-
About
Our Story
back- Our Mission
- Our Leadership
- Accessibility
- Careers
- Diversity, Equity, Inclusion
- Learning Science
- Sustainability
Our Solutions
back
-
Community
Community
back- Newsroom
- Discussions
- Webinars on Demand
- Digital Community
- The Institute at Macmillan Learning
- English Community
- Psychology Community
- History Community
- Communication Community
- College Success Community
- Economics Community
- Institutional Solutions Community
- Nutrition Community
- Lab Solutions Community
- STEM Community
- Newsroom
- Macmillan Community
- :
- Psychology Community
- :
- Psychology Blog
- :
- Psychology's Most Controversial Studies
Psychology's Most Controversial Studies
- Subscribe to RSS Feed
- Mark as New
- Mark as Read
- Bookmark
- Subscribe
- Printer Friendly Page
- Report Inappropriate Content
Originally posted on October 14, 2014.
What would you consider psychology’s ten most provocative and controversial studies? Christian Jarrett, a great communicator of psychological science via the British Psychological Society’s free Research Digest, offers his top ten list here. A quick recap:
1. The Stanford Prison Experiment (aka the Stanford Prison Simulation)
2. The Milgram "Shock Experiments"
3. The "Elderly-related Words Provoke Slow Walking" Experiment (and other social priming research)
4. The Conditioning of Little Albert
5. Loftus' "Lost in The Mall" Study
6. The Daryl Bem Pre-cognition Study
7. The Voodoo Correlations in Social Neuroscience study
8. The Kirsch Anti-Depressant Placebo Effect Study
9. Judith Rich Harris and the "Nurture Assumption"
10. Libet's Challenge to Free Will
This is, methinks, a great list. All ten have captured my attention and reporting (although I would reframe #5 to indicate Beth Loftus’s larger body of research on false memories and the misinformation effect). Are there other studies that would make your top ten list?
In the cover story of the October APS Observer, Carol Tavris reflects on “Teaching Contentious Classics,” which include the Milgram experiments, and also Sherif’s Robbers Cave experiment and Harlow’s baby monkey experiments, the latter of which surely also merits inclusion on any list of psychology’s most controversial studies.
You must be a registered user to add a comment. If you've already registered, sign in. Otherwise, register and sign in.
-
Abnormal Psychology
19 -
Achievement
3 -
Affiliation
1 -
Behavior Genetics
2 -
Cognition
40 -
Consciousness
35 -
Current Events
28 -
Development Psychology
19 -
Developmental Psychology
34 -
Drugs
5 -
Emotion
55 -
Evolution
3 -
Evolutionary Psychology
5 -
Gender
19 -
Gender and Sexuality
7 -
Genetics
12 -
History and System of Psychology
6 -
History and Systems of Psychology
7 -
Industrial and Organizational Psychology
51 -
Intelligence
8 -
Learning
70 -
Memory
39 -
Motivation
14 -
Motivation: Hunger
2 -
Nature-Nurture
7 -
Neuroscience
47 -
Personality
29 -
Psychological Disorders and Their Treatment
22 -
Research Methods and Statistics
107 -
Sensation and Perception
46 -
Social Psychology
132 -
Stress and Health
55 -
Teaching and Learning Best Practices
59 -
Thinking and Language
18 -
Virtual Learning
26
- « Previous
- Next »