Magicians, hypnotists and fortune-tellers aren't the only people trying to read our minds. Scientists are also keen to play "mind games", and over the years they have found increasingly strange ways to do so. We have collected the most ridiculous, frightening and fascinating experiments of psychologists.
Social laziness
In 1883, the French agronomist Max Ringelman experimented with students at an agricultural college, which proved that working in groups actually makes us lazier.
In the course of this experience, a group of people were invited to pick up the load, doing it together with the team and on their own. The tool applied to the end of the rope measured the efforts made. The results showed that those who work in the group are the least trying. The bigger the team, the lazier the participants are. In a group of eight people, each participant tried to do exactly half as well as they could. Isn't this proof that the team turns a good worker into a lazy one?
Non-standard thinking
We have prepared a small task for you, which you can do at your leisure. There are three boxes in front of you. One of them has a candle, the other one has buttons and the third one has matches. Your task is to attach a small candle to the door. Don't ask why, because it's just a game.
How will you do it? Of course, you use the boxes as a candlestick, and use the buttons as a holder. However, when the German psychologist Carl Dunker offered this task to his test subjects, it was coped with by only three out of seven people. In the next experiment, he removed all three objects from the boxes. And then the test subjects found a solution quite easily.
Dunker wanted to determine how original we think and how we perceive the functions of objects. When things were stored in boxes, it prevented the subjects from presenting them in a new role (for example, in the function of a candlestick).
Consequences of insomnia
Sleep experiments were carried out back in 1894, when a cold-blooded woman doctor Maria Manasseina tortured four puppies with insomnia. The first of them died after 96 hours without sleep, the last one was 143 hours later. Not content with killing four puppies, Manasseina had another experience, this time with six puppies. He showed the same results.
The following year, the experiment involved people: three men agreed to spend 90 hours without sleep under the supervision of scientists at the University of Iowa. They all began to see the hallucinations on the second night of waking up. After 90 hours of intolerable suffering, the volunteers fell into such a deep sleep that even severe electric shocks could not wake them up.
Images acting on the subconscious
The first experiments with subconscious were conducted in the USA in 1957. Then the ambitious market researcher James Weikeri offered the press to watch a short film about fish. During the short film, journalists attacked popcorn and soft drinks because the shots from the film allegedly secretly told them to do so. The messages "drink a coke" and "eat popcorn" appeared on the screen with a duration of at least 1/24 seconds. As a result, it turned out that sales of popcorn and coca-cola increased by 57.5% and 18.1% in 6 weeks. Despite the fact that now the existence of the 25th frame seems quite controversial.
Stanley Milgram's experiment
It's one of the most shocking experiments in the literal sense of the word. Each stage of testing required two people to participate, and they had to be completely unaware of what they were going to do. After meeting each other and drawing lots quickly, the two people went to different rooms. One person was tied to an electric chair and warned about possible electric shocks that were painful but harmless to the body. Meanwhile, the second person took on the role of "tormentor". He sat in front of the microphone and read out a number of questions. The victim's incorrect answer led to an electric shock. With each wrong answer, the voltage increased.
Tests began, and after several wrong answers, the voltage quickly reached a "painful" level. When the executables heard desperate screams in the next room, many asked the lab technician if everything was going according to plan. They were told that the experiment should continue. And most of them continued!
After a few minutes, the number of wrong answers reached such a level that the voltage increased to 375 volts.
More than a thousand volunteers took part in Milgram's experiment in the 1960s. It turned out that most people prefer to blindly obey their superiors, even when following orders can be harmful.
To be continued in the next part: https://zen.yandex.ru/media/id/5d5ee956d5135c00ad8929e9/unusual-psychological-research-part-2-5d92270ce4f39f00b29f1e8a?via=izenkit