Investigate
See how it was tested
The experiments and studies behind the ideas: the design, the result, and an honest account of what the evidence can and cannot support.
29 entries
Asch's Conformity Experiments
Solomon Asch's line-judgment studies, showing that people will call an obviously wrong answer right to avoid standing alone against a unanimous group, and that a single dissenter breaks the spell.
8 min
ExperimentChange Blindness and Inattentional Blindness
A person in a gorilla suit can walk through the middle of your visual field, in full view, and you will swear afterward that nothing was there.
7 min
ExperimentClassical Conditioning
Pavlov's discovery that pairing a neutral signal with a reflex-triggering stimulus teaches the nervous system to treat the signal as a cause in its own right.
9 min
ExperimentInsight Learning
Wolfgang Köhler's chimpanzees solved problems by a sudden reorganization of the whole situation, not by gradual trial and error, and that challenged the behaviorist account of how learning works.
9 min
ExperimentLearned Helplessness
Repeated exposure to a shock a dog cannot escape teaches it, wrongly, that nothing it does will change what happens, even later when escape is easy.
9 min
ExperimentLittle Albert
The 1920 study in which two psychologists conditioned an infant to fear a white rat, a landmark of behaviorism and one of the most ethically indefensible experiments in the field's history.
8 min
ExperimentMary's Room
A scientist who knows every physical fact about color but has only seen black and white: when she first sees red, does she learn something new, and if so, is physicalism false?
10 min
ExperimentMilgram's Obedience Experiments
The lab studies that found most ordinary people will keep delivering apparent electric shocks to a stranger simply because a man in a lab coat tells them to continue.
10 min
ExperimentObservational Learning
Bandura's Bobo doll studies showed that children learn new behavior, including aggression, simply by watching a model perform it and seeing what happens next.
8 min
ExperimentOperant Conditioning
Behavior that is rewarded tends to recur, behavior that is punished or ignored tends to fade, and Skinner built a whole science out of that one fact.
9 min
ExperimentReconstructive Memory
Memory rebuilds an event each time it is recalled, and information encountered afterward can be woven into that rebuild until people sincerely remember what never happened.
7 min
ExperimentSplit-Brain Research
When the cable joining the two hemispheres is cut, each half of the brain can perceive, decide, and act on its own, and the talking half calmly invents reasons for what the mute half just did.
8 min
ExperimentThe Brain in a Vat
How could you tell, from the inside, that you are not a disembodied brain in a tank being fed a lifelike stream of fake experience?
8 min
ExperimentThe Bystander Effect
The more people who witness someone in trouble, the less likely any one of them is to help, because each assumes someone else will.
8 min
ExperimentThe Chinese Room
A man who processes Chinese by rulebook without understanding a word shows that running the right program is not the same as understanding.
9 min
ExperimentThe Drowning Child
If you would ruin your suit to save a child drowning in front of you, why does a child dying far away have a weaker claim on you?
8 min
ExperimentThe Euthyphro Dilemma
Is the good good because God commands it, or does God command it because it is good? Either answer costs the believer something.
8 min
ExperimentThe Experience Machine
Nozick's machine offers a lifetime of perfect experiences; most people refuse it, which suggests we want more from life than how it feels from the inside.
8 min
ExperimentThe Garcia Effect
Rats made sick hours after tasting sweet water learned to avoid the sweetness alone, a result that broke the rule that any cue can be conditioned to any consequence.
7 min
ExperimentThe Gettier Problem
A short 1963 paper showed that a belief can be true, and justified, and still not count as knowledge, breaking a definition that had stood since Plato.
9 min
ExperimentThe Mere Addition Paradox
Parfit's step-by-step trap: adding happy people is not bad, and equalizing while raising welfare is good, yet repeating these steps proves a huge population of barely worthwhile lives is best.
8 min
ExperimentThe Prisoner's Dilemma
Two rational actors, each acting in their own interest, reach an outcome that is worse for both than if they had cooperated.
9 min
ExperimentThe Repugnant Conclusion
If total welfare is what matters, an enormous population of lives barely worth living beats a small population of wonderful ones, and Parfit found every escape route blocked.
9 min
ExperimentThe Ship of Theseus
If every plank of a ship is replaced one by one, is it still the same ship? A puzzle about what makes a thing the same thing over time.
8 min
ExperimentThe Stanford Prison Experiment
A six-day Stanford simulation in which student guards turned abusive, taken for decades as proof of situational power until 2018 archives showed the abuse was coached, not spontaneous.
8 min
ExperimentThe Ticking Time Bomb
A hypothetical bomb, a captured terrorist, and a clock: the scenario built to make torture look not only permissible but obligatory.
8 min
ExperimentThe Trolley Problem
A pair of near-identical dilemmas designed so that our intuitions diverge, forcing us to say what actually makes killing wrong.
10 min
ExperimentThe Veil of Ignorance
A device for finding just rules: choose the principles of your society without knowing who in it you will be.
9 min
ExperimentWhat Is It Like to Be a Bat?
There is something it is like to be a conscious creature, and Thomas Nagel argues that this inside view is exactly what a purely physical description of the brain can never capture.
9 min