The human mind needs to know about itself. And more than once, the search for that knowledge has caused factors like ethics and morality to fall to a lower plane. In recent decades, different experiments have been developed that, if reproduced today, would set off more than one alarm, and today we want to review several of them. Although not all are considered 'bad', some of the results force us to think long and hard…
The word experiment can have an intimidating profile depending on its context. After all, one thing is an experiment with chemical elements in a specialized laboratory run by experts, and quite another is the experiment Facebook did with its users without asking for prior authorization. Many things have been done in the name of knowledge. Some turned out to be very interesting. Others fell straight into the territory of the atrocious. What we are about to see is, in a way, exploring 'the middle' of both extremes. The reader will have the privilege of judging how 'good' or 'bad' each one was, and of course, share their point of view in the comments.
A Class Divided
Martin Luther King was assassinated on April 4, 1968, and Jane Elliott faced the challenge of explaining concepts like racism, prejudice, and discrimination to her third-grade students. Seeing that class discussion was not progressing, Elliott put it into practice, setting up for two days an exercise in which blue-eyed students received preferential treatment over brown-eyed students, reversing roles the next day.
What was the result? The favored groups responded faster, worked with more enthusiasm, and performed better on tests, while in the discriminated group exactly the opposite happened. In Elliott's words: "I observed what had been wonderful, stupendous, considerate, and cooperative children transform into horrible, cruel, and discriminating third graders in just fifteen minutes."
Pavlov's Dog
In an attempt to study the digestive system, Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov used dogs in his experiments. When a dog finds food, it starts salivating to make swallowing easier and optimize digestion. However, Pavlov saw that dogs began salivating without food in sight. First, he discovered that dogs reacted to lab coats because food was 'on the way' whenever the coats appeared.
His next step was to introduce a neutral stimulus (the sound of a bell) each time the dogs were fed. Through the accumulation of experiences, Pavlov managed to make dogs start salivating just by ringing the bell, thus establishing the basis of classical conditioning.
The Milgram Experiment
In July 1961, psychologist Stanley Milgram of Yale University initiated a series of social experiments to evaluate obedience to authority figures. Participants were to play the role of teachers and administer electric shocks to a student each time they answered a question incorrectly. In reality, no one was being electrocuted, and on the other side was an actor who, besides deliberately announcing wrong answers, pretended to feel pain with each shock.
Despite the screams and protests, participants continued to administer and increase the 'shocks' because the experimenter (the 'authority figure') instructed them to. In fact, 65 percent went as far as giving the equivalent of a lethal 450-volt shock. In short: authoritarianism turns us into monsters.
The Invisible Gorilla
The goal of this exercise, developed by Harvard University, is to watch a short clip of people playing basketball very carefully. While we watch, we must count all the passes made by players wearing white shirts. Midway through, a gorilla appears, stops halfway, beats its chest, and continues until it exits the frame.
Can we see the gorilla? The first thing that comes to mind is a resounding 'yes', but can we see 'everything' the gorilla does? What happened to the passes by the white players? Is it possible to observe every gorilla movement 'and' determine the correct number of passes? The first time I saw it, I missed several details of the gorilla and somehow counted fewer passes…
The Stanford Prison Experiment
One of the most controversial and extreme experiments took place between August 14 and 20, 1971, at Stanford University, led by psychology professor Philip Zimbardo. The plan was to study the psychological effects of perceived power, and to do so he randomly divided a group of volunteer students into guards and prisoners. Within a few hours of starting the experiment, the 'guards' began to psychologically abuse the prisoners, and within days they fully adopted their new sadistic side, increasing punishments and abuses.
Only the objections of Christina Maslach, a psychologist and Zimbardo's then-girlfriend, managed to stop the experiment eight days earlier than planned. The result of the experiment suggests that situational or external attributions rank above dispositional or internal ones, something consistent with what was observed in the Milgram Experiment, but it is still criticized 46 years later.
Halo Effect
In the early 1920s, psychologist Edward Thorndike asked two high-ranking officers to evaluate their soldiers based on parameters such as intelligence, leadership ability, physical qualities (appearance, energy, etc.), and more personal aspects like loyalty and responsibility. Thorndike's discovery was that the 'good impressions' some soldiers conveyed (according to the officers) positively affected their perception of other traits, while a negative attribute identified in a soldier harmed the rest of his evaluation. This cognitive bias is known as the Halo Effect, works in both directions, and raises an interesting question: Do first impressions count, or do they deceive the most…?
The Bobo Doll Experiment
This experiment was organized by Canadian psychologist Albert Bandura in 1961 and 1963, aiming to test his Social Learning Theory, which presents copying and imitation as basic elements of human behavior. The experiment separated several children into groups exposed to two well-defined behavior models. The first model showed an adult in a room repeatedly hitting a Bobo doll and demonstrating aggression in different ways.
The second model featured a calm adult willing to play with other toys, ignoring the doll. When introduced to another room, the children were told (after two minutes) that they could no longer play with the toys because they were 'reserved' for other children, aiming to generate frustration in the participants. Returning to the original room, the children exposed to the aggressive model showed a greater tendency to vent on the Bobo doll, including hitting, kicking, and attacking it with a wooden hammer. Bandura also recorded greater aggressiveness in boys than girls, supporting his prediction that same-sex models have greater influence.
The Asch Conformity Experiment
The Asch Experiment, also known as the Asch Paradigm, saw the light in 1951 thanks to the work of Polish psychologist Solomon Asch at Swarthmore College. It is a simple perception exercise: Two cards. The first has one line, and the second has three. The participant must indicate which line of the second card is longer than the first; however, that is not the real goal. This participant is part of a group of eight people, but the rest are actors who deliberately answer incorrectly.
After twelve trials, 36.8 percent of participants ended up accepting and conforming to what the incorrect majority said, while the 'independents' did not deny having doubts, questioning their judgment at some point, or experiencing the desire to 'follow the others' with their answers.
The Good Samaritan Experiment
A group of students at Princeton Theological Seminary in 1973 participated in a small experiment that basically put them in a bind. The first step was to answer a questionnaire in an office, and the second was to move to a more distant one to give a talk either about jobs or about the Parable of the Good Samaritan. The difference is that each participant was told that they had to hurry to get there, to varying degrees.
Halfway there, the experiment members found an actor pretending to need help. On average, only 40 percent of participants helped the actor. 63 percent of those with little hurry assisted. Those with moderate hurry did not exceed 45 percent, and among those in a big hurry, barely 10 percent decided to help. Once again, the situation seems to overcome personality.
The Third Wave
This is probably one of the best-known experiments on the list, due to its multiple adaptations. The story begins in April 1967 with high school teacher Ron Jones explaining in a history class how a large part of the German population accepted (or ignored) all the actions of the Nazi regime during World War II, including the Holocaust. The difficulties he faced in the process led Jones to create a semi-private social movement (it was supposed not to leave the classroom) named 'The Third Wave', which included discipline exercises and a strict sense of community.
In other words, what he did was adapt and mold basic characteristics of Nazism into his movement. In less than 72 hours, the Third Wave already had more than 200 members, identification cards, a banner, and a kind of internal police that reported those who did not follow the rules. Detecting that things were getting out of control, Jones organized a meeting in which he would supposedly reveal the Third Wave as a national movement, and its True Leader, who would compete in the upcoming presidential elections. All they saw on the fifth day at that meeting was the static of an empty channel. Jones had made his point by explaining the seduction of fascism.
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