Visit the link below and choose one of the studies listed that you find interesting. Read over the findings and ideas presented and comment in the blog about the study and something you found interesting from the research or experiment.
A discussion on human behaviour will follow.
Sorry Mr Jenkinson but there are no links. I looked at the blog a few times in the last six days.
Sorry gang, technical difficulties! However, the link can be found under 12 Society links on right side “Social Psychology Studies” Get on it!
You can also follow this link below. You only need to read and comment on one of the studies.
http://www.spring.org.uk/2007/11/10-piercing-insights-into-human-nature.php
I decided to read the Stanford Prison Experiment article because I have heard about it in the past before. It interesting to believe that everyone adapted to their role as a prisoner or a guard and even Zimbardo fell into his role as the prison superintendant just because they were told to “play” that role. This experiment shows that people with power become agressive to those who do not and the people who do not have power become submissive after outbursts of rebelious acts to the “guards”. This expermient was unethical because the participants got more into “playing their roles” then into the experiment. Besides all this the experiment did show that human behaviour can depend a lot on how much power a human posses and this could lead to explainations of other issues such as abuse, killings, violent outbreaks, etc that do occur at prisons.
I read the article on The Stanford Prison Experiment because I had past knowledge from classes I had taken last year. What I found interesting was the fact that they had so quickly adapted, in six days they were showing mental wear and there was even personality changes. It’s interesting, but personally I doubt it would work with larger groups. In a larger group there would be people less likely to adapt like that, and they would probably be reminding participants that it wasn’t real. Although it yielded interesting results, I have a hard time believing that it’s applicable to any real life situations other than jails.
As for the question of ethics, I think it was totally ethical. People were not truly imprisoned, and they were able to leave when they wanted to. It was completely voluntary, and there were whistle blowers involved to prevent serious damage. It was on the up and up.
I read How and Why We Lie to Ourselves: Cognitive Dissonance. It shows why humans tell ourselves about why we think and behave the way we do. I found it pretty interesting. I tend to do that a lot to myself. I think I like or don’t like something without giving it a chance. It tells the reader to imagine they are there so you can get into the character. I could totally see myself doing that! I sometimes tell people that something is really good or sucks even if I think differently.
Why we don’t help others? Bystander Apathy was interesting to read because it did not only talk about the bystander affect as we had discussed it class but also gave other examples / described experiments referring to it. For instance (Darley & Latane, 1968) did an bystander experiment with people facing an Epileptic emergency situation during a discussion. They found out that ‘the more people were involved in the group discussion, the slower participants were to respond to the apparent emergency. It seems that the presence of others inhibits people’s helping behaviours’. Then in the next paragraph ‘Don’t you care?’ It was found out that ‘those who did not act were far from uncaring about the seizure victim. Quite the reverse in fact, compared to those who did report the emergency, they appeared to be in a more heightened state of arousal. Many were sweating, had trembling hands and looked to be in considerable discomfort.’ Isn’t that amazing. As someone said “Why are strangers sometimes nearer to us than the own family.” I regret that I can’t remember who said that but isn’t it true? Strangers have an attempted to help but not those who mean the most to us like family members or friends.
Before I read the article I watched the video of ‘What would you do? Girl Gets Abducted While People Watch! again and I have to say both the video and the article support each other. The video makes it more visual and the case study in the text book have opened my eyes. Furthermore, while I was reading the article the situation of an almost falling old man came back to me. I was doing the dishes during Christmas Holidays, looking out of the kitchen window. One teenager was there who helped the old man to get save down the stairs (it was very slippery). I put on my running shoes and helped as well. I asked if he is ok and so on. That article reminded me of that situation and I realized that there were only two persons who surrounded the victim and not a whole bunch of people. This self connection to the article proofs the found information.
I read the article The Halo Effect: When Your Own Mind is a Mystery. The article explained that global evaluations about a person (e.g. she is likeable) bleed over into judgements about their specific traits (e.g. she is intelligent).
