Experimental Psychology Studies Humans and Animals
Experimental psychologists use empirical research methods to explore and better understand behavior.
Understanding Experimental Psychology
Our personalities, and to some degree our life experiences, are defined by the way we behave. But what influences the way we behave in the first place? How does our behavior shape our experiences throughout our lives?
Experimental psychologists are interested in exploring theoretical questions, often by creating a hypothesis and then setting out to prove or disprove it through experimentation. They study a wide range of behavioral topics among humans and animals, including sensation, perception, attention, memory, cognition and emotion.
Experimental Psychology Applied
Experimental psychologists use scientific methods to collect data and perform research. Often, their work builds, one study at a time, to a larger finding or conclusion. Some researchers have devoted their entire career to answering one complex research question. These psychologists work in a variety of settings, including universities, research centers, government agencies and private businesses. The focus of their research is as varied as the settings in which they work. Often, personal interest and educational background will influence the research questions they choose to explore.
In a sense, all psychologists can be considered experimental psychologists since research is the foundation of the discipline, and many psychologists split their professional focus among research, patient care, teaching or program administration. Experimental psychologists, however, often devote their full attention to research — its design, execution, analysis and dissemination.
Those focusing their careers specifically on experimental psychology contribute work across subfields. For example, they use scientific research to provide insights that improve teaching and learning, create safer workplaces and transportation systems, improve substance abuse treatment programs and promote healthy child development.
Experimental psychology uses scientific methods to study behaviors and mental processes in both humans and animals, exploring topics like perception, memory, and emotion, often using animals to understand fundamental principles applicable to humans, though ethical debates and methodological differences exist between species. While humans provide direct insights, animal studies help investigate complex issues like anticipatory nausea or brain functions not easily studied in people, revealing universal behavioral laws.
7 Famous Psychology Experiments
Many famous experiments studying human behavior have impacted our fundamental understanding of psychology. Though some could not be repeated today due to breaches in ethical boundaries, that does not diminish the significance of those psychological studies. Some of these important findings include a greater awareness of depression and its symptoms, how people learn behaviors through the process of association and how individuals conform to a group.
Below, we take a look at seven famous psychological experiments that greatly influenced the field of psychology and our understanding of human behavior.
The Little Albert Experiment, 1920
A John’s Hopkins University professor, Dr. John B. Watson, and a graduate student wanted to test a learning process called classical conditioning. Classical conditioning involves learning involuntary or automatic behaviors by association, and Dr. Watson thought it formed the bedrock of human psychology.
A nine-month-old toddler, dubbed “Albert B,” was volunteered for Dr. Watson and Rosalie Rayner‘s experiment. Albert played with white furry objects, and at first, the toddler displayed joy and affection. Over time, as he played with the objects, Dr. Watson would make a loud noise behind the child’s head to frighten him. After numerous trials, Albert was conditioned to be afraid when he saw white furry objects.
The study proved that humans could be conditioned to enjoy or fear something, which many psychologists believe could explain why people have irrational fears and how they may have developed early in life. This is a great example of experimental study psychology.
Stanford Prison Experiment, 1971
Stanford professor Philip Zimbardo wanted to learn how individuals conformed to societal roles. He wondered, for example, whether the tense relationship between prison guards and inmates in jails had more to do with the personalities of each or the environment.
During Zimbardo’s experiment, 24 male college students were assigned to be either a prisoner or a guard. The prisoners were held in a makeshift prison inside the basement of Stanford’s psychology department. They went through a standard booking process designed to take away their individuality and make them feel anonymous. Guards were given eight-hour shifts and tasked to treat the prisoners just like they would in real life.
Zimbardo found rather quickly that both the guards and prisoners fully adapted to their roles; in fact, he had to shut down the experiment after six days because it became too dangerous. Zimbardo even admitted he began thinking of himself as a police superintendent rather than a psychologist. The study confirmed that people will conform to the social roles they’re expected to play, especially overly stereotyped ones such as prison guards.
“We realized how ordinary people could be readily transformed from the good Dr. Jekyll to the evil Mr. Hyde,” Zimbardo wrote.
The Asch Conformity Study, 1951
Solomon Asch, a Polish-American social psychologist, was determined to see whether an individual would conform to a group’s decision, even if the individual knew it was incorrect. Conformity is defined by the American Psychological Association as the adjustment of a person’s opinions or thoughts so that they fall closer in line with those of other people or the normative standards of a social group or situation.
