By kind
Empirical studies
A real study: the design, the result, and what it can support.
14 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
Empirical studyChange 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
Empirical studyClassical 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
Empirical studyInsight 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
Empirical studyLearned 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
Empirical studyLittle 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
Empirical studyMilgram'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
Empirical studyObservational 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
Empirical studyOperant 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
Empirical studyReconstructive 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
Empirical studySplit-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
Empirical studyThe 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
Empirical studyThe 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
Empirical studyThe 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