famous self experiments

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Notable examples of self-experimentation in science

Over the course of human history, lots of scientists have used themselves as test subjects in their own experiments. Some well-known examples are Marie and Pierre Curie , who famously routinely exposed themselves to radiation (and suffered the consequences for the rest of their lives). This is by no means a comprehensive list, but here are a few other notable examples of self-experimenters.

Before we begin, one more thing. This should go without saying, but just in case: we here at CrossTalk do not recommend trying any of these at home.

J.B.S. and J.S. Haldane

J.B.S. Haldane was a British scientist who studied physiology, genetics, evolutionary biology, and mathematics. He published dozens of research articles— the first when he was only 20 years old—and made enormous contributions to the fields of statistical human genetics and, consequently, modern evolutionary biology. Even the fiction he wrote was influential: his science fiction essay, " Daedalus ," was the inspiration for Aldous Huxley's novel Brave New World .

His father, J.S. Haldane, was a scientist as well, and it was together that father and son began to use themselves as human guinea pigs in experiments testing the physiological effects of poisonous gases and safety conditions in diving experiments . In one such experiment, J.B.S. repeatedly placed himself in a decompression chamber to investigate effects on divers, ultimately suffering oxygen poisoning that led to burst eardrums and regular seizures.

Lest you think he came to his senses after suffering these consequences, in other experiments , J.B.S. drank quantities of hydrochloric acid to observe its effects on muscle action and exercised to exhaustion while measuring carbon dioxide pressure in his lungs. J.B.S. even wrote an essay about his self-experimentation, titled " On Being One's Own Rabbit ," with such choice observations as "to do the sorts of things to a dog as one does to the average medical student requires a license signed in triplicate by two archbishops, as far as I can remember" (his point being that it was easier to experiment on himself than to get approval to experiment on animals) and "The chief trouble in a long experiment is that one tends to drop asleep and stop breathing , so a ruthless colleague is needed to prod one" (emphasis mine).

Famous quote: J.B.S. Haldane is reported to have said about his burst eardrums, "The drum generally heals up; and if a hole remains in it, although one is somewhat deaf, one can blow tobacco smoke out of the ear in question, which is a social accomplishment."

Nathaniel Kleitman

Nathaniel Kleitman was a physiologist and sleep researcher and is considered the father of modern sleep researc h. He opened the world's first sleep laboratory in 1925 , and in 1939 he published Sleep and Wakefulness , the first major textbook on sleep. In 1953, together with Eugene Aserinsky, one of his grad students, he introduced the concept of REM sleep to the world in a game-changing study in Science .

But before this groundbreaking discovery, Kleitman was like many other aspiring scientists: desperate for results in his sleep research, which—back in the 1930s—was  not considered a terribly esteemed   field. He used himself as a subject in sleep experiments in a variety of settings, from a trek above the Arctic Circle to a two-week stay in an underwater submarine during World War II. Most notable was the time he was hoping to discover whether humans could adapt to a 28-hour day, so he and his research assistant moved to an underground cave in Kentucky to find out.

The cave, called Mammoth Cave , receives no natural light and has a constant temperature, meaning the scientists had no way to know when it was day or night above ground. They lived for 32 days at 120–140 feet below ground, sleeping for 9 hours, working for 10, and resting for another 9 hours . They found that Kleitman, who was 43 at the time, was unable to adjust his 24-hour internal clock over the course of the month, whereas his assistant, who was only 20, adjusted to the new 28-hour day within the first week underground. Their study helped to advance knowledge of human circadian rhythms , ultimately leading to practical recommendations for shift workers .

Despite years of using himself as a guinea pig in his experiments—sometimes even keeping himself awake for 100–180 hours at a time (!!) to study the effects of sleep deprivation—Kleitman lived to be 104 years old.

Famous quote : In his book Sleep and Wakefulness , Kleitman wrote , "Sleep is a topic on which almost everyone considers himself an authority because of personal interest and firsthand experience.... There has thus accumulated a vast literature on the physiology of sleep … and it often takes a good deal of hunting through the haystack before one becomes convinced that the proverbial needle is not even there."

Isaac Newton

You’ve probably heard of Isaac Newton before—he's the guy who formulated the laws of motion and universal gravitation, co-developed calculus, introduced the notion of Newtonian fluids … any of this ringing a bell? ( That was Pavlov .) Newton was an English physicist and mathematician and was arguably one of the most influential scientists of all time; his book Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica is widely considered to be the single most influential book on physics.

You probably knew all that. But did you know that he was a self-experimenter as well? Before his theories about planetary orbits, before his theory of optics, the ever-curious Newton would use himself as a test subject for his hypotheses.

As a teenager, Newton attempted to alter the interior curvature of his eye—in order to observe the resulting visual distortions—by putting a bodkin (a large, blunt sewing needle ) " betwixt my eye and bone as neare to [the] backside of my eye as I could ." Terrifying as this sounds, his reasoning was understandable. Scientists of the time weren't sure if color and light existed in the outside world and were perceived by the eye or if they existed in the eye itself, and Newton found that—essentially—when you poke yourself in the eye, you disrupt your vision. In his case, he saw spots. Luckily, he didn't blind himself, and this experiment and subsequent related ones led him to some pretty influential optics discoveries.

In another experiment, Newton stared at the sun, through a mirror in a dark room, with one eye (purposely, to see if the two eyes could experience sights separately) until he saw afterimages of the sun everywhere he looked; he then locked himself in a dark room for three days until the symptoms subsided, though he experienced afterimages for months .

Famous quote : Newton was a brilliant scientist, but even he couldn't apply reason to everything. He's reported to have once said, "I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people."

Posted by Jennifer Levine Jennifer is the Managing Editor of Developmental Cell , Cancer Cell , and iScience . She graduated from Brandeis University with degrees in Creative Writing and English Literature, and her parents were shocked when her BA in English helped her get a job. In her spare time (ha!), Jennifer writes and edits fiction, bakes (and eats) far too many cupcakes, and snuggles her two dogs, who are almost as big as she is.

Filed to Pop sci

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March 10, 2008

Self-Experimenters Step Up for Science

Eight stories of do-it- on -yourself discovery illuminate the promise and perils of a sample size of one

By JR Minkel

Quick—what's the first thought that pops into your head when you hear the word "experiment"? Odds are that what did not bubble up was the image of a 16th-century Italian nobleman who lived for 30 years on a platform suspended from a large straight-beam balance . But it should have. Historians of medicine consider Santorio Santorio—aka Santorio Santorii, aka Sanctorius of Padua—the first physician to have knowingly submitted his theoretical speculations to the rigor of experimental testing that today is taken for granted. By living on the balance, he was able to weigh himself against his daily intake of food and liquids, and his combined expulsions, leading him to the discovery of the insensible perspiration that wafts from our bodies.

Signore Santorio is far from the only self-experimenter to have left a mark on science. Sir Isaac Newton left a mark on the back of his eyelids, nearly blinding himself at age 22 by staring at the sun for too long in a mirror to study the after-images it left on his retinas. Early chemists were known for tasting their distillations, a habit that may have cut short the life of Carl Wilhelm Scheele, the 18th-century German-Swedish chemist who discovered chlorine and co-discovered nitrogen and oxygen; he died at age 44 from suspected heavy metal poisoning. And in what is probably the most famous case of self-experimentation, Australian physician Barry James Marshall downed the contents of a Petri dish laden with Helicobacter pylori bacteria to demonstrate that the microbe caused ulcers, sharing the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with J. Robin Warren for his self-experiment.

The practice is common enough among biomedical researchers that a full accounting would take volumes—a good starting point is the 1987 book by physician–journalist Lawrence Altman, entitled Who Goes First? The Story of Self-Experimentation in Medicine . To showcase the variety of reasons that a researcher (or daughter of a researcher or filmmaker) would opt to self-experiment as well as the problems of ethics and data interpretation that may crop up as a result, Scientific American is presenting an eight-part series on some of the most fascinating modern exemplars of the self-experimental method.

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Day 1: Self-Styled Cyborg Dreams of Outwitting Superintelligent Machines Kevin Warwick wired his nervous system into the Internet and his wife; now he's out to become one with The Matrix

Day 2: Filmmaker Gained Weight to Prove a Point about Portion Size Morgan Spurlock turned an extreme Big Mac Attack into a public health wake-up call

Day 3: Malaria Vaccine Maven Baits Irradiated Mosquitoes with His Own Arm Stephen Hoffman has given years of sweat—and lots of blood—on his quest to stop a global killer.

Day 4: To Purge Binges, Alcoholic Cardiologist Self-Prescribed an Obscure Drug Olivier Ameisen had tried everything to dry out; then he heard about baclofen

Day 5: Can 200,000 Hours of Baby Talk Untie a Robot's Tongue? Deb Roy and his family are risking their privacy so that someday computers might understand human speech

Day 6: Self-Experimenter Freed Himself from Insomnia, Acne and Love Handles Seth Roberts says the key to self-help lies in the scientific method

Day 7: Daughter of MRI Researcher Offered Her Brain for Virtual Dissection Sasha Giedd would have been the only girl in high school with a time-lapse movie of her developing brain, until the IRB caught wind of it

Day 8: Psychedelic Chemist Explores the Surreality of Inner Space, One Drug at a Time Alexander Shulgin endured a government crackdown and bone-melting hallucinations in pursuit of new mind-bending compounds

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The Top 10 Science Experiments of All Time

These seminal experiments changed our understanding of the universe and ourselves..

Every day, we conduct science experiments, posing an “if” with a “then” and seeing what shakes out. Maybe it’s just taking a slightly different route on our commute home or heating that burrito for a few seconds longer in the microwave. Or it could be trying one more variation of that gene, or wondering what kind of code would best fit a given problem. Ultimately, this striving, questioning spirit is at the root of our ability to discover anything at all. A willingness to experiment has helped us delve deeper into the nature of reality through the pursuit we call science. 

A select batch of these science experiments has stood the test of time in showcasing our species at its inquiring, intelligent best. Whether elegant or crude, and often with a touch of serendipity, these singular efforts have delivered insights that changed our view of ourselves or the universe. 

Here are nine such successful endeavors — plus a glorious failure — that could be hailed as the top science experiments of all time.

Eratosthenes Measures the World

Experimental result: The first recorded measurement of Earth’s circumference 

When: end of the third century B.C.

