Too many people today, even Christians go about their lives without any understanding of the psychological mechanisms that drive our behaviors. Yes, we live in a fallen world due to sin, but as with science and medicine, there is much more to the mechanisms that make us human that we ought to explore and it is unwise to oversimplify human behavior to (for example) just “oh well, it's just part of our sinful nature”. There's much more to explore and that is the purpose of this page.
Below are video presentations of 5 famous psychology experiments that tell us a lot about our humanity. Each experiment explores a different aspect of our humanity and offers information about what drives humans to behave the way they do. When you apply these learned principles to the daily behavior of people that we see in society today the results of these experiments really shine a light into our understanding of the past, present and future direction of humanity. Please enjoy these and share with others you know.
The results of this study by Soloman Asch in 1951 demonstrated that 37%, that's more than a third of the participants were willing to deny their own eyes in order to conform to the group and thus they gave the wrong answer, again even if they saw with their eyes that the group’s answer was obviously wrong. Think about that!
In the Milgram experiments conducted by Stanley Milgram at Yale University (1963) participants were asked to deliver electrical shocks to a "learner" whenever an incorrect answer was given. In reality, the learner was actually a confederate in the experiment who pretended to be shocked. The purpose of the experiment was to determine how far people were willing to go in order to obey the commands of an authority figure even when it was perceived that the shocks were injuring the subject. Milgram found that 65% of participants were willing to deliver the maximum level of shocks despite the fact that the learner seemed to be in serious distress or even unconscious.
In this 1971 study at Stanford University Philip Zimbardo's famous experiment cast regular students in the roles of prisoners and prison guards. While the study was originally slated to last 2 weeks, it had to be halted after just 6 days because the guards became abusive and the prisoners began to show signs of extreme stress and anxiety. As with the Milgram experiment the guards later admitted they were instructed to be abusive and were just following orders.
In the 1960s, John Darley and Bibb Latané sought to measure how much time elapsed before bystanders reacted and either intervened or ignored the need for help when an emergency situation involving a group or an individual was staged. The researchers were inspired by the murder of Kitty Genovese in 1964, which became infamous after The New York Times reported that there were 38 witnesses to her murder and none of them tried to help. They demonstrated that a larger number of bystanders diminished the chances any of them would offer help. The Bystander Effect has continued to be replicated for years.
In 1957, social psychologists Leon Festinger and James Carlsmith conducted an experiment to measure the impact of cognitive dissonance on people’s opinions and behaviors. Participants were engaged in a boring task. After doing the task, the researcher tells one group of participants to lie to the incoming participants and tell them that the task is delightful when they know that it isn't. One group was given 1 dollar for this new assignment and the other 20 dollars.
The shocking results were that the group that was given only 1 dollar to convince the other participants that the task is enjoyable was more successful in lying. The 20 dollar group was worse at lying and doing their job. The reason for that was, the 20 dollar group was less motivated to convince themselves that the task was enjoyable because they had sufficient justification — the 20 dollars — not to believe it. The 1 dollar group was more motivated because they needed to reduce their cognitive dissonance by convincing themselves that the task was indeed enjoyable.
