A good overview of the major social psychology experiments that have played a significant role in the development of this field of study.
Experimenter
|
Topic
|
Major Findings
|
LaPiere
|
Attitudes
|
Attitudes don’t always predict behavior: establishments that served a Chinese couple later reported they would refuse such a couple service.
|
Festinger and Carlsmith
|
Cognitive Dissonance
|
Changing one’s behavior can lead to a change in attitudes; people who describe a boring task as interesting for $1 in compensation later reported liking the task more than people who were paid $20.
|
Rosenthal and Jacobson
|
Self-fulfilling prophecy
|
One person’s attitudes can elicit a change in another person’s behavior; teachers’ positive expectations led to increases in students’ IQ scores.
|
Sherif
|
Superordinate Goals
|
Intergroup prejudice can be reduced through working toward superordinate goals; campers unfriendly, competing groups came to have more positive feelings about one another after working together to solve several camp-wide problems.
|
Darley and Latane
|
Bystander Effect
|
The more people that witness an emergency, the less likely any one person is to help; in one study, college students who thought they were the only person to overhear a peer have a seizure were more likely to help than students who thought others heard the seizure, too.
|
Asch
|
Conformity
|
People are loathe to contradict the opinions of a group; 70% of people reported at least one obviously incorrect answer.
|
Milgram
|
Obedience
|
People tend to obey authority figures; 60% of participants thought they delivered the maximum possible level of shock.
|
Zimbardo
|
Roles, deindividuation
|
Roles are powerful and can lead to deindividuation; college students role-playing prisoners and guards acted in surprisingly negative and hostile ways.
|