Just how big is our world? Of the many answers from ancient cultures, a stunningly accurate value calculated by Eratosthenes has echoed down the ages. Born around 276 B.C. in Cyrene, a Greek settlement on the coast of modern-day Libya, Eratosthenes became a voracious scholar — a trait that brought him both critics and admirers. The haters nicknamed him Beta, after the second letter of the Greek alphabet. University of Puget Sound physics professor James Evans explains the Classical-style burn: “Eratosthenes moved so often from one field to another that his contemporaries thought of him as only second-best in each of them.” Those who instead celebrated the multitalented Eratosthenes dubbed him Pentathlos, after the five-event athletic competition.

That mental dexterity landed the scholar a gig as chief librarian at the famous library in Alexandria, Egypt. It was there that he conducted his famous experiment. He had heard of a well in Syene, a Nile River city to the south (modern-day Aswan), where the noon sun shone straight down, casting no shadows, on the date of the Northern Hemisphere’s summer solstice. Intrigued, Eratosthenes measured the shadow cast by a vertical stick in Alexandria on this same day and time. He determined the angle of the sun’s light there to be 7.2 degrees, or 1/50th of a circle’s 360 degrees. 

Knowing — as many educated Greeks did — Earth was spherical, Eratosthenes fathomed that if he knew the distance between the two cities, he could multiply that figure by 50 and gauge Earth’s curvature, and hence its total circumference. Supplied with that information, Eratosthenes deduced Earth’s circumference as 250,000 stades, a Hellenistic unit of length equaling roughly 600 feet. The span equates to about 28,500 miles, well within the ballpark of the correct figure of 24,900 miles. 

Eratosthenes’ motive for getting Earth’s size right was his keenness for geography, a field whose name he coined. Fittingly, modernity has bestowed upon him one more nickname: father of geography. Not bad for a guy once dismissed as second-rate.

William Harvey Takes the Pulse of Nature

Experimental result: The discovery of blood circulation

When: Theory published in 1628

Boy, was Galen wrong. 

The Greek physician-cum-philosopher proposed a model of blood flow in the second century that, despite being full of whoppers, prevailed for nearly 1,500 years. Among its claims: The liver constantly makes new blood from food we eat; blood flows throughout the body in two separate streams, one infused (via the lungs) with “vital spirits” from air; and the blood that tissues soak up never returns to the heart. 

Overturning all this dogma took a series of often gruesome experiments. 

High-born in England in 1578, William Harvey rose to become royal physician to King James I, affording him the time and means to pursue his greatest interest: anatomy. He first hacked away (literally, in some cases) at the Galenic model by exsanguinating — draining the blood from — test critters, including sheep and pigs. Harvey realized that if Galen were right, an impossible volume of blood, exceeding the animals’ size, would have to pump through the heart every hour. 

To drive this point home, Harvey sliced open live animals in public, demonstrating their puny blood supplies. He also constricted blood flow into a snake’s exposed heart by finger-pinching a main vein. The heart shrunk and paled; when pierced, it poured forth little blood. By contrast, choking off the main exiting artery swelled the heart. Through studies of the slow heart beats of reptiles and animals near death, he discerned the heart’s contractions, and deduced that it pumped blood through the body in a circuit.

According to Andrew Gregory, a professor of history and philosophy of science at University College London, this was no easy deduction on Harvey’s part. “If you look at a heart beating normally in its normal surroundings, it is very difficult to work out what is actually happening,” he says. 

Experiments with willing people, which involved temporarily blocking blood flow in and out of limbs, further bore out Harvey’s revolutionary conception of blood circulation. He published the full theory in a 1628 book, De Motu Cordis [The Motion of the Heart]. His evidence-based approach transformed medical science, and he’s recognized today as the father of modern medicine and physiology.

Gregor Mendel Cultivates Genetics

Experimental result: The fundamental rules of genetic inheritance 

When: 1855-1863 

A child, to varying degrees, resembles a parent, whether it’s a passing resemblance or a full-blown mini-me. Why? 

The profound mystery behind the inheritance of physical traits began to unravel a century and a half ago, thanks to Gregor Mendel. Born in 1822 in what is now the Czech Republic, Mendel showed a knack for the physical sciences, though his farming family had little money for formal education. Following the advice of a professor, he joined the Augustinian order, a monastic group that emphasized research and learning, in 1843. 

Ensconced at a monastery in Brno, the shy Gregor quickly began spending time in the garden. Fuchsias in particular grabbed his attention, their daintiness hinting at an underlying grand design. “The fuchsias probably gave him the idea for the famous experiments,” says Sander Gliboff, who researches the history of biology at Indiana University Bloomington. “He had been crossing different varieties, trying to get new colors or combinations of colors, and he got repeatable results that suggested some law of heredity at work.”

These laws became clear with his cultivation of pea plants. Using paintbrushes, Mendel dabbed pollen from one to another, precisely pairing thousands of plants with certain traits over a stretch of about seven years. He meticulously documented how matching yellow peas and green peas, for instance, always yielded a yellow plant. Yet mating these yellow offspring together produced a generation where a quarter of the peas gleamed green again. Ratios like these led to Mendel’s coining of the terms dominant (the yellow color, in this case) and recessive for what we now call genes, and which Mendel referred to as “factors.” 

He was ahead of his time. His studies received scant attention in their day, but decades later, when other scientists discovered and replicated Mendel’s experiments, they came to be regarded as a breakthrough. 

“The genius in Mendel’s experiments was his way of formulating simple hypotheses that explain a few things very well, instead of tackling all the complexities of heredity at once,” says Gliboff. “His brilliance was in putting it all together into a project that he could actually do.”

Isaac Newton Eyes Optics

Experimental result: The nature of color and light

When: 1665-1666

Before he was that Isaac Newton — scientist extraordinaire and inventor of the laws of motion, calculus and universal gravitation (plus a crimefighter to boot) — plain ol’ Isaac found himself with time to kill. To escape a devastating outbreak of plague in his college town of Cambridge, Newton holed up at his boyhood home in the English countryside. There, he tinkered with a prism he picked up at a local fair — a “child’s plaything,” according to Patricia Fara, fellow of Clare College, Cambridge. 

Let sunlight pass through a prism and a rainbow, or spectrum, of colors splays out. In Newton’s time, prevailing thinking held that light takes on the color from the medium it transits, like sunlight through stained glass. Unconvinced, Newton set up a prism experiment that proved color is instead an inherent property of light itself. This revolutionary insight established the field of optics, fundamental to modern science and technology. 

Newton deftly executed the delicate experiment: He bored a hole in a window shutter, allowing a single beam of sunlight to pass through two prisms. By blocking some of the resulting colors from reaching the second prism, Newton showed that different colors refracted, or bent, differently through a prism. He then singled out a color from the first prism and passed it alone through the second prism; when the color came out unchanged, it proved the prism didn’t affect the color of the ray. The medium did not matter. Color was tied up, somehow, with light itself. 

Partly owing to the ad hoc, homemade nature of Newton’s experimental setup, plus his incomplete descriptions in a seminal 1672 paper, his contemporaries initially struggled to replicate the results. “It’s a really, really technically difficult experiment to carry out,” says Fara. “But once you have seen it, it’s incredibly convincing.” 

In making his name, Newton certainly displayed a flair for experimentation, occasionally delving into the self-as-subject variety. One time, he stared at the sun so long he nearly went blind. Another, he wormed a long, thick needle under his eyelid, pressing on the back of his eyeball to gauge how it affected his vision. Although he had plenty of misses in his career — forays into occultism, dabbling in biblical numerology — Newton’s hits ensured his lasting fame.

Michelson and Morley Whiff on Ether

Experimental result: The way light moves

Say “hey!” and the sound waves travel through a medium (air) to reach your listener’s ears. Ocean waves, too, move through their own medium: water. Light waves are a special case, however. In a vacuum, with all media such as air and water removed, light somehow still gets from here to there. How can that be? 

The answer, according to the physics en vogue in the late 19th century, was an invisible, ubiquitous medium delightfully dubbed the “luminiferous ether.” Working together at what is now Case Western Reserve University in Ohio, Albert Michelson and Edward W. Morley set out to prove this ether’s existence. What followed is arguably the most famous failed experiment in history. 

The scientists’ hypothesis was thus: As Earth orbits the sun, it constantly plows through ether, generating an ether wind. When the path of a light beam travels in the same direction as the wind, the light should move a bit faster compared with sailing against the wind. 

To measure the effect, miniscule though it would have to be, Michelson had just the thing. In the early 1880s, he had invented a type of interferometer, an instrument that brings sources of light together to create an interference pattern, like when ripples on a pond intermingle. A Michelson interferometer beams light through a one-way mirror. The light splits in two, and the resulting beams travel at right angles to each other. After some distance, they reflect off mirrors back toward a central meeting point. If the light beams arrive at different times, due to some sort of unequal displacement during their journeys (say, from the ether wind), they create a distinctive interference pattern. 

The researchers protected their delicate interferometer setup from vibrations by placing it atop a solid sandstone slab, floating almost friction-free in a trough of mercury and further isolated in a campus building’s basement. Michelson and Morley slowly rotated the slab, expecting to see interference patterns as the light beams synced in and out with the ether’s direction. 

Instead, nothing. Light’s speed did not vary. 

Neither researcher fully grasped the significance of their null result. Chalking it up to experimental error, they moved on to other projects. (Fruitfully so: In 1907, Michelson became the first American to win a Nobel Prize, for optical instrument-based investigations.) But the huge dent Michelson and Morley unintentionally kicked into ether theory set off a chain of further experimentation and theorizing that led to Albert Einstein’s 1905 breakthrough new paradigm of light, special relativity.

Marie Curie’s Work Matters

Experimental result: Defining radioactivity 

Few women are represented in the annals of legendary scientific experiments, reflecting their historical exclusion from the discipline. Marie Sklodowska broke this mold. 

Born in 1867 in Warsaw, she immigrated to Paris at age 24 for the chance to further study math and physics. There, she met and married physicist Pierre Curie, a close intellectual partner who helped her revolutionary ideas gain a foothold within the male-dominated field. “If it wasn’t for Pierre, Marie would never have been accepted by the scientific community,” says Marilyn B. Ogilvie, professor emeritus in the history of science at the University of Oklahoma. “Nonetheless, the basic hypotheses — those that guided the future course of investigation into the nature of radioactivity — were hers.”

The Curies worked together mostly out of a converted shed on the college campus where Pierre worked. For her doctoral thesis in 1897, Marie began investigating a newfangled kind of radiation, similar to X-rays and discovered just a year earlier. Using an instrument called an electrometer, built by Pierre and his brother, Marie measured the mysterious rays emitted by thorium and uranium. Regardless of the elements’ mineralogical makeup — a yellow crystal or a black powder, in uranium’s case — radiation rates depended solely on the amount of the element present. 

