Interesting and crazy studies of human psychology

Over the past 100 years, people have learned a lot of new and strange things about the human mind and all thanks to various psychological studies. Some of the studies were very interesting, while others were so cruel that they were considered illegal and inhuman.

• 1. Global Harvard Grant Study

  This study spanned 75 years and involved 268 male students at Harvard University. During the experiment, data were recorded on various aspects of the life of each of them.

  This exciting and unique study has shown that love, and the warmth and happiness that comes from it, actually fills a person with the sense of life satisfaction that we cannot get from other sources of our life.

  The results of the study also showed that for complete happiness, a person needs not only love, but also the opportunity to live in such a way that this does not affect love.

• 2. Blindness to change

  If something around you suddenly changes, of course, you will immediately notice it, right? In fact, this is not always the case. When too much information enters the brain, it is unable to process it all.

  "Change blindness" is a term that describes a person's difficulty paying attention to significant change. Simply put, a person does not pay attention to an obvious change. Every day we experience such blindness.

  In one experiment, it was decided to test blindness to change using face recognition. A man approached the research participant and gave out a form to fill out, after which this person bent under the table to allegedly pick up something, and a completely different person in different clothes got up. 75% of the study participants did not find any changes.

• 3. Cognitive dissonance

  Everyone experiences cognitive dissonance. The first person to study this phenomenon was Jack Brehm, a psychology student at the University of Minnesota.

  In 1956, he brought 8 of his wedding gifts such as a toaster, radio, and hair dryer to class and asked each student to rate each item based on how much they needed it.

  After that, he asked each student to choose between two subjects that they considered equally necessary and take home one of them. Later, the students were again asked to rate each item. As a result, it turned out that students praised the previously chosen subject more and the subject that they rejected for the first time less.

• 4. Halo effect

  In psychology, the Halo Effect is the idea that people's overall opinion of a person is made up of just one property or trait.

  To test this idea, one man decided to post two different videos on a dating site where he spoke the same text. In the first video, he was incredibly confident, while in the second one he was more melancholic.

  Each video was shown to a group of girls in different rooms. The women who watched the first video (with a confident man) said that they liked the man, but in the second room the young girls did not like the man at all.

  This experiment shows how people try to convince themselves that they made the right choice.

• 5. Monster Study

  This study was given this name because of its unethical (if not monstrous) attitude towards people. In 1939, Wendell Johnson and his team selected 22 orphans. Some children were completely healthy, while others suffered from stuttering.

  Children with stuttering were praised and applauded when they did not stutter, while healthy children were humiliated and criticized. As a result of the experiment, children who were criticized developed speech problems that remained throughout their adult lives.

  This experiment, although very cruel, showed why children need to be encouraged and motivated at an early age.

• 6. Asch Conformity Experiment

  Asch's experiments were a series of studies done in the 1950s that aimed to demonstrate how people conform in groups (to show the power of conformity in groups).

  One of the participants was placed in the room with the actors. An image with three stripes of different lengths was hung in the room. The contestant was asked to point to the longest line, and the actors all chose the wrong answer on purpose. The goal was to find out if the participant succumbed to the general opinion. Most of the participants agreed with the wrong answer given by the actors.

• 7. A Class Divided

  In 1968, 3rd grade teacher Jane Elliot came up with an exercise that would show white children the effects of racism. She divided the class into children with brown and blue eyes.

  On the first day, children with blue eyes were considered better, and she gave them more freedom and privileges than children with brown eyes. Both groups were forbidden to communicate with each other.

  The results were not long in coming. Blue-eyed students began to cope in the classroom better and at the same time mocked the brown-eyed ones. Children with brown eyes had low self-esteem and were less able to perform on tasks.

  The next day, the brown-eyed children had more privileges and the results were also not long in coming. As a result, the children realized that one should not judge a person by his appearance, and at the end of the lesson everyone hugged each other.

• 8. Experiment "Missing child"

  Very often people do not pay due attention to their surroundings. This theory was proven in the "missing child" experiment.

  The researchers printed out a missing child flyer with a photo and relevant information and hung it on the shop door. Some passers-by did not even pay attention to the ad, and those who saw it and studied it did not notice the "missing" boy from the ad, who was standing right next to the store.

• 9. The Marshmallow Experiment

  This experiment consisted of a series of studies analyzing delayed gratification conducted in the late 60s and early 70s. Psychologist Walter Mischel tried to understand whether the amount of reward for a person affects his success in the future.

  In these studies, the psychologist offered children a choice: either take a small reward (in the form of one marshmallow or one cookie) right away, or wait a little (about 15 minutes) and double their reward, that is, receive 2 marshmallows or 2 cookies.

  A third of the children who participated in the study decided to wait to get more sweets. Subsequent experiments showed that most of the children who waited to get more sweets had a more prosperous life.

• 10. The Fun Theory

  In 2009, Volkswagen decided to launch a project called The Fun Theory in a metro station in Stockholm. The idea turned out to be ingenious and at the same time incredibly simple. The theory of fun says that in order for a person to enjoy doing something, it must be something that pleases and surprises him.

  In this case, the company made a piano out of ordinary subway steps, and the goal was to see how many people would want to go down the musical steps, and how many down the escalator. The number of people who chose to walk down the stairs increased by 66%. Surprisingly, people chose the healthier option because they had fun.