Fire, Murder and Media Feeds: 4 Unsettling Psychological Studies

Have you ever wondered what would convince an ordinary human to commit murder? It turns out a lab coat and authoritative tone can do the trick!

This article looks at some unsettling psychological studies, including...

• Latane and Darley Convinced People to Stay in a "Burning" Building
• Dutton and Aron Turned Fear to Attraction
• Facebook Curated Post Feeds to Control the Emotions of Their Users
• Milgram's Controversial Compliance Study Made People into "Murderers"

Latane and Darley Convinced People to Stay in a "Burning" Building

If you were in a room and smoke started pouring through a vent, you'd get up and leave... right?

Psychologists Latane and Darley's experiment asked students to fill out a questionnaire while sitting in a quiet room. They would either do this alone, in a group with two actors (who were in on the study) or two other normal students.

As they worked their way through the questions, smoke would begin to drift in through one of the vents - Latane and Darley wanted to see who would go and raise the alarm.

When alone, students noticed and reported the smoke around 75% of the time. They were less likely to go and seek help when sitting with two other normal students - despite having three potential reporters in them, these groups raised the alarm only 38% of the time.

When the student was sitting with a pair of actors who simply ignored the smoke, the chance of them raising the alarm dropped to a tiny 10%!

Dutton and Aron Turned Fear to Attraction

There's a well-established theory in psychology that emotions are a combination of physiological arousal (i.e. adrenaline, heart rate etc.) and how our brains interpret that arousal. It's not as far fetched as it initially sounds - for example, you've probably noticed that your body reacts the same way if you're excited, angry or scared.

In 1974, Dutton and Aron decided to put the theory to the test. They selected a pair of bridges (one sturdy, one wobbly) and stationed a female researcher on each of them.

The plan was simple - the researcher would intercept males crossing the bridge and ask them to participate in a study about how nature affects creative expression. She'd also give them her phone number "in case they had any questions about the study." The psychologists were interested in how many males would attempt to make contact with the researcher.

It turned out that those on the wobbly bridge were much more likely to get in touch afterwards. Dutton and Aron suggested that the males were interpreting nervousness from crossing the unsteady bridge as attraction to the researcher. This idea was supported by the answers given to the questionnaire - those from the wobbly bridge tended to reference sex or romance!

Facebook Curated Post Feeds to Control the Emotions of Their Users

Movies, games and books love the idea of mega corporations controlling every aspect of human life, but that's just a bit of fiction... right?

In 2014 researchers working for Facebook released details of an experiment they'd be quietly conducting on around 700,000 unsuspecting users.

The selected "participants" had their feeds secretly curated - some saw a constant dribble of negative posts, while others saw a deluge of positive news. The results weren't that surprising really - those with exposed to the negative tended to post negatively themselves, mirrored by positive posts from those surrounded by positivity.

I'll tell you what wasn't positive though - the reaction to their little bit of clandestine research!

Milgram's Controversial Compliance Study Made People into "Murderers"

In the 1960s, psychologist Stanley Milgram convinced Americans to fatally electrocute their fellow citizens - or think they did, anyway.

Milgram had heard accounts of the Nazi death camps of World War II and was interested in how far people would go to follow the orders of an authority figure.

His experiment used a fairly simple set up - the participant (a member of the public recruited for the study via an advert) was to ask another person strapped in a chair (an actor in the pay of Milgram) questions... and if they got the answer wrong, punish them with an increasingly powerful electric shock.

The participant and actor were in separate labs for the experiment, communicating over an intercom. This hid the fact that the shocks were fake, but allowed the actor to cry out in pain when one was given... and eventually stop when the voltage reached 315. Just to add a bit of extra danger, the actor would tell each participant that they had a heart condition.

Naturally, the participants had concerns when the cries became anguished and then replies ceased entirely. Each time they expressed the desire to stop, a uniformed researcher would tell them to keep going using authoritative language (i.e. “You have no other choice; you must go on!”)

Milgram conducted several versions of the experiment, finding that two thirds of people were willing to go to the maximum voltage of 450 volts (this dropped down to around half when the experiment was done in an office building rather than a university lab.) There was also little difference in how far male and female participants were willing to go!

Thanks for reading - perhaps you'd also like...

• Alien Hand Syndrome: A Real Condition Behind “Evil” Limbs
• A Questioning Parrot, a Cold Reading Horse and a Minecraft Playing Ape

Sources and Further Info:

• Group inhibition of bystander intervention in emergencies.
• Real-Life Extension of Schachter and Singer (1962)
• Facebook emotion experiment sparks criticism
• Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks
• Milgram experiment