From this observation, Marie deduced that the emission of radiation had nothing to do with a substance’s molecular arrangements. Instead, radioactivity — a term she coined — was an inherent property of individual atoms, emanating from their internal structure. Up until this point, scientists had thought atoms elementary, indivisible entities. Marie had cracked the door open to understanding matter at a more fundamental, subatomic level. 

Curie was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, in 1903, and one of a very select few people to earn a second Nobel, in 1911 (for her later discoveries of the elements radium and polonium). 

“In her life and work,” says Ogilvie, “she became a role model for young women who wanted a career in science.”

Ivan Pavlov Salivates at the Idea

Experimental result: The discovery of conditioned reflexes

When: 1890s-1900s

Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov scooped up a Nobel Prize in 1904 for his work with dogs, investigating how saliva and stomach juices digest food. While his scientific legacy will always be tied to doggie drool, it is the operations of the mind — canine, human and otherwise — for which Pavlov remains celebrated today.

Gauging gastric secretions was no picnic. Pavlov and his students collected the fluids that canine digestive organs produced, with a tube suspended from some pooches’ mouths to capture saliva. Come feeding time, the researchers began noticing that dogs who were experienced in the trials would start drooling into the tubes before they’d even tasted a morsel. Like numerous other bodily functions, the generation of saliva was considered a reflex at the time, an unconscious action only occurring in the presence of food. But Pavlov’s dogs had learned to associate the appearance of an experimenter with meals, meaning the canines’ experience had conditioned their physical responses. 

“Up until Pavlov’s work, reflexes were considered fixed or hardwired and not changeable,” says Catharine Rankin, a psychology professor at the University of British Columbia and president of the Pavlovian Society. “His work showed that they could change as a result of experience.” 

Pavlov and his team then taught the dogs to associate food with neutral stimuli as varied as buzzers, metronomes, rotating objects, black squares, whistles, lamp flashes and electric shocks. Pavlov never did ring a bell, however; credit an early mistranslation of the Russian word for buzzer for that enduring myth. 

The findings formed the basis for the concept of classical, or Pavlovian, conditioning. It extends to essentially any learning about stimuli, even if reflexive responses are not involved. “Pavlovian conditioning is happening to us all of the time,” says W. Jeffrey Wilson of Albion College, fellow officer of the Pavlovian Society. “Our brains are constantly connecting things we experience together.” In fact, trying to “un-wire” these conditioned responses is the strategy behind modern treatments for post-traumatic stress disorder, as well as addiction.

Robert Millikan Gets a Charge

Experimental result: The precise value of a single electron’s charge

By most measures, Robert Millikan had done well for himself. Born in 1868 in a small town in Illinois, he went on to earn degrees from Oberlin College and Columbia University. He studied physics with European luminaries in Germany. He then joined the University of Chicago’s physics department, and even penned some successful textbooks. 

But his colleagues were doing far more. The turn of the 20th century was a heady time for physics: In the span of just over a decade, the world was introduced to quantum physics, special relativity and the electron — the first evidence that atoms had divisible parts. By 1908, Millikan found himself pushing 40 without a significant discovery to his name. 

The electron, though, offered an opportunity. Researchers had struggled with whether the particle represented a fundamental unit of electric charge, the same in all cases. It was a critical determination for further developing particle physics. With nothing to lose, Millikan gave it a go. 

In his lab at the University of Chicago, he began working with containers of thick water vapor, called cloud chambers, and varying the strength of an electric field within them. Clouds of water droplets formed around charged atoms and molecules before descending due to gravity. By adjusting the strength of the electric field, he could slow down or even halt a single droplet’s fall, countering gravity with electricity. Find the precise strength where they balanced, and — assuming it did so consistently — that would reveal the charge’s value. 

When it turned out water evaporated too quickly, Millikan and his students — the often-unsung heroes of science — switched to a longer-lasting substance: oil, sprayed into the chamber by a drugstore perfume atomizer. 

The increasingly sophisticated oil-drop experiments eventually determined that the electron did indeed represent a unit of charge. They estimated its value to within whiskers of the currently accepted charge of one electron (1.602 x 10-19 coulombs). It was a coup for particle physics, as well as Millikan. 

“There’s no question that it was a brilliant experiment,” says Caltech physicist David Goodstein. “Millikan’s result proved beyond reasonable doubt that the electron existed and was quantized with a definite charge. All of the discoveries of particle physics follow from that.”

Young, Davisson and Germer See Particles Do the Wave

Experimental result: The wavelike nature of light and electrons 

When: 1801 and 1927, respectively 

Light: particle or wave? Having long wrestled with this seeming either/or, many physicists settled on particle after Isaac Newton’s tour de force through optics. But a rudimentary, yet powerful, demonstration by fellow Englishman Thomas Young shattered this convention. 

Young’s interests covered everything from Egyptology (he helped decode the Rosetta Stone) to medicine and optics. To probe light’s essence, Young devised an experiment in 1801. He cut two thin slits into an opaque object, let sunlight stream through them and watched how the beams cast a series of bright and dark fringes on a screen beyond. Young reasoned that this pattern emerged from light wavily spreading outward, like ripples across a pond, with crests and troughs from different light waves amplifying and canceling each other. 

Although contemporary physicists initially rebuffed Young’s findings, rampant rerunning of these so-called double-slit experiments established that the particles of light really do move like waves. “Double-slit experiments have become so compelling [because] they are relatively easy to conduct,” says David Kaiser, a professor of physics and of the history of science at MIT. “There is an unusually large ratio, in this case, between the relative simplicity and accessibility of the experimental design and the deep conceptual significance of the results.”

More than a century later, a related experiment by Clinton Davisson and Lester Germer showed the depth of this significance. At what is now called Nokia Bell Labs in New Jersey, the physicists ricocheted electron particles off a nickel crystal. The scattered electrons interacted to produce a pattern only possible if the particles also acted like waves. Subsequent double slit-style experiments with electrons proved that particles with matter and undulating energy (light) can each act like both particles and waves. The paradoxical idea lies at the heart of quantum physics, which at the time was just beginning to explain the behavior of matter at a fundamental level. 

“What these experiments show, at their root, is that the stuff of the world, be it radiation or seemingly solid matter, has some irreducible, unavoidable wavelike characteristics,” says Kaiser. “No matter how surprising or counterintuitive that may seem, physicists must take that essential ‘waviness’ into account.”

Robert Paine Stresses Starfish

Experimental result: The disproportionate impact of keystone species on ecosystems

When: Initially presented in a 1966 paper

Just like the purple starfish he crowbarred off rocks and chucked into the Pacific Ocean, Bob Paine threw conventional wisdom right out the window. 

By the 1960s, ecologists had come to agree that habitats thrived primarily through diversity. The common practice of observing these interacting webs of creatures great and small suggested as much. Paine took a different approach. 

Curious what would happen if he intervened in an environment, Paine ran his starfish-banishing experiments in tidal pools along and off the rugged coast of Washington state. The removal of this single species, it turned out, could destabilize a whole ecosystem. Unchecked, the starfish’s barnacle prey went wild — only to then be devoured by marauding mussels. These shellfish, in turn, started crowding out the limpets and algal species. The eventual result: a food web in tatters, with only mussel-dominated pools left behind. 

Paine dubbed the starfish a keystone species, after the necessary center stone that locks an arch into place. A revelatory concept, it meant that all species do not contribute equally in a given ecosystem. Paine’s discovery had a major influence on conservation, overturning the practice of narrowly preserving an individual species for the sake of it, versus an ecosystem-based management strategy.

“His influence was absolutely transformative,” says Oregon State University’s Jane Lubchenco, a marine ecologist. She and her husband, fellow OSU professor Bruce Menge, met 50 years ago as graduate students in Paine’s lab at the University of Washington. Lubchenco, the administrator of the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration from 2009 to 2013, saw over the years the impact that Paine’s keystone species concept had on policies related to fisheries management.

Lubchenco and Menge credit Paine’s inquisitiveness and dogged personality for changing their field. “A thing that made him so charismatic was almost a childlike enthusiasm for ideas,” says Menge. “Curiosity drove him to start the experiment, and then he got these spectacular results.”

Paine died in 2016. His later work had begun exploring the profound implications of humans as a hyper-keystone species, altering the global ecosystem through climate change and unchecked predation.

Adam Hadhazy is based in New Jersey. His work has also appeared in New Scientist and Popular Science , among other publications. This story originally appeared in print as "10 Experiments That Changed Everything"

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When Scientists Perform Experiments on Themselves

More than one self-experiment has resulted in a Nobel Prize. Against all odds, and sometimes in spite of the damage they cause, these crazy gambits pay off.

It’s amazing what experiments people will volunteer to take part in. People have undergone some pretty extreme experiences for science, from eating parasitic worm eggs to lying prone in bed for months . Usually, though, volunteers are compensated for their time and risk. But there is one elite group who, either through necessity or dedication, perform their own experiments on themselves with no guaranteed reward and plenty of risk. Here is a tribute to three little-known scholars who put themselves on the line to make our world better.

Humphry Davy

For sheer foolhardiness, the award must go to Humphry Davy, a late eighteenth/early nineteenth-century British chemist . Davy was particularly interested in the effects of inhaling various gasses, so he, well, inhaled various gasses. Davy’s best known experiments involved nitrous oxide, AKA laughing gas. He described some of his more ridiculous behavior under its influence in much detail. Among other odd behaviors, he was given to peals of insane laughter and mysterious prophecies about the nature of thought. He may even have suffered from some form of addiction to his discovery. He foresaw the gas’s value as an anesthetic, but his noble attempts to perform controlled experiments were overshadowed by his reported antics.  He was ridiculed as a dilettante and a quack, and during his lifetime Davy’s discovery never served a medical purpose, only recreational huffing. Of course, he turned out to be right in the end.

Jesse Lazear

A colleague of the better-known Walter Reed, Lazear was a physician on contract to the U.S. Army working on the crucial question of yellow fever transmission . Without knowledge of how it spread, there was no way to stop it. A Cuban physician, Carlos Finlay, had years earlier proposed that it was spread by mosquitoes. With all other avenues reaching dead ends, Lazear and his colleagues finally decided to test Finlay’s ideas. Lazear successfully used mosquitoes to infect two volunteers with yellow fever, but fatefully performed a third test on himself. The self test does not appear in any official records. Rumor has it that Lazear’s colleagues covered up the story so his wife would qualify for death benefits, impossible if his death was ruled a suicide. Jesse Lazear, 35, died of yellow fever in September 1900.

