What have you been studying in Psychology?
Fun stuff.
There was the effects society has on our behaviour. This involved Zimbardo's Prison Simulation, where a group of college boys were put in a made-believe prison, randomly assigned the roles of either Prisoner or Guard, and their behaviour monitored. The rate at which they went from normal young adults to actually living their roles was shocking. Those playing the prisoners went from having fun and slightly rebellious to either full out rebellious, or mentally crushed. Those playing the guards almost all became sadistic torturers. The experiment was cancelled after 6 days, when it was intended to go on for 2 weeks. All those who played the prisoners failed to go on an achieve a lot in life, their self esteem was crushed so badly, and despite the best efforts of the experimenters these people were scarred for life. Those playing the guards almost all went into careers where they held authority and dominance over others, one actually went on to become a real guard. It was quite a shocking experiment.
Next was discrimination by Tajfel, who studied inter-group discrimination. This was done by taking a group of boys, showing them some dots on a screen, and asking them to estimate how many were on the screen. The boys were then randomly divided into two, and were told it was based upon the number of dots they saw. Either over or under estimators. Once split up, they were each given a booklet. On each page they had to decide how much money to give to two boys. They could either give more to one, more to the other, or equal amounts to both. Only thing they were told about each boy was which group he was in, that's it. It was found out that while picking between boys within their group, they gave equal amounts, but when choosing between the two groups, they gave more to boys of their groups. They always seemed to not pick the option where the total amount earned between the boy would be the highest possible, and so ignored maximum join profit for inter-group preferences.
Then there was a study of obedience, with Milgrim. He took a group of male volunteers of all backgrounds, and told them they were taking part in an experiment of punishment in teaching. They had to read out a list of pairs of words to a make believe participant, and then read out a word from the list and ask him for the corresponding word. For every wrong answer, they had to give the participant an electrical shock, increasing the shock each time a wrong answer was given. The 'student' and the subject were in two different rooms. After a number of shocks, the 'student' would start hitting the desk and doors. After a while he would scream for pain, and then after a while beg for it to stop. Eventually, at the highest shock (450 volts I think it was, which is lethal to humans) he would stop responding. An experimenter would be in the room with the participant, urging him to go on if he wanted to stop, assuring him everything is fine. There were a lot more variables and a lot more factors, but the end result was that majority of the people kept going till the end of the test, killing the 'student' in the process. They went all the way because they were told to, despite knowing the student was in distress. And these were average people too. Shows our capacity to kill.
Then there was one on Good Samaritan - how many of us will go out of our way to help people. This one is very detailed and got a lot of different theories, so I won't go into it, but the end result pretty much showed we humans are a selfish bunch.
Then there was Freud and his psycho-sexual stages of development, including phobias, the Oedipus Complex, and Hysteria. All are pretty much well recorded, but it generally spoke of how our behaviour is influenced almost completely by our childhood and relationship with our parents, and that our phobias are developed when we are younger. It also spoke of how issues in childhood are repressed and come back to haunt us when we are older. This is because we cannot deal with them as a child, and so hold it back, but as a result of repressing it it is always present in our subconscious, affecting everything we do. Then it talked about normal childhood behaviour, and also about how everything we do in our life -who we are, how we act, how our personality is- is due to our sex drive. Don't worry though, a lot of his theories have been disproved.
And finally is the one we are doing now, Thigpen and Cleckly and MPD - Multiple Personality Disorder. That's fun too. It is basically the same as above, where we repress one part of our personality and so it breaks out later. It can also occur when we experience something traumatic, and our only way of dealing with it is to dis-associate ourselves from what happened, creating a new identity. This is the basis of MPD's new name, Dis-associated Identity Disorder, DID.
And these are the six I have to do the homework on. We have done LOADS on Cognitive Psychology - Our memory, IQ, individual differences, Perception, Autism, language...
My God we've done a lot in a few months...