In his experiment, Asch selected 50 male college students to participate in a “vision test.” Individuals would have to determine which line on a card was longer. However, the individuals at the center of the experiment did not know that the other people taking the test were actors following scripts, and at times selected the wrong answer on purpose. Asch found that, on average over 12 trials, nearly one-third of the naive participants conformed with the incorrect majority, and only 25 percent never conformed to the incorrect majority. In the control group that featured only the participants and no actors, less than one percent of participants ever chose the wrong answer.
Asch’s experiment showed that people will conform to groups to fit in (normative influence) because of the belief that the group was better informed than the individual. This explains why some people change behaviors or beliefs when in a new group or social setting, even when it goes against past behaviors or beliefs.
The Bobo Doll Experiment, 1961, 1963
Stanford University professor Albert Bandura wanted to put the social learning theory into action. Social learning theory suggests that people can acquire new behaviors “through direct experience or by observing the behavior of others.” Using a Bobo doll, which is a blow-up toy in the shape of a life-size bowling pin, Bandura and his team tested whether children witnessing acts of aggression would copy them.
Bandura and two colleagues selected 36 boys and 36 girls between the ages of 3 and 6 from the Stanford University nursery and split them into three groups of 24. One group watched adults behaving aggressively toward the Bobo doll. In some cases, the adult subjects hit the doll with a hammer or threw it in the air. Another group was shown an adult playing with the Bobo doll in a non-aggressive manner, and the last group was not shown a model at all, just the Bobo doll.
After each session, children were taken to a room with toys and studied to see how their play patterns changed. In a room with aggressive toys (a mallet, dart guns, and a Bobo doll) and non-aggressive toys (a tea set, crayons, and plastic farm animals), Bandura and his colleagues observed that children who watched the aggressive adults were more likely to imitate the aggressive responses.
Unexpectedly, Bandura found that female children acted more physically aggressive after watching a male subject and more verbally aggressive after watching a female subject. The results of the study highlight how children learn behaviors from observing others.
The Learned Helplessness Experiment, 1965
Martin Seligman wanted to research a different angle related to Dr. Watson’s study of classical conditioning. In studying conditioning with dogs, Seligman made an astute observation: the subjects, which had already been conditioned to expect a light electric shock if they heard a bell, would sometimes give up after another negative outcome, rather than searching for the positive outcome.
Under normal circumstances, animals will always try to get away from negative outcomes. When Seligman tested his experiment on animals who hadn’t been previously conditioned, the animals attempted to find a positive outcome. Oppositely, the dogs who had been already conditioned to expect a negative response assumed there would be another negative response waiting for them, even in a different situation.
The conditioned dogs’ behavior became known as learned helplessness, the idea that some subjects won’t try to get out of a negative situation because past experiences have forced them to believe they are helpless. The study’s findings shed light on depression and its symptoms in humans.
The use of animals in research
Around 29 million animals per year are used in experiments in the USA and the EURats and mice make up around 80% of the total number of animals used in researchThe use of animals in experiments has fallen by half in the past 30 years as ethical considerations have become more prominent and technology has progressed so that their use is unnecessaryResearch into behaviourism drew strongly on animal models e.g. Pavlov’s dogs and classical conditioning; Skinner’s rats and operant conditioning Animals are also widely used in the biological approach e.g. the use of pigeons, mice and rats in understanding drug tolerance and addiction
Arguments which support the use of animals to provide insight into human behaviour
Human beings are animals and it is only via experimentation that insight into particular types of behaviour can be achieved, particularly at the biochemical level of experimental psychology Using human beings as participants can only go so far, due to ethical restrictions placed on the use of humans in research: this is when the use of animals as subjects is useful There are some perceived similarities between human brains and animal brains, particularly with higher-order animals such as chimpanzees, who share 98.8% of their DNA with humans therefore this has real value as a model of human behaviour Some animal studies involve injecting animals with hormones, lesioning part of their brain or implementing genetic modification: all techniques that would be unethical to use on humans but which may provide scientific breakthroughs
There are strong moral and ethical arguments for not using animals in research: causing distress to the animal; depriving the animal of their natural environment; destroying the animal for the sake of the research; using animals without considering possible alternative solutions; the assumption that an animal life is less valuable than a human life Humans and animals share similarities but they are, clearly, not completely identical: humans are more sophisticated in terms of their cognitions, motivations and higher-order thinking than animals so the results of animal studies cannot be completely generalised to humans Some research using animals has been prone to methodological flaws e.g. not using random allocation to conditions, not using a single‐blind design, baseline measurements being unreliable, testing the animals in the artificial environment of the lab, rather than in the wild