Werner Forssman

In 1929, German physician Werner Forssmann inserted a catheter deep into his own arm vein . Without any aid, using his circulatory system as a map, he threaded a wire all the way into his heart. Still encathetered, he walked himself to the X-ray department for imagery. The films clearly showed that he had self-performed the first cardiac catheterization. Forssman himself was repeatedly disciplined for his unorthodox approach, and further besmirched his own reputation by joining the Nazi Party during the Second World War. Nevertheless, a breakthrough is a breakthrough, and Forssman earned a Nobel Prize for his discovery in 1956. Today the technique is a crucial tool for diagnosing and treating many forms of heart disease.

There are many more scientists, who through either desire or necessity used themselves as guinea pigs. More than one self-experiment has resulted in a Nobel Prize. Or other major breakthrough. Against all odds, and sometimes in spite of the damage they cause, these crazy gambits pay off.

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7 Examples of Medical Self-Experimentation

Self-experimentation has a rich tradition in medicine..

Posted January 13, 2020

According to one study , during just the past 200 years, there have been 465 cases of self-experimentation documented in the medical literature, with eight recorded deaths. Most instances occurred in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century.

Here are seven notable instances of medical self-experimentation.

The pellagra "filth parties"

Dr. Joseph Goldberger was an epidemiologist and quarantine physician in the U.S. Public Health Service. As such, it was his responsibility to figure out the causes of diseases.

In 1906, the first large outbreak of pellagra occurred in the United States. Pellagra is a disease marked by dementia , diarrhea, and dermatitis (the three Ds).

At the time, scientists thought that pellagra was infectious. To test this hypothesis, Goldberger and colleagues took part in “filth parties,” where they ingested the skin, urine, and feces of patients with pellagra. (For what it’s worth, they made capsules of this human waste.) They also rubbed themselves with the nasal and oral secretions of those with pellagra.

In other experiments, Goldberger supplemented the diets of children at an orphanage with eggs, meat, milk, oatmeal, and beans, which caused incidents of pellagra to stop. Moreover, he found that placing prisoners on a low-protein—but otherwise healthy— diet could produce pellagra. Years later, other researchers showed that pellagra resulted from a deficiency in the B-vitamin niacin.

Yellow fever kills brave physician

Although Dr. Walter Reed received much recognition for the discovery that yellow fever is spread by mosquitoes, the heroics of the discovery go to his colleagues on the Yellow Fever Commission he led in Cuba in 1900. None of Reed’s colleagues were delighted by the prospect of exposing themselves to the deadly yellow fever virus, and Reed himself returned to Washington, D.C., before he could be bitten.

Eventually, Drs. James Carroll and Jesse Lazear, both military physicians, agreed to be bitten by the mosquitoes. Carroll ended up enduring lifelong complications from yellow fever, and Lazear died from the disease.

Physicians try polio

In 1934, Dr. Maurice Brodie, of McGill University Medical School, took the grounded spinal cords of monkeys infected with polio, added formaldehyde, and produced a solution that he hoped could serve as a polio vaccine.

Along with Dr. William H. Park, of the New York City Department of Health, the experimental vaccine was injected into monkeys, which were the only animals at the time that demonstrated susceptibility to the poliovirus.

The vaccine resulted in antibody production and immunity in the monkeys, but the animals experienced severe skin irritation and sloughing of the skin. Once the concentration of formaldehyde was lowered, the skin irritation stopped and no other adverse effects occurred.

At the 1934 annual meeting of the American Public Health Association, Brodie stated the following: “It was deemed advisable to try it upon ourselves, not that we had misgivings about the possibilities of infection, but rather to determine whether the vaccine produced any disagreeable local or general reaction.”

Brodie, Park, and colleagues inoculated themselves with up to three doses of the vaccine, and although soreness and swelling resulted at the injection site, no systemic reaction was observed. Blood tests demonstrated that the vaccine produced antibodies in human recipients.

Co-infection with syphilis and gonorrhea

Although likely apocryphal, one bit of self-experimentation lore involving the revered British surgeon John Hunter bemuses medical historians to this day. In an attempt to demonstrate that both gonorrhea and syphilis are caused by the same disease, Hunter is said to have exposed himself to pus from a woman with infection. He is said to have then developed symptoms of both diseases.

In an alternative version of this yarn, Hunter exposed someone else to this pus and not himself, which, if true, casts an ignoble light on the famous surgeon.

Gastritis "brew"

For two years, Dr. Barry Marshall argued that the bacteria Helicobacter pylori could cause gastritis, or stomach inflammation, and perhaps ulcers years later. However, Marshall was having trouble developing an animal model for infection.

He finally took matters into his own hands and ingested a “brew” of H. pylori , which caused gastritis, or stomach inflammation, and epithelial damage on visualization with endoscopy and biopsy. Marshall cured the infection with antibiotics, and later won the Nobel prize for his work, along with Dr. Robin Warren, his collaborator.

“After five days, I started to have bloating and fullness after the evening meal, and my appetite decreased,” said Marshall in an interview published in the Canadian Journal of Gastroenterology and Hepatology. “My breath was bad and I vomited clear watery liquid, without acid, each morning at approximately 06:00.”

Understanding a deadly bleeding disorder

On a hot and sticky day in 1945, a 17-year-old girl came to the Cambridge City Hospital in Boston with complaints of profuse vaginal bleeding. In cursory fashion, the physician wrote the presentation off as a failed abortion.

However, results from a complete blood count indicated that the teen had very low levels of platelets, a condition referred to as idiopathic thrombocytic purpura (ITP). People with ITP bleed and bruise easily. Of note, platelets help with clotting.

Although physicians at the time did not understand the cause of ITP, they did know that removal of the spleen and treatment with steroids helped. Unfortunately, the young patient initially written off by a cynical physician later died of a botched splenectomy.

An internist named Dr. William J. Harrington watched in a mix of disgust and horror at the poor and bigoted treatment that this teen received. This experience inspired him to become a hematologist and later receive a National Institute of Health (NIH) grant to study ITP with a colleague named Dr. James Hollingsworth.

Based on the observation that the children of ITP mothers were born with low platelet levels, Harrington and Hollingsworth had a hunch that something in blood plasma was responsible for platelet destruction in ITP; something autoimmune in the plasma was crossing the placenta and to the baby before birth.

Because animal models are not known to develop ITP, humans needed to be tested. Hollingsworth proceeded to transfuse Harrington with plasma from a consenting patient with ITP. Soon, Harrington’s platelet levels dropped dramatically, and there was evidence something in the plasma caused platelet destruction.

For a week, Harrington was pretty sick and experienced bleeding from the mouth, nose, and rectum. Precautions were taken so that Harrington would not experience a hemorrhagic stroke . But after a week, he was better and soon other colleagues were self-experimenting in the same fashion to figure out the effects of different titrations of plasma. These efforts laid the foundation for later work by Nobel prize-winner Dr. Jean Dausset’s discovery of antiplatelet antibodies in plasma.

Taking self-experimentation to heart

For eons, humans have viewed the heart as the spiritual and physical center of life. However, it was only starting in the 21st century that physicians have been able to access it. This accomplishment can be attributed to pioneering work done by a young German internist named Dr. Werner Forssmann.

Forssmann was intrigued by the work of French physiologists who accessed a horse heart by means of the jugular vein—located in the neck—without hurting or killing the horse. He wondered whether a similar procedure could be done in humans. Consequently, he asked the physician who he was apprenticed to, Dr. Richard Schneider, whether he could try doing this procedure on either deceased patients or even himself. His requests were summarily dismissed.

Undeterred, Forssman decided to secretly do the procedure on himself. He enlisted the help of a senior nurse, whom he took under his wing, and after much preparation, he slit his brachial vein, which is located in the forearm, and passed a really long piece of tubing (called a ureteric catheter) to his heart.

Excited, he rushed to get an x-ray done for proof when one of his colleagues attempted to stop him by pulling the tubing. Eventually, however, the colleague desisted, and the x-ray was taken. Voila! The door to cardiology opened.

The role of self-experimentation in medicine is currently quite limited. In an evidence-based world, self-experimentation is rife with concerns about validity, reproducibility , and ethics . Nevertheless, historical analysis of self-experimentation is important because it elucidates how we value altruism and human life. It also provides insight into whether researchers would subject themselves to the interventions they design for other human participants.

Altman LK. Who Goes First? The Story of Self-Experimentation in Medicine. University of California Press: Berkeley and Los Angeles; 1998.

Kerridge J. Altruism or reckless curiosity? A brief history of self-experimentation in medicine. Intern Med J. 2003; 33: 203–207. doi:10.1046/j.1445-5994.2003.00337.x

Marshall B. Helicobacter pylori --a Nobel pursuit?. Can J Gastroenterol. 2008;22(11):895–896. doi:10.1155/2008/459810

Weisse AB. Self-experimentation and its role in medical research. Tex Heart Inst J. 2012;39(1):51–54.

Naveed Saleh, M.D., M.S. , attained a medical degree from Wayne State University School of Medicine and a master's degree in science journalism from Texas A&M.

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Gareth Parry and Eric Buenz explore the storied history of scientists using themselves as guinea pigs

Self experimentation is a rich medical tradition, leading to remarkable scientific advances but also erroneous conclusions and, sometimes, death.

Recently we explored the properties of Urtica ferox , a stinging nettle endemic to New Zealand (fig 1). During a collection expedition a 71 year old emeritus neurologist indulged in inadvertent, and subsequently deliberate, self experimentation. His notes of the evolving neurological manifestations after exposure provide clues to the toxin’s mechanism of action that would be difficult to draw without self experimentation (see box 1 for notes).

Self experimentation by an emeritus neurologist. Urtica ferox is a tree nettle growing >2 m tall, endemic to New Zealand (A), with trichomes that contain a putative neurotoxin (B). During a collection expedition and subsequent sample preparation an emeritus neurologist exposed himself to the fluid in the trichomes (C) and recorded the experience in detail (D).

The emeritus professor’s notes after exposure to the neurotoxic stinging nettle

Immediate, moderately severe, burning pain at the site of penetration spread over 5-10 seconds to involve an area 1 cm in diameter. The pain began to subside within five minutes and had resolved within 60 minutes. As the pain subsided paraesthesias appeared that were intense and annoying but not truly painful, and allodynia was noted in the affected area.

Paraesthesias were constant for 18 hours and then became intermittent (particularly triggered by cold) and resolved completely by 48 hours. Numbness developed within 30 minutes of onset of paraesthesias. At nadir, complete loss of cold thermal and light touch sensation was noted, and pin prick thresholds were increased, but hyperalgesia occurred when the threshold was exceeded. At 18 hours the numbness began to recede in severity and extent, and it resolved completely by 72 hours.

