Five famous psychological experiments #2

Last year I did a post about five famous psychology experiments. Here is another selection:

Blind to the unexpected

In 1999 cognitive psychologists Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris came up with the so-called “invisible gorilla” test. Their volunteers had to watch a one-minute video where two groups of people — half dressed in white, the other half in black — are passing basketballs around. The volunteers were told to count the passes among players dressed in white shirts while ignoring the passes of those in black. During the video, a woman in a gorilla suit walked into the centre of the frame, pounded her chest and then walked off.  It would seem to be the most obvious thing in the world. However, about half the people missed it. This effect is known as inattentional blindness. When you are focussing on one activity you can become blind to the unexpected. Last year they repeated the study; they wanted to see if the people who had heard about experiment would notice other unexpected events in a new video. Like the first time those who hadn’t seen it had a 50% success rate. As you would expect, all 23 of the experimentees who knew about the original experiment saw the gorilla but only 17% saw one or both of the new unexpected events – the curtain changing colour and one player on the black team leaving the game. You may find this experiment trivial, but one done by NASA using commercial pilots with thousands of hours of flying experience in a state-of-the art flight simulator is more worrying. During a simulated landing in foggy conditions some of the pilots failed to notice a jet parked on the runway!

Clairvoyant rats and pigeons

Last week I wrote about the unreliability of expert predictions. There are experiments that show that animals can do better than humans some times. I’m not referring to Paul the Octopus, who was able to correctly predict the winner of each ofGermany’s seven matches in the 2010 World Cup, as well as the result of the final. In this case it was rats and pigeons. The experiment involved researchers flashing two lights, one green and one red, onto a screen. However, the exact sequence was kept random. The rats and pigeons were quick to discover that the optimum strategy was to always go for green, guaranteeing an 80 percent hit rate. Humans, on the other hand, tried to see a pattern where there was none and only achieved 68% success. What’s more they would persist in the erroneous strategy even after they had been told that the flashing lights were random. Another study with Yale students produced similar results; they couldn’t accept 40% error, so they ended up with almost 50%.

Frightening Little Albert

Behaviourist John Watson believed, following the principles of classical conditioning, that he could condition a child to fear a stimulus which normally would not be frightening. The subject of the study was a nine–month old baby called Albert. At the beginning of the experiment Little Albert was exposed, to a white rat, a rabbit, a dog, a monkey, masks with and without hair and burning newspapers among other things. During this phase Little Albert showed no fear toward any of these items. In later trials, Watson and his assistant Rosalie Rayner made loud sounds behind Albert’s back by striking a long steel pipe with a hammer when the baby touched one of the chosen items. Not surprisingly on these occasions, Little Albert cried and showed fear when he heard the noise. The final stage of the experiment was to present Albert with only the stimuli. He became very upset as the rat appeared in the room. He cried, turned away from the rodent, and tried to move away. Watson had show that emotional responses could be conditioned, or learned. Indeed, Little Albert seemed to generalize his fear to other furry objects so that when Watson sent a non-white rabbit into the room seventeen days after the original experiment, Albert also became distressed. He showed similar reactions when presented with a furry dog, a seal-skin coat, and even when Watson appeared in front of him wearing a Santa Claus mask with a white cotton beard. The story has a sad ending. Albert, whose real name appears to have been Douglas Merritte, was the son of one Arvilla Merritte, then an unmarried woman who was a wet nurse at the Harriet  Lane Home. Nothing is known about the long-term effects of Watson’s experiment on the child. Tragically he died at the age of six on May 10, 1925 and is buried in a cemetery in Maryland.

Make me straight

Dr. Robert Galbraith Heath, founder and chairman of the Department of Psychiatry and Neurology at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana, did research, partially financed by the CIA and the US military, which involved stimulation of the brains using surgically implanted electrodes. His subjects were institutionalized psychiatric patients, often African Americans. He wanted to use this brain stimulation relieve the symptoms of major psychiatric disorders such as severe depression and schizophrenia. However despite this laudable desire, his methods left a lot to be desired. One of his collaborators was the Australian psychiatrist Harry Bailey, who later recalled that they had used African Americans as subjects because “they were everywhere and cheap experimental animals”  His most infamous  experiment was on Patient B-19, a 24-year-old gay man who wanted Heath to make him straight. Heath implanted electrodes in his head, showed him straight porn movies, and then activated the pleasure centres of the brain via the electrodes. A prostitute was hired to see if his treatment had worked. Did patient B-19 actually become heterosexual?  Following discharge from the hospital, he had a sexual relationship with a married woman for almost 10 months. His homosexual activity was reduced during this period, but did not stop completely.  I couldn’t find any long-term follow-up information. Heath seemed excited about the prospects for this therapy, but fortunately homosexual conversion therapy with brain surgery and pleasure centre stimulation did not catch on.

The monster study

Most of us are familiar with the film The King’s Speech. At the beginning of the film a therapist has the future king put seven pebbles in his mouth to get him to take his mind off stuttering. This goes back to ancient Greece where the famous orator Demosthenes is said to have used the same treatment. Anyway it didn’t work out; George spat them out and the hapless therapist was promptly sent packing. On the other side of the Atlantic, at more or less the same time, an infamous experiment was taking place. The year was 1939 and the place,  Davenport,Iowa. The aim of the experiment was to make kids stutter. The intentions were noble; Dr. Wendell Johnson, a speech pathologist believed that stutterers were not born and the stigma of being labelled a stutterer d actually make them worse, and in some cases caused ‘normal’ children to start stuttering. To prove his point, he ran an experiment which has since become known as the ‘Monster Study’. The 22 youngsters from a veterans’ orphanage who were recruited to participate in the experiment were divided into two groups. The first were labelled ‘normal speakers’ and the second ‘stutterers’. In reality only half of the group labelled stutterers had actually shown signs of stuttering. During the course of the experiment, the normal speakers were given positive encouragement. But what made the study so notorious was what happened to the stutterers’ group. They received negative reinforcement – they were lectured about stuttering and constantly reminded not to repeat words. And the rest of the teachers and staff at the orphanage were told them the whole group were stutterers.  Although none of the test subjects actually became stutterers they became very embittered when they discovered in 2001 what had been done to them.  The quality of their schoolwork fell off and they would suffer a number of psychological and emotional scars later in their lives. The university issued an apology after the study was made public in news reports. On 17 August 2007, six of the orphan children were awarded $925,000 by the State of Iowa.

_________

So there you are. These are some of the things psychologists got up to. One would assume that they don’t do some of the more ethically questionable things that I have described above. They were different times. I could have mentioned Pavlov, who experimented on humans as well as dogs. Watching the videos can be quite painful. The uncomfortable fact is that we did learn a lot from these experiments and others carried out in those years. There were some pretty terrible experiments going on in other fields. One of the most shocking must surely be Tuskegee syphilis study conducted between 1932 and 1972 in Tuskegee,  Alabama by the U.S. Public Health Service on poor, rural black men. They received free health care, but they were never told they had syphilis, nor were they ever treated for it. The aim was to see what would happen if the disease went untreated. I hope in 2050 a future blogger will not have to write about what we were doing in the 21^st century.