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Solomon Asch conducted a groundbreaking study that was designed to evaluate a person’s likelihood to conform to a standard when there is pressure to do so.Ī group of participants were shown pictures with lines of various lengths and were then asked a simple question: Which line is longest? The tricky part of this study was that in each group only one person was a true participant. Study Conducted in 1951 at Swarthmore CollegeĮxperiment Details: Dr. Asch Conformity Study Study Conducted by: Dr. This exercise has since been repeated many times with similar outcomes.Ģ. The next day, she reversed the roles of the two groups and the blue-eyed students became the minority group.Īt the end of the experiment, the children were so relieved that they were reported to have embraced one another and agreed that people should not be judged based on outward appearances. The brown-eyed group experienced lower self-confidence and worse academic performance. The group of blue-eyed students performed better academically and even began bullying their brown-eyed classmates. What this exercise showed was that the children’s behavior changed almost instantaneously. She discouraged the groups from interacting and singled out individual students to stress the negative characteristics of the children in the minority group. 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. The third grade teacher developed an exercise, or better yet, a psychological experiment, to help her Caucasian students understand the effects of racism and prejudice.Įlliott divided her class into two separate groups: blue-eyed students and brown-eyed students. Study Conducted in 1968 in an Iowa classroomĮxperiment Details: Jane Elliott’s famous experiment was inspired by the assassination of Dr. A Class Divided Study Conducted By: Jane Elliott This is a list of the 25 most influential psychological experiments still being taught to psychology students of today.ġ.
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And still others were not designed to be true psychological experiments, but ended up as beacons to the psychological community in proving or disproving theories. Others pushed the boundaries of human behavior during their psychological experiments and created controversies that still linger to this day. Some of these were dutifully conducted, keeping within the confines of ethical and practical guidelines. While each year thousands and thousands of studies are completed in the many specialty areas of psychology, there are a handful that, over the years, have had a lasting impact in the psychological community as a whole. Each of these specialty areas has been strengthened over the years by research studies designed to prove or disprove theories and hypotheses that pique the interests of psychologists throughout the world and help us to understand human behavior.
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The field of psychology is a very broad field comprised of many smaller specialty areas.
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