Urtica ferox contains several chemicals that may account …

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6 Scientists Who Made Great Discoveries Experimenting on Themselves

Ethics dictates that a scientist should never subject another person to a treatment he would not undergo himself. These researchers took that advice literally.

For centuries, bold and curious scientists have used themselves as guinea pigs in the name of discovery. It was a common practice in the 19th and 20th centuries, especially in the fields of psychology and medicine, as doctors often considered themselves the most reliable witnesses to the effects of a certain drug or other regimen. These days, the practice has fallen out of favor, since a sample size of one falls far short of the standards of a double-blind trial.

But even today, researchers continue to experiment on themselves, sometimes because no ethics board would approve testing on another human, sometimes out of sheer curiosity, and sometimes out of desperation.

Here are six great moments in the history of science conducted on one’s self.

The first big trip.

The First Acid Trip

Chemist Albert Hofmann first synthesized lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), but had no idea of its halluncinogenic powers until 1943, when he accidentally injested a small amount. Realizing his discovery, he did what any good scientist would do and began experimenting on himself. His first purposeful acid trip was on April 19, 1943, when he famously rode his bicycle home while under the influence of the drug.

“Now, little by little I could begin to enjoy the unprecedented colors and plays of shapes that persisted behind my closed eyes,” he wrote of the experience. “Kaleidoscopic, fantastic images surged in on me, alternating, variegated, opening and then closing themselves in circles and spirals, exploding in colored fountains, rearranging and hybridizing themselves in constant flux. It was particularly remarkable how every acoustic perception, such as the sound of a door handle or a passing automobile, became transformed into optical perceptions. Every sound generated a vividly changing image, with its own consistent form and color.”

The Alcoholism Miracle Pill

Olivier Ameisen was a brilliant cardiologist until alcoholism took over his life. None of the available treatments were enough to keep him away from the bottle. It was out of desperation that he took an unconventional tack — experimenting on himself with baclofen, a muscle relaxant that had shown promising results in tests on addicted lab animals. Ameisen upped his dose gradually until he reached a level where his alcohol cravings simply evaporated. He tells the tale in his 2009 book, Heal Thyself .

The face of testicular fortitude.

Ball-Crushingly Strong Anesthesia

In 1898 German surgeon August Bier figured out that a dose of cocaine injected into the spinal fluid could serve as an effective anesthesia. In order to prove it out, he had an assistant, Augustus Hildebrandt, attempt to inject him with the drug. But Hildebrandt messed up, and Bier ended up leaking spinal fluid out of a hole is his neck. Rather than abandon the experiment, the two men switched places and Bier injected Hildebrandt with the cocaine. He proceeded to stab, hammer, and burn his assistant, pulling pubic hair and crushing his testicles. The pair subsequently went out for a boozy dinner, perhaps in an effort to forget that day’s traumatic events.

Effortless Weight Loss

Neuroscientist Michael Graziano recently reported on a weight-loss experiment he performed on himself. The goal was to lose weight without effort. The theory is that, when we deprive ourselves of food through dieting, we elevate our hunger mood, which causes us to eventually give into cravings and eat more than we might have otherwise. Graziano proceeded by avoiding foods that crank up our hunger mood (carbs), welcoming foods that make us feel satiated (fats), and allowing himself to eat until he was full at each meal. The result? Fifty pounds shed over eight months, all without engaging in a battle of willpower.

The Parasitic Allergy Cure

What would it take for you to willingly put parasitic hookworms against your skin, so that they can burrow through your skin, live in your intestines, and feed off your blood? Immunologist-biologist David Pritchard did just that in 2004, all in the name of science. He had a hypothesis that hookworm infections reduce allergy and asthma symptoms, and needed to test on human subjects. He agreed to be the guinea pig, in order to appease his ethics committee. The experiment later allowed for wider testing on humans, who reported miraculous relief of allergy symptoms.

Self surgery is not for the faint of abdomen.

The Coke-Fueled Operation

On 15 February 1921, American surgeon Evan O’Neill Kane was lying on an operating table waiting to have his appendix removed. Suddenly, he had an idea for an experiment: Could he complete the operation on himself? He ordered the doctors and nurses to back off, injected the wall of his abdomen with cocaine and adrenaline, cut himself open and removed the appendix. It took half an hour, and the only mishap was when his intestines popped out from inside him when he leaned too far forward. He recovered quickly.

Anthill 9: When scientists experiment on themselves

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Self-experimentation is something scientists have done since, well, science began. Throughout history, testing a theory on one’s own body was the easiest route to getting an answer.

You may be forgiven for thinking that this is a thing of the past. For starters, a sample size of one is rarely conclusive. Then there are pesky ethical review boards that need to be cleared.

But it turns out self-experimentation is alive and well and the ninth episode of The Anthill features researchers who have engaged in the practice.

First, our health editor Clint Witchalls looks into a field where self-experimentation seems to be growing in popularity – if not respectability. He talks to King’s College London’s Tim Spector about the many diets he’s tried and why more people should get on board with testing out different food regimes .

This month we’re launching a short survey to find out what you, our listeners, think of The Anthill so far. We’d be grateful if you could spare a few minutes of your time to answer a couple of questions about the podcast here .

The second part of the podcast features an academic who took on the persona of the man he was researching . Overwhelmed by the existing number of books written about David Bowie, Kingston University’s Will Brooker decided to take a different approach to learning about his hero.

Instead of just reading about him, Brooker lived as Bowie for a year. He read the books Bowie read, listened to the music he listened to, spent time in the places he lived, and copied his diet at different times in his life. He even employed a vocal coach and performed with tribute band The Thin White Duke. Hear them play, as Brooker shares his experiences of walking in Bowie’s shoes with our arts and culture editor Josephine Lethbridge.

Part three of the podcast returns to science and the efficacy of researchers taking mind-altering substances. Peter Kinderman, a clinical psychologist at the University of Liverpool, tells our science editor Miriam Frankel about how common this kind of self-experimentation is in his field. And Sorcha Uí Chonnachtaigh, a lecturer in ethics and law at Keele University, discusses the ethics of it.

The Anthill theme music is by Alex Grey for Melody Loops . Background music during the nutrition segment is Parisian and Spy Glass , both by Kevin MacLeod. David Bowie music is performed by tribute band The Thin White Duke , with vocals by Will Brooker in the song Let’s Dance. Music during the psychology segment is The Psychedelic And by Six Umbrellas .

A big thanks to City University London’s Department of Journalism for letting us use their studios.

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7 thought experiments that will make you question everything

• Thought experiments provide a platform to examine abstract concepts in a playful and imaginative manner. 
• The best thought experiments challenge our beliefs and offer fresh perspectives on how the world operates by presenting hypothetical situations. 
• These hypothetical situations are often constructed in extremes so we can see how certain ideas might play out — all without suffering any real-world repercussions.

Thought experiments are among the most important tools in the intellectual toolbox. Widely used in many disciplines, thought experiments allow for complex situations to be explored, questions to be raised, and complex ideas to be placed in an understandable context. Here are seven thought experiments in philosophy you might not have heard of, complete with explanations of what they mean and what questions they raise.

Written by Donald Davidson in 1987, this thought experiment raises questions about identity.

Suppose a man is out for a walk one day when a bolt of lightning disintegrates him. Simultaneously, a bolt of lightning strikes a marsh and causes a bunch of molecules to spontaneously rearrange into the same pattern that constituted that man a few moments ago. This “Swampman” has an exact copy of the brain, memories, patterns of behavior as he did. It goes about its day, works, interacts with the man’s friends and is otherwise indistinguishable from him.

Question: Is the Swampman the same person as the disintegrated fellow?

Davidson said no. He argues that while they are physically identical and nobody would ever notice the difference, they don’t share a casual history and can’t be the same. For example, while the Swampman would remember the friends of the disintegrated man, it never saw them before. Another person saw them and the Swampman just has his memories.

There are objections to the idea that the two characters in the story are different. Some argue that the identical minds of Swampman and the original person mean that they are the same person. Others, like philosopher Daniel Dennett, argue that the entire experiment is too far removed from reality to be meaningful.

This raises problems for teleportation as seen on Star Trek and for those who want to download their brains into a computer. Both cases rely on one version of you being created and one disappearing, but is the second version of you still you ?

Thompson’s violinist

This one was written by Judith Thomson in her 1971 essay A Defense of Abortion . She writes: “You wake up in the morning and find yourself back to back in bed with an unconscious violinist. A famous unconscious violinist. He has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help. They have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist’s circulatory system was plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own. If he is unplugged from you now, he will die; but in nine months he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you”

Question: Are you obligated to keep the musician alive, or do you cut him loose and let him die because you want to?

Thompson, who has several excellent thought experiments to her name, says no. Not because the violinist isn’t a person with rights, but rather because he has no right to your body and the life-preserving functions that it provides. Thompson then expands her reasoning to argue that a fetus also lacks the rights to another person’s body and can be evicted at any time.

Her argument is subtle, however. She doesn’t say you have a right to kill him, only to stop him from using your body to stay alive. His resultant death is viewed as a separate, yet related, event that you have no obligation to prevent.

The Veil of Ignorance

This experiment was devised by John Rawls in 1971 to explore notions of justice in his book A Theory of Justice.

Suppose that you and a group of people had to decide on the principles that would establish a new society. However, none of you know anything about who you will be in that society. Elements such as your race, income level, sex, gender, religion, and personal preferences are all unknown to you. After you decide on those principles, you will then be turned out into the society you established.

Question: How would that society turn out? What does that mean for our society now?

Rawls argues that in this situation we can’t know what our self-interest is so we cannot pursue it. Without that guidepost, he suggests that we would all try to create a fair society with equal rights and economic security for the poor both out of moral considerations and as a means to secure the best possible worst-case scenario for us when we step outside that veil. Others disagree, arguing that we would seek only to maximize our freedom or assure perfect equality

This raises questions for the current state of our society, as it suggests we allow self-interest to get in the way of progressing towards a just society. Rawls’ ideas about the just society are fascinating and can be delved into here .

The Experience Machine

Robert Nozick came up with this thought experiment, which appears in his book Anarchy, State, and Utopia.

Imagine that super neuroscientists have created a machine that can simulate pleasurable experiences for the rest of your life. The simulation is ultra-realistic and indistinguishable from reality. There are no adverse side effects, and specific pleasurable experiences can even be programmed into the simulation. Regarding pleasure experienced, the machine offers more than is possible in several lifetimes.

Question: Do we have any reason to not go in?

