The most bizarre psychological experiments

In the quest to map the human psyche, man has pushed the boundaries of psychological experimentation.

This resulted in a series of bizarre, frequently questionable and sometimes brutally unethical tests and studies, conducted particularly between the turn of the 20th century and the 1980s.

Below are a few of the most bizarre psychological experiments undertaken:

Humans raised by apes

Psychologist, Winthrop Kellogg wanted to know if it was possible to reverse the ‘children raised by animals’ theory, wondering if an animal raised by humans would eventually act like a human.

To test this, Kellogg and his wife ‘raised’ a seven-month-old chimpanzee with their 10-month-old son, Donald, in 1931.

Donald and the chimp, named Gua, were fed at the same time, interacted frequently and underwent similar behavioural studies to track their development.

The chimpanzee performed better on the tests, except in terms of learning to speak.

What disturbed Kellogg most was the manner in which his son’s speech began to decline, and when Donald signalled his hunger with a food ‘bark’ nine months after he experiment began, he decided it was over.

Gua was shipped back to a primate centre on March 28, 1932, and died 18 months later.

The Stanford Prison experiment

In an attempt to discern why prisons were so dangerous, Philip Zimbardo set up a mock prison in the basement of the Stanford University’s psychological department in 1971.

Young men without criminal records were hired as volunteers and divided into ‘prisoners’ and ‘guards’.

The scope of the experiment was two weeks, during which Zimbardo would observe the volunteers to determine if a prison is dangerous because of the prisoners or the power structure of a prison.

Almost immediately, the situation at the fake prison took a dramatic turn.

Prisoners staged a riot on the first night behind bars, and in response to the threat from these ‘inmates’, the guards devised a series of ways to initiate a complete crackdown.

Methods of control included verbal abuse, withholding food, curtailing bathroom privileges and more.

Between three and six days later, prisoners began to shatter under the immense pressure of the situation, one prisoner screaming that if felt as if he was “burning up inside.”

Even Zimbardo became ensnared in the psychology of the mock prison scenario.

After falling into the belief his prisoners were planning a jail-break, Zimbardo found himself attempting to contact the real police for help, and knew things had gone too far.

In less than a week, the clean-cut young men had transformed into sullen prisoners and sadistic guards.

Zimbardo announced at a meeting the next morning every volunteer was allowed to leave; the prisoners were relieved, yet the guards were upset at losing their new found authority and power.

Change blindness

The term ‘change blindness’ is the ability to detect subtle changes in objects or scenes that would be perfectly obvious upon closer inspection, even including the recognition of human faces.

A recent experiment revealed visual distractions can cause change blindness.

In the experiment, a man standing behind a counter hands a consent form to a subject of the test, then stoops down behind the counter to ‘retrieve a packet’.

Another man in different man then emerges from behind the counter.

Conductors of the test noticed an astonishing 75 per cent of subjects did not notice the man had changed, revealing how much the human brain misses from one moment to the next.