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Obedience, Power, and Violence
Is an ordinary person capable of committing heinous acts? After the Holocaust (1941-45), many questioned how Nazi soldiers were capable of such senseless murder. Did it take a certain type of person, or did there exist situational factors that enabled their behavior? This historical moment inspired a series of influential psychological studies. Milgram’s Electric Shock…
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Milgram’s Other Work
Stanley Milgram is one of the most famous people in the history of psychology, and also one of the most controversial because of his work on obedience. But many people are unfamiliar with Milgram’s work after his rise to fame.
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Reinforcement vs Punishment: from Animal Training to Theology
Ever felt “positively punished” when your dog-trainer or psychologist inundate you with these lingo?
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Psychology Classics: Wason Selection Task (Part II)
This post is the second in a series on the Wason selection task (Part I), and part of our ongoing series exploring classic experiments and theories in the history of psychological research.In Part I of my series of posts on the Wason selection task, I detailed the development of the task (Wason, 1966), the discovery of the…
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Psychology Classics: Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development
Jean Piaget (1896-1980) was a Swiss developmental psychologist. While he made many contributions to the field, his most notable is his systematic study of cognitive development.
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Psychology Classics: Claude Steele’s Stereotype Threat Paradigm
In the late 1980s, a university committee at the University of Michigan called for psychology professor Dr. Claude Steele to tackle the problem of academic achievement among minority students at the university. His subsequent research resulted in the discovery and identification of one of the most far-reaching and influential phenomena in social psychology
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Psychology Classics: James Pennebaker’s Expressive Writing Paradigm
ames Pennebaker’s writing paradigm was an important contribution to the young field of health psychology at the time and continues to be used today to explore connections between disclosure and physical and mental health and to generate hypotheses about other psychological phenomena.
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Psychology Classics: Wason Selection Task (Part I)
This post is the first of three on the Wason selection task (Part II), and part of our ongoing series exploring classic experiments and theories in the history of psychological research.