Nozick argues that if we have any reason to not get in then hedonistic utilitarianism, the idea that pleasure is the only good and that we ought to maximize it, is false. Many people value having real experiences or being a person who does things rather than dreams about doing them. No matter what the reason, if you don’t go in you can’t claim pleasure is the only good, and Nozick thinks most people won’t go in.

There are counter-arguments, however. Some hedonists argue that people really would go into the machine or that we have a status quo bias that leads us to treat the reality we are currently in as more important than other, better ones. In either case, the experiment does present us with a problem for those who argue we only want pleasure.

Mary’s Room

In 1982, philosopher Frank Jackson proposed this thought experiment that raises questions about the nature of knowledge.

Mary lives in a black and white room, reads black and white books, and uses screens that only display images in black and white to learn everything that has ever been discovered about color vision in physics and biology. One day, her computer screen breaks and displays the color red. For the first time, she sees color.

Question: Does she learn anything new?

If she does, then it shows that qualia, individual occurrences of subjective elements of experience, exist; as she had access to all possible information other than experience before she saw the color but still learned something new.

This has implications for what knowledge and mental states are. Because if she learns something new then mental states, like seeing color, can’t be described entirely by physical facts. There would have to be more to it, something subjective and dependent on experience.

If she doesn’t learn anything new, then we would have to apply the idea that knowing physical facts is identical to experiencing something everywhere. For example, we would have to say that knowing all about echolocation is similar to knowing what it is like to use it.

This experiment is unique of the ones on this list as the author later changed their mind and argued that Mary seeing red doesn’t count as evidence that qualia exist. However, the problems posed by the experiment remain widely debated.

Buridan’s Ass

Variations on this experiment date back to antiquity, this formulation was named after the philosopher Jean Buridan, whose views on determinism it ridicules.

Imagine a donkey placed precisely between two identical bales of hay. The donkey has no free will, and always acts in the most rational manner. However, as both bales are equidistant from the donkey and offer the same nourishment, neither choice is better than the other.

Question: How can it choose? Does it choose at all, or does it stand still until it starves?

If choices are made based on which action is the more rational one or on other environmental factors, the ass will starve to death trying to decide on which to eat- as both options are equally rational and indistinguishable from one another. If the ass does make a choice, then the facts of the matter couldn’t be all that determined the outcome, so some element of random chance or free will may have been involved.

It poses a problem for deterministic theories as it does seem absurd to suppose that the ass would stand still forever. Determinists remain split on the problem that the ass poses. Spinoza famously dismissed it while others accept that the donkey would starve to death. Others argue that there is always some element of a choice that differentiates it from another one.

The life you can save

This experiment was written by famed utilitarian thinker Peter Singer in 2009.

Imagine that you are walking down the street and notice a child drowning in a lake. You can swim and are close enough to save her if you act immediately. However, doing so ruins your expensive shoes. Do you still have an obligation to save the child?

Singer says yes, you have a responsibility to save the life of a dying child and price is no object. If you agree with him, it leads to his question.

Question: If you are obligated to save the life of a child in need, is there a fundamental difference between saving a child in front of you and one on the other side of the world?

In The Life You Can Save, Singer argues that there is no moral difference between a child drowning in front of you and one starving in some far off land. The cost of the ruined shoes in the experiment is analogous to the cost of a donation, and if the value of the shoes is irrelevant than the price of charity is too. If you would save the nearby child, he reasons, you have to save the distant one too . He put his money where his mouth is, and started a program to help people donate to charities that do the most good .

There are counter-arguments of course. Most of them rely on the idea that a drowning child is in a different sort of situation than a child who is starving and that they require different solutions which impose different obligations.

Social Psychology Experiments: 10 Of The Most Famous Studies

Ten of the most influential social psychology experiments explain why we sometimes do dumb or irrational things. 

Ten of the most influential social psychology experiments explain why we sometimes do dumb or irrational things.

“I have been primarily interested in how and why ordinary people do unusual things, things that seem alien to their natures. Why do good people sometimes act evil? Why do smart people sometimes do dumb or irrational things?” –Philip Zimbardo

Like famous social psychologist Professor Philip Zimbardo (author of The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil ), I’m also obsessed with why we do dumb or irrational things.

The answer quite often is because of other people — something social psychologists have comprehensively shown.

Each of the 10 brilliant social psychology experiments below tells a unique, insightful story relevant to all our lives, every day.

Click the link in each social psychology experiment to get the full description and explanation of each phenomenon.

1. Social Psychology Experiments: The Halo Effect

The halo effect is a finding from a famous social psychology experiment.

It is the idea that global evaluations about a person (e.g. she is likeable) bleed over into judgements about their specific traits (e.g. she is intelligent).

It is sometimes called the “what is beautiful is good” principle, or the “physical attractiveness stereotype”.

It is called the halo effect because a halo was often used in religious art to show that a person is good.

2. Cognitive Dissonance

Cognitive dissonance is the mental discomfort people feel when trying to hold two conflicting beliefs in their mind.

People resolve this discomfort by changing their thoughts to align with one of conflicting beliefs and rejecting the other.

The study provides a central insight into the stories we tell ourselves about why we think and behave the way we do.

3. Robbers Cave Experiment: How Group Conflicts Develop

The Robbers Cave experiment was a famous social psychology experiment on how prejudice and conflict emerged between two group of boys.

It shows how groups naturally develop their own cultures, status structures and boundaries — and then come into conflict with each other.

For example, each country has its own culture, its government, legal system and it draws boundaries to differentiate itself from neighbouring countries.

One of the reasons the became so famous is that it appeared to show how groups could be reconciled, how peace could flourish.

The key was the focus on superordinate goals, those stretching beyond the boundaries of the group itself.

4. Social Psychology Experiments: The Stanford Prison Experiment

The Stanford prison experiment was run to find out how people would react to being made a prisoner or prison guard.

The psychologist Philip Zimbardo, who led the Stanford prison experiment, thought ordinary, healthy people would come to behave cruelly, like prison guards, if they were put in that situation, even if it was against their personality.

It has since become a classic social psychology experiment, studied by generations of students and recently coming under a lot of criticism.

5. The Milgram Social Psychology Experiment

The Milgram experiment , led by the well-known psychologist Stanley Milgram in the 1960s, aimed to test people’s obedience to authority.

The results of Milgram’s social psychology experiment, sometimes known as the Milgram obedience study, continue to be both thought-provoking and controversial.

The Milgram experiment discovered people are much more obedient than you might imagine.

Fully 63 percent of the participants continued administering what appeared like electric shocks to another person while they screamed in agony, begged to stop and eventually fell silent — just because they were told to.

6. The False Consensus Effect

The false consensus effect is a famous social psychological finding that people tend to assume that others agree with them.

It could apply to opinions, values, beliefs or behaviours, but people assume others think and act in the same way as they do.

It is hard for many people to believe the false consensus effect exists because they quite naturally believe they are good ‘intuitive psychologists’, thinking it is relatively easy to predict other people’s attitudes and behaviours.

In reality, people show a number of predictable biases, such as the false consensus effect, when estimating other people’s behaviour and its causes.

7. Social Psychology Experiments: Social Identity Theory

Social identity theory helps to explain why people’s behaviour in groups is fascinating and sometimes disturbing.

People gain part of their self from the groups they belong to and that is at the heart of social identity theory.

The famous theory explains why as soon as humans are bunched together in groups we start to do odd things: copy other members of our group, favour members of own group over others, look for a leader to worship and fight other groups.

8. Negotiation: 2 Psychological Strategies That Matter Most

Negotiation is one of those activities we often engage in without quite realising it.

Negotiation doesn’t just happen in the boardroom, or when we ask our boss for a raise or down at the market, it happens every time we want to reach an agreement with someone.

In a classic, award-winning series of social psychology experiments, Morgan Deutsch and Robert Krauss investigated two central factors in negotiation: how we communicate with each other and how we use threats.

9. Bystander Effect And The Diffusion Of Responsibility

The bystander effect in social psychology is the surprising finding that the mere presence of other people inhibits our own helping behaviours in an emergency.

The bystander effect social psychology experiments are mentioned in every psychology textbook and often dubbed ‘seminal’.

This famous social psychology experiment on the bystander effect was inspired by the highly publicised murder of Kitty Genovese in 1964.

It found that in some circumstances, the presence of others inhibits people’s helping behaviours — partly because of a phenomenon called diffusion of responsibility.

10. Asch Conformity Experiment: The Power Of Social Pressure

The Asch conformity experiments — some of the most famous every done — were a series of social psychology experiments carried out by noted psychologist Solomon Asch.

The Asch conformity experiment reveals how strongly a person’s opinions are affected by people around them.

In fact, the Asch conformity experiment shows that many of us will deny our own senses just to conform with others.

Author: Dr Jeremy Dean

Psychologist, Jeremy Dean, PhD is the founder and author of PsyBlog. He holds a doctorate in psychology from University College London and two other advanced degrees in psychology. He has been writing about scientific research on PsyBlog since 2004. View all posts by Dr Jeremy Dean

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Self-Experimentation and Its Role in Medical Research

Although experimentation involving human volunteers has attracted intense study, the matter of self-experimentation among medical researchers has received much less attention. Many questions have been answered only in part, or have been left unanswered. How common is this practice? Is it more common among certain nationalities? What have been the predominant medical fields in which self-experimentation has occurred? How dangerous an act has this proved to be? What have been the trends over time? What is the future likely to bring?

From the available literature, I identified and analyzed 465 documented instances of this practice, performed over the course of the past 2 centuries. Most instances occurred in the United States. The peak of self-experimentation occurred in the first half of the 20th century. Eight deaths were recorded. A number of the investigators enjoyed successful careers, including the receipt of Nobel Prizes. Although self-experimentation by physicians and other biological scientists appears to be in decline, the courage of those involved and the benefits to society cannot be denied.

The medical literature of the last half century or more abounds with reports of malpractice and misadventure in the form of experiments involving patients and other susceptible groups, such as the poor, students, convicts, and victims of the Holocaust; yet little has been written about self -experimentation and even less about the need to curtail it—for better or for worse.

For the general public and for most doctors, I suspect, the first thing to come to mind when self-experimentation is mentioned is Walter Reed's Yellow Fever Commission in Cuba in 1900 and its plan to allow mosquitoes suspected of harboring the deadly disease to bite Commission members, thus to demonstrate the mode of transmission. The ensuing public recognition of Reed above that of his colleagues is ironic, because Reed left for Washington, D.C., on the day after the pact was made and never himself submitted to the experiment. James Carroll was bitten and developed yellow fever, the consequence of which was chronic ill health for the rest of his life. Also bitten was Jesse Lazear, who died of the disease. The fourth member of the commission, Aristides Agramonte, was excluded from the experiment because he had recovered from a bout of yellow fever and was assumed to have acquired immunity. 1

The yellow fever experiment is often presented as a heroic episode in medicine, although some will argue that it was more foolhardy than heroic. Perhaps there are elements of both in such ventures.

