Stanley Milgram‘s famous electric shock experiments sought to find out how far ordinary people would go in obeisance to an authority figure. Participants played the part of teachers who had to deliver increasingly powerful electric shocks to learners who didn’t...
Psychology
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Obedience and responsibility
The results of Milgram’s electric shock experiment showed that ordinary people show “willingness” to go to "almost any lengths" on the command of an authoritative figure. This shows that obedience is related to responsibility and that people are more willing to comply...
The Stanford prison experiment
A decade after Milgram’s obedience experiments his high school classmate Philip Zimbardo devised the Stanford prison experiment o examine another aspect of what makes people act badly. The 24 participants, students at Stanford University, were randomly divided into...
The power of social situation
The Stanford prison experiment was infamous for the disturbing behavior shown by the participants, who were given no choice but to submit to authority figures. However, it also showed dramatically what would happen when good people were placed in an evil situation. In...
Aggression and antisocial behaviour
The studies by Asch, Milgram and Zimbardo examined the social forces of conformance, obedience, and situation that could influence our actions, but didn’t provide a complete explanation for aggressiveness and anti-social behavior. Some psychologists, such as Konrad...
Altruism and prosocial behaviour
Following the Second World war, much social psychology focused on understanding what social forces influence ordinary people to behave in anti-social and violent ways. For the most part, however, people behave in peaceful and cooperative ways towards each other and...
The bystander effect
In New York City in 1964, 37 people saw the murder of a young girl, but only one person was willing to call the police. This event prompted researchers Bibb Latané & John Darley to examine how often people actually help those in need. They found that the more...
Attitudes
Social psychologists understand attitudes as our positive and negative opinions about other people, issues, and things, composed of a combination of our own thoughts and values. These attitudes are formed over time, partly through rational appraisal, but are mostly...
Persuasion
In the 1930s John B. Watson (page 58) demonstrated that people can be persuaded to buy products through appeals to specific emotions such as love, anger, fear, and so forth. Other psychologists were interested in how these methods of persuasion could alter attitudes....
Cognitive dissonance
The more deeply held your belief is, the harder it will be to change your mind. When faced with contradictory information, it can be difficult to let go of what you already believe. This is known as cognitive dissonance. For example, if you were told that you had a...
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Perception
While we are asleep, our sensory organs provide our brains with a huge amount of data about the outside world. However, instead of just feeling these sensations, our brains convert them into images, sounds, thoughts, feelings, and emotions. These mental...
Gestalt psychology
At the turn of the 21st Century, a group of German psychologists proposed a different way of thinking about cognitive function and perception, instead of the prevailing ‘structuralism' of psychologists such as Wilhelm Wundt, who sought to isolate the separate elements...
The Gestalt laws of perception
At the core of Gestalt theory is an understanding that people see the world in very similar ways. By applying these similarities, we can understand how people make sense of what they see. Gestalt principles provide ‘rules’ about how we recognize patterns in our...
Pattern recognition
Gestalt psychologists weren't the first ones who utilized the psychological idea of Gestalt. In 1894, the philosopher Christian von Ehrenfels describes Gestalt as an emergent property of a perceived object - the exact opposite of the main principle of Gestalt...
Recognizing faces
Theories that say that visual perception is a process that identifies objects based on the features they possess (like shape, color, size, orientation) are supported by the everyday experiences of seeing things such as faces, circles, and flowers. We seem to be...
Free Course in Semiology
A completely and truly free course on Semiology (Semiotics). Learn about the meaning of signs, how and why did the field emerged. What is the relationship between the street signs and the signs that we use every day - words.