To explain it futher, it pretty much summed up how some people can look at a very presentable person and just assume all these great things about them without even getting to know them and their actual characterisics. In the article, an experiement was done where scientests hired a lecturer. They filmed the lecturer from two sides – on one side the lecturer would answer questions in a kind and warm manner. The next side they filmed the lecturer answering questions in a cold and serious manner. They then got two groups of students to watch the videos and rate them. The students who watched the positive side of the lecturer rated the other qualities of the lecturer high, completely ignoring what his or her actual characteristics could be. They just assumed how the lecturer was from what they say. The students who watched the negative side of the lecturer rated the qualities lower. Apparently if you are kind, warm and welcoming at first view/meeting, youre more approachable and attractive.
The rest of the article explained how the students made unconcious judgments, in the article is said that ” The surprise is that students had no clue whatsoever why they gave one lecturer higher ratings, even after they were given every chance. After the study it was suggested to them that how much they liked the lecturer might have affected their evaluations. Despite this, most said that how much they liked the lecturer from what he said had not affected their evaluation of his individual characteristics at all.”
I found this article extremely interesting and it pretty much summed up how society really thinks. I admit I think this way sometimes. I can meet someone for the first time and theyre really sweet and immediatley like them. I assume theyre kind and sweet, ignoring the fact that I just met them.
I decided to read, Why dont we help others: Bystander Apathy. It had mention the Kitty Genovese case, which i have learned about before in previous classes. She was murdered, while 38 people had witness it and did nothing. It says how people that witness other people’s unfourtune, don’t step in to help. They are more worried about not putting stress on themselves then too help others. I find it terrible that although this person was having a seizure, something that could kill them, Harldly any of the people who seen it stopped to help.I think people think to much about themselves to help others. I think i would feel way to guilty to not help somebody in a bad situation.
Bystander effect we as human beings tend to go with the collective if someone was getting hurt or needed help the more people there are the slower the response. When there is more people we as a group assume someone will do something but the problem is everyone would probably think that which to nobody doing anything. This usually is because of the fear of getting hurt yourself such as the case where Kitty Genovese was stabbed to death with apparently 38 witnesses. All the people watching just assumed someone would do something or were too scared to do anything themselves.
I found this experiment really interesting. I know that with myself I’m a little prone to low expectations if I’ve heard that something wasn’t very good. I tend to never give things a chance. On the other hand, if I’ve seen something that doesn’t look that great but someone says it’s good, I still normally won’t give it a chance. I also know that this is a big thing in young kids with food; if they think something is gross but they’ve never tried it, then they won’t usually give it a try.
I read the article on the Stanford Prison experiment. To me, this ultimately showed that humans have a domineering and malicious nature: that we are power-hungry, easily-persuaded individuals at heart who when given even the smallest amount of power over another – even, evidently, during something as trivial as an experiment – will abuse this newfound authority for all it’s worth. This experiment also highlighted how impressionable the human mind is. It’s said in the article that after mere days, good, previously pacifistic people had turned into cruel, tyrannical ‘wardens’. It showed how easily corruptible humans are, and how everything one believes they stand for – their morals, values, and ideals – can change at the drop of a hat.
What surprised me about the experiment was how easily Zimbardo – the lead researcher – fell into his self-assigned role as the ‘prison superintendent’. I believe that this, above all, is an indicator of how easily the mind can be tricked into adapting to certain situations with an ‘eat or be eaten’ outlook: Zimbardo admits he took his roles as superintendent extremely seriously, focussing more on prison security than the actual experiment. The guards evidently did the same – tormenting the prisoners after rebellion, and humiliating them until their behavior was entirely submissive. Even the prisoners were not able to simply wait out the experiment: they organized a rebellion against the guards only a couple days into the experiment, demonstrating a prisoner mindset as opposed to the college student who was attempting to make a few extra dollars through participation in an experiment.
I decided to read “Conforming to the Norm” and I found it really interesting and accurate. Solomon Asch found that yes, people do conform to the “social norm” even when the “social norm” may be wrong. By doing this experiment it proved that people -whether talking out loud or writing it down- do conform to social norms. I found this to be relevant to how we are now. I find that most people conform to what is socially acceptable by others or by what most others do because they want to fit in or feel comfortable. In this experiment people were placed in a room and shown a line, and then lines A, B, C. They had to say what line the one in the first box matched in the second one. After the questions and answers were done, he decided to sit down with the people who were experimented on. He asked them why they chose what they chose. Some said that it was because they actually thought it was the right answer, some felt that it was the wrong answer but they didn’t want to stand out, and others felt that the group was correct so they went along with it.