In contrast to the experience of the Reed Commission, the overwhelming majority of medical self-experiments have been performed by single individuals in relative isolation, and not by a committee acting under fiat. The first truly systematic study of self-experimentation, to the best of my knowledge, appeared in Lawrence Altman's book Who Goes First? , published in 1987. 2 In this work, Altman artfully recorded over a hundred examples of this practice. A more recent source, Arsen Fiks's Self Experimenters: Sources for Study 3 (2003), contains several hundred additional examples of self-experimentation. The title of the book is quite explicit, for Fiks does not provide details or interpretations: he simply lists names, dates, and very brief descriptions of procedures and outcomes.

From these 2 sources, I extracted 514 examples of this practice. In order to determine trends over time, I discarded the 49 examples antedating 1800 and divided, into 50-year time periods, the remaining 465 episodes that occurred over the next 2 centuries. The areas of interest comprised 6 categories: infectious diseases (including vaccines), anesthesiology (general and local), physiology, pharmacology, radiology (including x-rays and other radiation sources), and oncology. The representation of each over the entire 2 centuries is illustrated in Figure 1 . Infectious diseases is the most strongly represented, followed by anesthesiology, physiology, and pharmacology, with radiology and oncology at the lower end.

Fig. 1 Categories of the 465 instances of self-experimentation, 1800–1999. Anesth. = anesthesia; ID = infectious diseases; Oncol. = oncology; Pharm. = pharmacology; Physiol. = physiology; Radiol. = radiology

Table I shows a more detailed breakdown over the four 50-year periods. For some categories, the influence of the medical trends of a particular time is mirrored in the results. In anesthesiology, for example, the introduction of general anesthesia in the 1830s and 1840s, followed by the adoption of local anesthesia during the 1880s, is reflected by a sizable number of self-experiments during the first two 50-year periods. As these anesthetic methods were absorbed into standard medical practice, the number of self-experiments in the field fell off sharply. Roentgen did not discover x-rays until 1895, and the Curies did not isolate radium until 1902. Unsurprisingly, there were no instances of self-experimentation along these lines until the third 50-year period, when a flurry of such instances occurred. The number fell off sharply in the final period. In contrast to these 2 fields of endeavor, attempts involving infectious diseases, pharmacology, and physiology are well represented over the entire 2 centuries. Surprisingly, attempts at self-experimentation in oncology were few throughout the entire period. The total number of self-experiments peaked at 189 in the first half of the 20th century, falling sharply to 82 during the final period observed.

TABLE I. Changing Trends in Self-Experimentation, 1800–1999

Who Performed This Kind of Research? Given the social and professional strictures of the times, women were in a distinct minority among these self-experimenters. Only 12 women could be identified, 5 of them Russian. What about the nationalities of the group as a whole? The nation most prominently represented was the United States (33% of the total), followed by Germany (15%), the United Kingdom (13%), Russia (11%), and France (8%), with lower representations among countries in the remaining 20%.

Were These Individuals Remarkable in Any Other Way? It turns out that 12 actually received one type of Nobel Prize or another, the most recent one going to Barry Marshall in 2005 after his ingestion of a Helicobacter culture to demonstrate in his own stomach how it might cause gastrointestinal disease ( Table II ). Five of these Nobel recipients won for work unrelated to their self-experimentation. These were Ramsay, who exposed himself to various gases to determine their anesthetic properties; Metchnikoff, who injected himself with blood containing relapsing fever spirochetes; Lawrence, who drank a solution containing radioactive sodium; de Hevesy, who drank a solution containing heavy water to monitor its elimination from the body; and Schweitzer, who submitted himself to an unproven yellow fever vaccine to determine any side effects.

TABLE II. Nobel Prizes Awarded to Self-Experimenters

In a remarkable 89% of instances, the self-experiments obtained positive results in support of a hypothesis or valuable data that had been sought. In the remaining studies in which results were either negative or inconclusive, some of the negative results could be viewed as beneficial in directing investigators into more fruitful avenues of research.

At What Cost Were These Results Obtained? Of course the clearest negative endpoint was the death of the scientist as a direct result of his self-experiment. Eight such deaths are indicated in Table III , all but one of them the result of infectious diseases. In the case of Alexander Bogdanov, it seems most likely that what killed him was a severe immunologic reaction to the multiple blood transfusions to which he subjected himself. Although death directly related to the intervention was obvious, there were instances in which a severe acute illness occurred. Then, after initial recovery was noted, long-term disability sometimes ensued. Some delayed effects of experiments involving radioactivity are also worth noting. For example, Marie Curie's death at age 67 from leukemia was almost surely related to her exposure during the course of her career. As mentioned above, James Carroll experienced ill health for the remainder of his life, despite his recovery from an acute attack of yellow fever.

TABLE III. Deaths from Self-Experimentation, 1800–1999

What Has Been the Role of Self-Experimentation in Cardiovascular Disease? Its application in this particular field has been limited in number but enormously important in impact. Some lesser examples include that of Henry C. Bazett, who used himself as a subject in the study of pulse-wave velocity (1921). Hermann Blumgart injected himself with radon in 1927 to study the velocity of blood flow. Waldo E. Cohn performed a similar self-experiment with radioactive sodium about a decade later.

The most dramatic and influential self-experiment in cardiology was that of Werner Forssmann, who, in 1929, inserted a catheter into his own antecubital vein and passed it retrogradely into the right atrium, documenting this achievement by an x-ray of his chest taken at the time. 2 Some years earlier, in 1911 and 1912, Fritz Bleichroeder had inserted catheters into peripheral vessels, his own as well as those of others, and claimed to have reached his own heart with the tip of a catheter at one point. However, there was no radiographic documentation of this, which leaves Forssmann's claim to priority unassailable. Together with Dickinson Richards and André Cournand of New York, who popularized the technique in the early 1940s, Forssmann received the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology in 1956.

Fiks lists others who later subjected themselves to cardiac catheterization in pursuit of their research: Robert A. Bruce, Howard B. Burchell, and Eugene Stead. He mistakenly includes Cournand, who, much to his personal chagrin and regret, never offered himself as a subject. 2 As I looked further into the history of heart catheterization, specifically in the context of self-experimentation, I learned that Fiks overlooked several other individuals. At the Mayo Clinic, not only did Burchell undergo voluntary heart catheterization, but Drs. H.F. “Fred” Helmholz and Earl H. Wood did so as well. * Stead's paper 4 mentions another physician volunteer, in addition to himself, but that person is not further identified.

I recalled my own entry into the field of cardiovascular research as a fellow at the University of Utah School of Medicine (1961–1963). While there, I gained the impression that a number of senior cardiologists, in setting up their laboratories, also had undergone cardiac catheterization. I suspected that, at some laboratories, this might even have been a rite of passage for tyros such as I, although this period was at least a decade or more before my time. What was going on here?

For a better understanding of the ethics involved, I turned to the field of immunology and the development of vaccines. In Saul Benison's oral-history memoir of the curmudgeonly Tom Rivers, a leading virologist at the Rockefeller Foundation from 1922 through 1955, I found the quotation I sought: “I know that if anyone ever came up to me and asked me to take an untried vaccine, I'd ask ‘Have you taken it?’ and, by God, if that person said ‘No,’ I'd tell him to go to hell.” 5

To confirm the safety of their products, the developers of vaccines were expected to subject not only themselves to inoculation, but their immediate personal and professional families. Rivers noted that Salk administered his vaccine to himself and to his wife and children, before field trials were begun. Similarly, Albert B. Sabin, father of the oral polio vaccine, administered it to his wife and daughters, as well as to their playmates, before administering it to hundreds and then thousands of others in field trial. *

In essence, therefore, it is probable that many cardiologists of the time, with no public fanfare, had themselves catheterized as they set up their hemodynamic laboratories. One stated reason for this was the need to obtain normal values for use of the newly established facilities. However, I believe they also did so to assure themselves and others of the safety of the procedure—a case of developing a familiarity that would breed not contempt, but con- tent. This attitude was still probably alive and well in more recent times. When Andreas Gruentzig introduced coronary angioplasty at Emory University's medical school in 1980, he himself underwent coronary arteriography to demonstrate to his new chief his belief in the safety of the procedure. ** Such revelations engender in me, perhaps anachronistically, the feeling of camaraderie that one experiences in contributing to a research enterprise and in partaking, even a little, in the adventure of discovery.

What is the current status of self-experimentation and what might its role be in the future? Will there be any efforts to restrain or regulate this activity? In preparation for this article, I sent letters of inquiry to a number of authors who had published on the subject of human experimentation, but no new information was forthcoming.

Occasional conferences, such as that at the Harvard School of Public Health in 2004, are held to discuss the pros and cons of self-experimentation. Aside from my discovery that some institutional review boards might not approve any research proposals involving this practice, I have learned of no other new guidelines or regulations that have emerged from such conferences. I wrote to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the National Institutes of Health, and the Institute of Medicine, also without success.

Surely those pharmaceutical giants responsible for the preparation and introduction of vaccines might have something to offer, I thought. My letter to Novartis was answered by a detailed reply, which assured me that, for all their products, the company followed strict FDA guidelines, informed-consent procedures, and institutional review board oversight, including the close monitoring of any clinical activity. ***

The trend in recent years toward collaborative studies, often on a massive scale, makes self-experimentation by a single individual, tucked away in his laboratory, seem almost quaint, a relic of the past. However, advances in medicine are not often made by panels of recognized “experts.” Rivers 5 has called this “gang or group research.” He goes on to say, “Great discoveries are not made by committees or groups of workers; they originate in the minds of single individuals … I know of no important discovery in medicine or biology in the last hundred years that evolved out of gang research. You can do a hell of a lot of scut work by gang research, but the ideas for discovery are still going to come from the ideas in one man's mind. In other words, you can hire men but not ideas.”

Perhaps as we progress into a new era of molecular biology, which is characterized by the development of increasingly complex methods of research, the need for self-experimentation will vanish. My own conclusion is that, despite some unwise decisions in the past to indulge in this activity, many self-experiments have proved invaluable to the medical community and to the patients we are seeking to help. Therefore, rather than scorn such intrepid colleagues in their search for truth, I am inclined to salute them.

* Interview with Dr. Sabin by ABW, 27 July 1987.

