The Stanford Prison Experiment, conducted in August 1971 by Philip Zimbardo, remains one of the most infamous and unethical studies ever conducted in the field of psychology. Continue reading
The Stanford Prison Experiment
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Category Archives: Videos
Cool Mind Trick / Brain Teaser
What is Stereotype Threat?
Stereotype threat describes the experience of “being at risk of confirming, as self-characteristic, a negative stereotype of one’s group” (Steel & Aronson, 1995). Continue reading
Effective Psychological Strategies Used in Advertising
Advertising is intrinsically linked to the science of psychology. In this short video Dr. Robert Cialdini discusses various psychological techniques employed by advertisers in order to influence consumer thinking and boost product sales. Among the strategies discussed are the principles of reciprocation, scarcity, authority, commitment, liking and consensus.
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- How do you persuade others? (forbes.com)
- The Society for Media Psychology & Technology (psychologytoday.com)
- How to Win Over Someone Who Doesn’t Like You (forbes.com)
Monkey See, Monkey Read
In the video above Jonathan Grainger discusses an experiment in which he and his colleagues attempted to teach Guinea baboons to distinguish between real English words and strings of letters which are not English words. The baboons learned to recognize words from nonwords, exhibiting human-like orthographic processing. The results indicate that the baboons were focusing on the location of individual letters in the words in order to identify them. Interestingly, this is similar to the approach taken by human readers.
Related articles
- Reuters Video: Bright baboons show linguistic learning skills (englishblog.com)
- Baboons recognize words on a screen (jtm71.wordpress.com)
- Baboon personalities connected to social success and health benefits (sciencedaily.com)
- Monkey gets upset about receiving unequal pay (Video) (boingboing.net)
Split Brain Behavioral Experiments
Meet Joe. After suffering from years of epilepsy, Joe underwent brain surgery to have his corpus callosum severed. The corpus callosum, also referred to as the colossal commissure, is a thick band of 200-250 million nerve fibers at the longitudinal fissure that facilitates interhemispheric communication in the brain. By having this band severed, Joe prevented the spread of epileptic seizure from one hemisphere to the other.