Change Blindness
Change blindness is the ability to detect subtle changes in objects or
scenes that would be perfectly obvious upon closer inspection. This
unawareness can even include the recognition of human faces. One
experiment revealed that visual distractions can cause change blindness.
A man behind a counter handed a consent form to a subject. He then
stooped down behind the desk to “retrieve a packet” only to have a
different man emerge from behind the desk and give the packet to the
subject. The second man in the experiment did not look like the first
and was even wearing a different colored shirt. Astonishingly, 75
percent of subjects didn’t even notice the change, revealing how much
the human brain misses from one moment to the next.
Free Hugs Campaign
We’ve all experienced bad days. Sometimes, a hug is all that we need to feel better. A man who called himself Juan Mann decided to conduct a social experiment of his own to test this theory. He stood in a busy area of Sydney, Australia holding a sign that read “Free Hugs” and set out on a mission to spread joy in his hometown. His “Free Hugs” campaign elicited a tremendous response only to be banned by the police. But in an inspiring twist, over 10,000 people signed a petition to keep the campaign going, sending a hopeful message that humanity can be found even in this age of impersonal media and technology.
Cognitive Dissonance
Have you ever suffered a disappointment and then convinced yourself that
you weren’t disappointed at all? If you answered yes, you’ve
experienced a psychological phenomenon called cognitive dissonance. In
1956, psychology student Jack Brehm brought some of his wedding gifts to
class (a lamp, a toaster, a transistor radio, etc.) and asked everyone
to rate each item’s desirability. The students were then asked to choose
between two items they found equally attractive. After making a choice,
the students were asked to rate all the items again. Everyone increased
the ratings of the items they had chosen and downgraded the ratings of
their second-choice items, showing that humans will always try to
convince themselves that they’ve made the right decision.
Car Crash Experiment
Memories can be deceiving. This is what Loftus and Palmer discovered in their 1974 car crash experiment. The two wanted to see if wording questions a certain way would affect participants’ recall by distorting their memories of an event. The participants watched slides of a car accident and were asked to describe what had happened as if they were eyewitnesses. The experimenters found that the use of different verbs affected the participants’ memories of the accident, showing that memory can be easily distorted.
The Monster Study
Known as The Monster Study because of its unethical methods, this
experiment determined the effects of positive and negative speech
therapy on children. Wendell Johnson of the University of Iowa selected
twenty-two orphan children, some with stutters and some without. He
engaged the stutterers in positive speech therapy, praising them for
their fluency, and the non-stutterers in negative speech therapy,
belittling them for every mistake. As a result of the experiment, some
of the children who received negative speech therapy suffered
psychological effects and retained speech problems for the rest of their
lives, making them examples of the significance of positive
reinforcement in education.
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