David LinckAs Psychology moved further away from philosophy and towards science, more and more experiments began to be conducted. These experiments have revealed important insights regarding the nature of human behaviour. Some of these revelations are taken for granted in the modern world as their discoveries are now widely known. However, at the time, they were rather controversial.
The Stanford Prison Experiment
The Stanford Prison Experiment was conducted in August 1971 by Philip Zimbardo, a Psychology Professor in Stanford University. The experiment aimed to examine the psychological impact of a prison environment on prisoners and guards.
In order to test this, Zimbardo built a mock prison in the basement of Stanford University. A group of 24 participants were randomly allocated to the positions of guards or prisoners with Zimbardo taking on the role of the prison Superintendent. The participants were all screened beforehand and deemed to be “normal, healthy male college students who were predominantly middle class and white”. The prisoners were taken from their houses, handcuffed by real police officers and taken to the mock prison where they were stripped and deloused. The prisoners stayed in the prison 24 hours a day while the guards only worked an eight hour shift and returned home afterwards. All participants received $15 per day, partly funded by the US Navy.
The guards wore mirrored sunglasses, a khaki uniform, nightstick and a whistle while the prisoners wore a smock with an ID number sewn onto the front and back, a stocking cap and a chain locked around their ankles. The uniforms were designed to de-humanise the guards and prisoners while making the guards appear to have total control over the prisoners’ lives. The guards were instructed to “maintain a reasonable degree of order” but almost immediately began to abuse their position. The guards would force the prisoners to complete exercises, they would strip them naked and degrade them, remove their mattresses and force them to sleep on the concrete and would punish prisoners by making them urinate and defecate in a bucket in their cells but not allow the bucket to be emptied. They had become truly immersed in their role.
The experiment was supposed to last two weeks but ended after only 6 days. By that stage, five prisoners had already been released due to severe depression. Zimbardo himself became so immersed in his role as the prison Superintendent he found that his ability to be impartial was severely impaired. Zimbardo had to be confronted by Professor Christina Maslach (whom he would later marry) about the ethical issues of the experiment before he realised that he had failed in his duty of care to these young participants and ended the study. This experiment cemented Zimbardo’s idea that good people, if put in bad environments, can be capable of great wrongdoing. Zimbardo dubbed this phenomenon “The Lucifer Effect”.
Milgram and Obedience
After the Second World War, surviving Nazis were tried for war crimes at the Nuremberg Trials. A common defence for them was to say that they were “just following orders”. Thus, Stanley Milgram, a Psychologist at Yale University devised an experiment to test whether anyone could be susceptible to this or if Germans were unusually obedient to their superiors.
Milgram began experiments in July 1961. He advertised in the newspaper for male participants for an experiment on “learning”. There were three people involved: the Experimenter, Teacher (Participant) and Learner (Actor). The Teacher and Learner would then be separated into different rooms where they can communicate but not see one another. The Teacher believed that the Learner’s cognitive abilities were being tested but in actuality, it was the Teacher’s obedience to authority. The Learner was supposedly hooked up to electrodes and each time they gave a wrong answer the Teacher would administer an electric shock which increased in severity with each wrong answer. The shocks went from 15 volts (mild) to 450 volts (Death). The Teacher would be given a sample electric shock before beginning to feel the pain caused to the Learner.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6GxIuljT3w
As the voltage increased so did the intensity of the Learner’s screaming. If the Teacher questioned the study at any point the Experimenter would give 4 responses, continuing on to the next one each time they were questioned. They were:
1: Please continue.
2: The experiment requires you to continue.
3: It is absolutely essential that you continue.
4: You have no other choice but to continue.
Around two-thirds of participants continued to the lethal shock of 450 volts while the rest continued to, at least, a very painful 300 volts. Milgram would go on to carry out multiple separate variations of the experiment, changing the location, proximity between the Learner and Teacher and so on. However, though proximity decreased the likelihood of participants continuing to 450 volts, 30% of participants still administered lethal shocks. The experiment proved that ordinary people could commit acts of grievous violence just because an authority figure ordered them to.
