5 INTERESTING Psychological

EXPERIMENTS

THE ASCH CONFORMITY EXPERIMENTS

During the 1950s the psychologist Solomon Asch gathered some college students in a room to take
part in a simple "perceptual" task, in reality, all but one participant were actors, and the true focus
of the study was about how the real participant would react to the actors’ behavior.

Most of the actors were instructed to give the wrong answer but the real participant did not know
this and was led to believe that the actors were also real participants.

So each person in the room had to state aloud which comparison line (A, B, or C) was most like the
target line and the real participant had to answer last or next to last.

VIDEOOOOOOOO

The answer was always obvious but the experiment revealed that on average, the real participants
conformed to the incorrect answers on 32% of the critical trials. Even though he knew that the
answers were wrong.

So that showed the degree to which a person's own opinions are influenced by those of groups.
Asch found that people were willing to ignore reality and give an incorrect answer in order to
conform to the rest of the group.

BYSTANDER EFFECT
Is a social psychological theory that states that individuals are less likely to offer help to a victim
when there are other people present.

In an experiment carried out in London, it was shown that not because we are surrounded by
people means that we will receive help if we need it.

On the contrary, it is more likely that if there are few people you will receive the help that you
need.

To understand this better let's imagine a simple situation, a person is on the ground asking for help
because he is in pain, around this person there are 100 people, let's say that those 100 people do
not help him because they think that someone else will, but what if the 100 people have the same
thought, the result will be that nobody is going to help him.
Obviously it is very difficult that 100 people think the same, and also there are other factors that
can alter how someone helps, but the experiment showed that the fewer people there are, the
more likely it is that someone will help.

BLUE EYES, BROWN EYES

Jane Elliott conducted this experiment in 1968, inspired by the assassination of Martin Luther King
Jr and the inspirational life that he led. The third grade teacher developed an exercise to help her
students understand the effects of racism.

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 that point
forward they had extra privileges, leaving the brown-eyed children to represent the minority
group. She discouraged the groups from interacting and singled out individual students to stress
the negative characteristics of the children in the minority group. What this exercise showed was
that the children’s behavior changed almost instantaneously.

The group of blue-eyed students performed better academically and even began bullying their
brown-eyed classmates. The brown-eyed group experienced lower 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. The results were the same.

At the end of the experiment, the children agreed that people should not be judged based on
outward appearances, like eye color or skin color.
MILGRAM EXPERIMENT
In the wake of the horrific atrocities carried out by Nazi Germany during World War II, Stanley
Milgram wanted to test the levels of obedience to authority. The Yale University professor wanted
to study if people would obey commands, even when it conflicted with the person’s conscience,

So, he recruited 40 men using newspaper ads and In exchange for their participation, each person
was paid $4.50.

Milgram developed an intimidating shock generator, with shock levels starting at 30 volts and
increasing in 15-volt increments all the way up to 450 volts. The many switches were labeled with
terms including "slight shock," "moderate shock" and "danger: severe shock." The final two
switches were labeled simply with an ominous "XXX."

Each participant took the role of a "teacher" who would then deliver a shock to the "student"
whenever an incorrect answer was given. While the participant believed that he was delivering
real shocks to the student, the “student” was an actor who was simply pretending to be shocked.

As the experiment progressed, the participant would hear the learner plead to be released or even
complain about a heart condition. Once they reached the 300-volt level, the learner would bang
on the wall and demand to be released. Beyond this point, the learner became completely silent
and refused to answer any more questions. The experimenter then instructed the participant to
treat this silence as an incorrect response and deliver a further shock.

Most participants asked the experimenter whether they should continue. The experimenter issued
a series of commands to prod the participant along:

"Please continue."

"The experiment requires that you continue."

"It is absolutely essential that you continue."

"You have no other choice; you must go on."

He found that 65 percent of the participants in his experiment delivered the maximum shocks. Of
the 40 participants in the study, 26 delivered the maximum shocks while 14 stopped before
reaching the highest levels. It is important to note that many of the subjects became extremely
agitated, distraught, and angry at the experimenter, but they continued to follow orders all the
way to the end.
FUN THEORY

This experiment was intended as an advertising campaign for the Volkswagen Company

So in 2009 several campaigns were carried out to show that life is very different if we try to make
everything around us more fun.

So, in one of the campaigns, they turned a staircase of the Stockholm metro into a piano.

This causes that 66% more people than normal chose the piano stairs over the escalator

In the next campaign, they added a fun sound to a trash can that was in a park.

During one day 72kg of trash was collected in the trash can with the fun sound, that's 41kg more
than the normal trash can just a small distance away

In another example to demonstrate that theory, a bottle bank was modified, transforming it into
an arcade bottle bank, each time you threw bottles you collected points, this achieved that the
arcade bottle bank was used by 100 people in one night when it was normal that just 2 people
used it

This experiment made it clear that fun can obviously change behavior for the better