SOCIAL EXPERIMENTS
● Have you ever wondered how people behave in groups or how the
presence of others impacts individual behavior?
● Over the years, social psychologists have explored these questions by
conducting experiments.
● I’m Lu and today I’m going to explain 3 psychological experiments.
The Asch Experiment - The power of social pressure
● Have you ever made a decision against your better judgment just to fit
in with your friends or family? The Asch Experiment will help you
understand this kind of situation better.
● In this experiment, Asch selected 50 students to participate in a
“vision test”. In the experiments, groups of participants were asked
to match the length of lines, a task with an obvious answer.
● However, each group only included one real participant, and the rest
were actors instructed to give the incorrect answer.
● Results showed that most of the participants went for the wrong
answer, even though they knew which line was the same length.
● When the participants were asked why they identified the wrong one,
they said that they didn’t want to be branded as strange or peculiar.
Conclusion: there are situations in life where people prefer fitting in than
being right. A group’s decision can overwhelm a person and make them
doubt their judgment.
The Bobo Doll Experiment
● Does watching violence on television cause children to behave more
aggressively? Albert Bandura proposed that human behavior is mostly
influenced by environmental rather than genetic factors.
● In this experiment, children were divided into three groups: one
group was shown a video in which an adult acted aggressively toward
the doll, the second group was shown a video in which an adult play
with the doll, and the third group served as the control group where
no video was shown.
● The children were then led to a room with different kinds of toys,
including the doll they had seen in the video.
● Those who were presented the aggressive model acted aggressively
toward doll while those who were presented the passive model
showed less aggression.
Conclusion: Results showed that children tend to imitate adults’ behavior.
The Milgram Experiment
● Milgram wanted to find out how easy it was to get someone to follow
orders, even if the orders went against their conscience.
● Participants were told they would be helping out in a "learning
experiment".
● The participant played the role of a "teacher" in which they had to ask
questions to the "learner".
● Every time the learner got a question wrong or failed to answer, the
teacher was ordered by a scientist to inflict electric shocks on the
learner.
● The voltage increased each time. Actually, the victim was simply an
actor pretending to be injured, but the participants fully believed that
they were giving electrical shocks to the other person.
● Even when the victim was protesting or complaining of a heart
condition, most of the participants continued to deliver painful
shocks.
Conclusion: Obviously, no one wants to believe that we are capable of
inflicting pain on another human being simply on the orders of an authority
figure. The results of the obedience experiments are disturbing because they
reveal that people are much more obedient than they may believe.