Asch and Conformity
In 1951, Solomon Asch, conducted experiments at Swarthmore College. Asch recruited male college students to participate in tasks to measure their perceptual abilities. They would be shown a picture of a line followed by another picture with three lines labelled “A”, “B”, “C” and would have to match the original line to the line of the same length on the second picture. Participants would be seated around a table and would call out their answer in turn. However, there was a catch: only one of these was actually a participant, the other participants were all actors, and the experiment was to examine group conformity not perception.
This line task was repeated about 16 times with different lines each time. On the first two times, the participant and the actors gave the same, correct, answer. After this, the actors gave the same, wrong, answer to see if the participant would conform to their answer despite knowing that he was correct.
In the end 75% of participants gave at least one wrong answer with 5% consistently conforming to group pressure and 25% never conforming. Those who conformed later stated that they did so because of self-doubt or low self-confidence with some felling that their judgement must be impaired and so, they answered according to the majority.
Harlow and Attachment
In the 1950s, mainstream psychologists believed that classical conditioning was the basis for the bond between a mother and her child. The idea being that the child bonded with the mother because the mother fed the child. During this time, John Bowlby disagreed. He believed instead that a mother and child have a unique bond that is more complicated than a conditioned response. Psychologist Harry Harlow began experiments using rhesus monkeys to test these hypotheses.
The experiments began with the isolation of baby rhesus monkeys. The monkeys were kept alone in isolation chambers for 3, 6, 12 and 24 months. This caused the monkeys to engage in strange behaviour such as circling their cages or self mutilation. When the monkeys were released and attempted to integrate back into normal monkey populations they had severe problems with socialising. They were often bullied by the other monkeys. However, the monkeys demonstrated attachment towards their cloth pads that covered the cage floor and would exhibit temper tantrums if the cloths were removed.
After this, Harlow began to run a different kind of experiment. Harlow and his students developed a surrogate mother for the rhesus monkeys. The mother was a block of wood covered in rubber with soft cloth on the outside and a light bulb behind so that it radiated warmth. It was designed to be comfortable for the monkeys. A second surrogate was then developed but it was only bare wire and rather uncomfortable. Both surrogates were placed into the cages of the baby monkeys, partitioned from one another. For four of the monkeys, the wire mother provided food and the cloth mother did not. For another four, the cloth mother provided food and the wire mother did not.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OrNBEhzjg8I
Harlow found that all the monkeys spent a majority of their time on the cloth mother. Those who were fed by the wire mother only left the cloth mother to feed and those who were fed by the cloth mother almost never visited the wire mother. Additionally, when frightened, the monkeys would almost always run towards the cloth mother rather than the wire mother. These findings demonstrate that contact comfort is essential to the formation of a strong child-mother bond. This runs counter to the behaviourist point of view which held that this attachment was the result of the mother feeding the child.
These experiments changed the fabric of modern psychology. They introduced new theories that challenged the current paradigm and caused Psychology to introduce methods of ethical testing after witnessing the negative effect of careless psychological testing. These Psychologists each made contributions to their respective fields that have gone down in history. So to all you budding Psychologists: go out and make history.
References
Asch, S. E. (1951). Effects of group pressure upon the modification and distortion of judgment. In H. Guetzkow (ed.) Groups, leadership and men. Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie Press.
Bowlby, J. (1958). The nature of the childs tie to his mother. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 39, 350-371.
Haney, C., Banks, W. C., & Zimbardo, P. G. (1973). A study of prisoners and guards in a simulated prison. Naval Research Review, 30, 4-17.
Harlow, H. F. & Zimmermann, R. R. (1958). The development of affective responsiveness in infant monkeys. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 102,501 -509.
Milgram, S. (1963). Behavioral study of obedience. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 67, 371-378.
