. Introverts became agitated quickly and performed all manners of self- stimulation. Extroverts quickly went to sleep. What the finding showed was that it's introverts who are the sensation seekers, needing stimulation from
    via u/nahhhgeorge
  • 38
    Text - SuperBeastNoobSlayer • 1y In his book on morality, I believe, Sam Harris cites an experiment done with patients who had a corpus calloscotomy (a surgical treatment where the communicating nervs of the two hemispheres of the brain are cut in order to stop sever epileptic seizures). A sheet is placed between the eyes of a patient and on the side that isn't conscious there will be a text reading "Stand up and leave the room". The patient proceeds to stand up and walk away, at which point he/
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