I do agree that this experiment happens in everyday life. People like to conform and stick to what’s safe. Stay “inside the box.” This article definitely proves that this is correct.
I read about cognitive dissonance, which i found pretty interesting. The experiment showed how people are quick to judge something without even giving it a chance. I think i can be like this at times, I make up my mind about trying something without even trying it. The subject had at first felt that the experiment was very boring, but then changed their mind when being asked how they thought the experiment was. The subject then changed their mind and believed it wasn’t as boring as they had initally thought. I think this article shows that people need to give things a chance before making up their mind about how they really feel about it.
Bystander Effect- I think that all people often at times usually follow or do what the people they are surrounded by are doing. I know that there have been some incidents where I have probably been one of those people to not step up and give a hand or whatever the situation calls for. I think that in Kitty Genovese’s case, the bystander effect was awful with how there were multiple witnesses and none of them even attempted to help or try and get help for her because they figured someone else would do it.
I read the article on the Halo effect. The halo effect is basically when you look at the way someone portrays themselves to the public, and subconciously make judgements on their other traits, such as intelligence, physical appearance, and general likeability. A perfect example of this is hollywood celebrites, many of us may look at our favourite celebrity and look at the way they portray themselves and imagine them to be intelligent, kind, we may imagine they make good choices and are relatively likeable.
While this could be very far from the truth. I believe that this is very true in a lot of aspects in our lives, for example, in the experiment they ran, they asked two groups of students to rate a lecturer based on a video of a lecture they gave. The firstgroup of students viewed the lecturer who delieved the lecture with enthusiasm and came off very friendly and warm. The second group of students saw the same lecturer who came off very cold, authoritive, like he didn’t really enjoy teaching. The students were asked to rate him on physical appearances, mannerisms (the mannerisms were kept the same in both lectures) and his accent (the lecturer had a thick belgian accent). The first lecturer reciceved higher scores on all three. I think that this makes sense because whenever someone seems more approachable or friendly, I usually make preconcieved judgements on the person, thinking I’ll probably like them and vice-versa
I read Our Dark Hearts: The Stanford Prison Experiment. I can’t believe the findings of the lead researcher, Philip Zimbardo. The short version is that they took regular people and put them into two groups, ‘prisoners’ and ‘guards’ and put them in a prison-like area for 14 days. The experiment only lasted six days. The guards took their role in the second day, beating down prisoners that were rebelling. The prisoners too lost their identity and only became their numbers that were assigned at the beginning of the experiment. This is hard to believe in some cases. However, I can see how people can do this. Some people will often see something happening and know they would not be able to do that. An example is cutting in a coffee shop lineup. They would consider the person rude and think they wouldn’t do that. But give them motive and the setting, let’s say they are late for work, they would cut in line in order to save a few minutes of time. What makes me sick the fact that during the Stanford Experiment, some prisoners had to leave the prison because of an emotional breakdown they were having. The impact on the controlled environment was so real that it broke them down mentally and physically.
As I began reading this, I realized that I had already seen the movie based off this experiment. Although I realize the movie would have been highly dramatized, the fact that this experiment actually took place kind of surprised me- same goes for the way the the participants began acting. I think that the expiriment effectively demonstrated how willing people are to act according to social norms. Both the ‘prisoners’ and ‘gaurds’ began acting the way they probably thought they would if it were a real situation- the ‘prisoners’ passive, and the ‘gaurds’ violent. I think this demonstrates how figures of authority are viewed in our society, which is threatening. The ‘gaurds’ automatically assumed that because they were in control they had the ability to act as violent as they wanted, and the ‘prisoners’ assumed that they were to simply obey. This made me wonder why we have a set idea of how authoritative figures are supposed to act, and why people are so willing to deal with it. Maybe it’s because most people have dark sides and will take advantage of an opportunity to act on it, or maybe they just want to fit into their social norms.