February is Psychology Month
Hi everyone! Thanks for reading the Center Street Psychology Blog this week. If you haven’t been here before, you can click back to see some of our other posts on things like attachment styles, goal setting, and mental health support for a variety of different populations. This week, in honour of February being Psychology Month, we’ll take a look at the history of psychology and some of the more memorable, but highly unethical experiments that some people still speak about today.
In the grand scheme of things, psychology is relatively young. The first time it was studied as its discipline was in the late 1800s when a German physiologist named Wilhelm Wundt opened the first psychology lab at the University of Leipzig. This was the beginning of the first wave of psychology, based on structuralism (breaking down consciousness into different sensations and perceptions to better understand responses and reactions). At close to the same time William James, considered the founder of American psychology, published his book “The Principles of Psychology”, which established the second wave of psychological thought, functionalism (how behaviour helps people function in different settings). Wave three of psychology was based on Gestalt thinking, which looks at how we experience the world. It was based on the belief that the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts.
Wave four was started by Sigmund Freud and focused on psychoanalysis, with psychologists in this school of thought believing that most of our feelings come from the unconscious mind. The fifth wave of psychology, behaviourism, was focused less on feelings and more on the belief that understanding how or why someone acted a certain way was more important and was influenced by the work of B.F Skinner. The final wave, which is where we currently are, is more about choice including an integrative and eclectic approach with much higher ethical standards and practices. This means that psychologists intentionally choose from various interventions to find a treatment plan that is more collaborative and individualized to meet your needs.
Some of the most interesting experiments in psychology would never be allowed now. Requirements such as ethics board approval and informed consent would have meant these three key experiments would have never gotten off the ground:
1) “Little Albert” – 1920’s. This experiment, performed by John Watson, conditioned an 11-month-old infant to be afraid of a white laboratory rat by pairing a loud, startling noise with exposure to the rat (classical conditioning, much like Pavlov’s dogs). Interestingly, Albert generalized this fear to other white things (a furry dog, a rabbit, and even a Santa beard).
2)The Stanford Prison Experiment – 1971. This was led by Philip Zimbardo, a professor of psychology at Stanford University. He wanted to understand how individuals conformed to societal roles, so he set up a mock prison where volunteers were split into either guards or prisoners. The guards were given mirrored sunglasses and uniforms to strip them of their identity, while prisoners were given numbers and treated in a variety of dehumanizing ways. Zimbardo found that people conformed to their societal roles quickly and had to shut the experiment down after six days due to volunteers embracing their roles a little too well.
3) Milgram’s Experiments on Authority – 1963. Stanley Milgram wanted to understand if people would carry out tasks that did not align with their conscience if directed to do so by a person with authority (brought on by watching the trial of Adolf Eichmann). For the experiments, Milgram lined up three people, who were split into the roles of “experimenter” (or authority figure), “teacher” and “learner” (who was a Confederate); the teacher (who was a volunteer) told to comply with the experimenter in trying to tutor the learner in sets of word pairs. The penalty for wrong answers by the learner was an electrical shock, with the learner pretending to receive painful and increasingly strong jolts of electricity that the teacher thought they were delivering. Milgram found that the volunteers would continue to deliver these “shocks” as prompted, even after expressing discomfort or wanting to stop.
Want to know more?
The Canadian Psychology Association has a podcast every week, MIND FULL, and this week is Psychology Month: Trust with Dr. Katherine Arbuthnott that you can check out here: https://soundcloud.com/user-389503679
This article discusses the 25 most influential psychology experiments: https://online225.psych.wisc.edu/wp-content/uploads/225-Master/225- UnitPages/Unit-10/Fescoe_OP_2016.pdf
There are movies based on both Stanley Milgram’s experiment (Experimenter) and Philip Zimbardo’s experiment (The Stanford Prison Experiment).
If you’re interested in addictions at all, there is also a documentary called Rat Park which looks at experiments done at Simon Fraser University by Dr. Bruce Alexander. He found that rats were much less likely to drink water laced with opiates when they had a more stimulating environment, versus consumption of drugs when kept in wire cages with little socialization or stimulation; these results influenced the understanding of addictions to include not just biological factors but also sociological and environmental ones as well.
Please reach out to us at Center Street Psychology, as we provide uniquely tailored therapeutic plans and interventions to support you and collaborate on your personal goals. We are an inclusive clinic, located in Calgary, Alberta that provides in-person and virtual psychological services across Canada in the evenings and weekends. Please text or call 403-399-5120 to talk to our Director of Client Care, Amy, who will guide you through the intake process.
Written by: Lindsay Mcnena