** Personal communication (e-mail) from J. Willis Hurst to ABW, 27 February 2011.

*** Letter from Clement Lewin (of Novartis) to ABW, 23 July 2010.

Address for reprints : Allen B. Weisse, MD, 164 Hillside Ave., Springfield, NJ 07081

E-mail : ude.jndmu@baessiew

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Early life and work

The bobo doll experiment, testimony on the effects of televised violence, later life and work.

Albert Bandura

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Albert Bandura (born December 4, 1925, Mundare, Alberta , Canada—died July 26, 2021, Stanford, California , U.S.) was a Canadian-born American psychologist and originator of social cognitive theory who is probably best known for his modeling study on aggression , referred to as the “Bobo doll” experiment , which demonstrated that children can learn behaviours through the observation of adults.

Bandura was the youngest of six children born to parents of eastern European descent. His father was from Kraków, Poland, and his mother from Ukraine; both immigrated to Canada as adolescents. After marrying, they settled in Mundare, Alberta, where Bandura’s father worked laying track for the trans-Canada railroad.

After graduating from high school in 1946, Bandura pursued a bachelor’s degree at the University of British Columbia and in 1949 graduated with the Bolocan Award in psychology , annually awarded to the outstanding student in psychology. He then did graduate work at the University of Iowa , where he received a master’s degree in psychology (1951) and a doctorate in clinical psychology (1952).

In 1953 Bandura accepted a one-year instructorship at Stanford University , where he quickly secured a professorship. In 1974 he was named the David Starr Jordan Professor of Social Science in Psychology, and two years later he became chairman of the psychology department. He remained at Stanford, becoming professor emeritus in 2010.

In 1961 Bandura carried out his famous Bobo doll experiment , a study in which researchers physically and verbally abused a clown-faced inflatable toy in front of preschool-age children, which led the children to later mimic the behaviour of the adults by attacking the doll in the same fashion. Subsequent experiments in which children were exposed to such violence on videotape yielded similar results.

In the late 1960s, prompted by the media’s graphic coverage of the assassination of U.S. Sen. Robert F. Kennedy together with increased reports of children incurring serious injuries during attempted replications of dangerous behaviours depicted in television advertisements, the potential effects of television violence on children became a growing public concern. Because of his related research, Bandura was invited to testify before the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the Eisenhower Commission , and several congressional committees as to the evidence that televised violence affects aggressive behaviour . His testimony played a role in the FTC’s decision to render as unacceptable portrayals of children engaging in risky activities—such as pounding one another in the head with mallets in an advertisement for headache medication—and subsequently to pass new advertising standards.

Bandura was the first to demonstrate (1977) that self-efficacy, the belief in one’s own capabilities, has an effect on what individuals choose to do, the amount of effort they put into doing it, and the way they feel as they are doing it. Bandura also discovered that learning occurs both through those beliefs and through social modeling—thereby originating social cognitive theory (1986), which holds that a person’s environment , cognition, and behaviour all interact to determine how that person functions, as opposed to one of those factors playing a dominant role.

Bandura received numerous awards for his contributions to the field of psychology, including the American Psychological Association (APA) Award for Outstanding Lifetime Contribution to Psychology (2004), the American Psychological Foundation’s Gold Medal Award for distinguished lifetime contribution to psychological science (2006), and the University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Psychology (2008; carrying a $200,000 prize) for his groundbreaking work in self-efficacy and cognitive theory. In 2016 he received the National Medal of Science. Bandura also held many organizational memberships and positions, including APA president (1974) and American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS) fellow (1980).

Bandura was associated for many years with a variety of academic journals, including the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology , Applied Psychology , Media Psychology , Cognitive Therapy and Research , Behavior Research and Therapy , and Social Behavior and Personality . He also authored, coauthored, or edited a number of books, including Adolescent Aggression (1959), Principles of Behavior Modification (1969), Aggression: A Social Learning Analysis (1973), Social Learning Theory (1977), and Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm and Live with Themselves (2016). In 2002 the Review of General Psychology ranked Bandura as the fourth most eminent psychologist of the 20th century, following B.F. Skinner , Jean Piaget , and Sigmund Freud .

Cookie Test Yields Secrets of Self-Control Years Later

Imagine hundreds of 4-year-olds each alone in a room with a delectable cookie or a scrumptious marshmallow. Before they reach for the enticing confection, an experimenter offers them a choice: they can have one right away, or get two if they just wait. Can they resist sweet temptation for 15 agonizing minutes, or do they surrender to instant gratification?

This simple test of willpower, and follow-up studies for years afterward, has uncovered a host of insights on how self-control, or the lack thereof, might influence lives.

Now, decades after the marshmallow experiment started, by analyzing the first batch of these children, long since grown up, scientists have pinpointed brain circuits underlying willpower . Such research could help discover new ways to improve self-control, potentially helping to fight addiction and obesity, scientists suggested.

Want a cookie?

More than 600 children took part in the marshmallow experiment nearly 40 years ago, conceived of by psychologist Walter Mischel of Stanford University and his colleagues.

"Sometimes experimenters had not even finished talking about the experiment when the kids already ate the marshmallow or cookie," said cognitive neuroscientist B.J. Casey at Weill Cornell Medical College, who has taken part in follow-up studies on this work. "Other 4-year-olds were able to wait by sitting on their hands and turning away, or creating imaginary friends to distract them."

Since Mischel's daughters attended nursery school with many of these children in the study, he began noticing that whether or not the kids delayed gratification appeared linked with many other factors in their lives. Kids who succumbed quickly to temptation often had lower SAT scores, a higher body-mass index and a slightly increased risk of substance abuse later on. [ 10 Easy Paths to Self Destruction ]

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Casey refers to those who quickly gave in as low-delayers and those who can delay gratification high-delayers.

"Now, you're not doomed to a bad life if you're in the low-delay group — those results are the average across the whole group, and not true for everyone within," Casey stressed. "Personally, I think we need both low-delayers and high-delayers. High-delayers are more methodical, while low-delayers are more drawn to interesting new or alluring things. If you need explorers, low-delayers might be where to look."

Willpower on the brain

Now, with the advent of advanced brain-imaging techniques, researchers wanted to see if they could learn more about the roots of willpower in the brain from the original experimental group, now middle-aged. However, first they had to find out if these differences were still present. Since marshmallows and cookies are much less enticing to most adults than 4-year-olds, the scientists devised a new test of impulse control.

Casey, Mischel and their colleagueschose nearly 60 volunteers who scored in the extremes from the original group — either they gave in quickly or held out the entire time. The researchers had them perform a task where they where shown fearful or happy facial expressions and had to push the button when they saw one but not the other.

The happy faces  essentially served as marshmallows — people generally prefer happy faces to others, and are more apt to push buttons for them even when they are not supposed to. "We found the same individuals who had trouble delaying gratification 40 years ago still had trouble doing it now," Casey told LiveScience. "It really blew me away that we saw a trait that seemed so stable — they couldn't stop themselves at 4, and still can't stop themselves at more than 40."

By scanning the brains of these volunteers during the task with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the researchers found "this deep structure in the brain, the ventral striatum, was involved, one associated with how we process rewards and has been linked with addiction," Casey said. "We think it's sensitive to cues a person might think are essentially salient to themselves, and so novelty seekers get pulled in."

Now that scientists have the technology to understand this trait and its possible origins in the brain, this finding "is just the first step of more to come," Casey said.

For instance, other research of Mischel and his colleagues have shown tactics 4-year-olds could employ to help resist temptation , "such as thinking of marshmallows as clouds or cookies as pictures," Casey said. "We could see if training how people pay attention to things helps them regulate their behavior, which could help with the obesity epidemic or with addiction research."

Mischel and Casey, with Yuichi Shoda and their colleagues, detailed their findings online today (Aug. 29) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Follow LiveScience for the latest in science news and discoveries on Twitter @livescience   and on Facebook .

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Benjamin Franklin’s Kite Experiment: What Do We Know?

By: Becky Little

Updated: June 14, 2023 | Original: June 6, 2022

On June 10, 1752, Benjamin Franklin took a kite out during a storm to see if a key attached to the string would draw an electrical charge. Or so the story goes. In fact, historians aren’t quite sure about the date of Franklin’s famous experiment, and some have questioned whether it took place at all.

Even if Franklin’s kite and key experiment did happen, it didn’t play out the way many people think it did. Contrary to popular myths, Franklin didn’t conduct the experiment to prove the existence of electricity. In addition, it’s very unlikely that lightning struck a key while Franklin was flying a kite—because if it had, Franklin probably would have died.

Franklin Didn't Write Much About the Experiment

Everything we know about Franklin’s kite and key experiment comes from two sources . The first is a letter Franklin wrote to his friend Peter Collinson in October 1752 that was published in the The Pennsylvania Gazette and read before the Royal Society. The second is a section of Joseph Priestley’s 1767 book History and Present Status of Electricity , in which Priestley recounted what Franklin had presumably told him about the experiment.

In the letter, Franklin wrote that an “Experiment has succeeded in Philadelphia” using a kite and key, and detailed how one could go about reproducing the experiment. He didn’t specify when the experiment took place or whether he had actually conducted it. Fifteen years later, Priestley provided some more details, writing that 46-year-old Franklin and his 22-year-old son William had conducted the experiment sometime in June 1752.

Scholars of Franklin have speculated that the experiment occurred around June 10, though no one really knows what date it happened on. Some have theorized that it occurred later in 1752, while others have questioned whether it happened at all, or at least acknowledged that there is room for doubt.

“The episode of the kite, so firm and fixed in legend, turns out to be dim and mystifying in fact,” wrote Carl Van Doren in his 1939 Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, Benjamin Franklin . The legendary aspect of the kite and key experiment has led many people believe, incorrectly, that it marked the discovery of electricity.

Ben Franklin Didn't Discover Electricity

Electricity was already a known phenomenon during the mid-18th century. There were, however, debates about the nature of this phenomenon, and Franklin was one of a group of philosophers and scientists who theorized that lightning was a form of electricity.

In March 1750, Franklin wrote a letter to his friend Collinson about his idea for a lightning rod. That July, he published an idea for an experiment using a lightning rod to try and catch an electrical charge in a “leyden jar,” a storage container for electrical charges, thus demonstrating that lightning was a form of electricity.

Franklin’s ideas circulated in Europe, and in May 1752, two French scientists—Thomas Dalibard and M. Delor—separately carried out successful versions of Franklin’s experiment. According to Priestley, Franklin hadn’t yet heard of these successes in June 1752, when he was waiting on the construction of a spire to conduct his own lightning rod experiment.

Apparently, Franklin decided that instead of waiting for the spire, he could test his theory by flying a kite with a key attached to its string when he sensed an approaching thunderstorm. “[D]reading the ridicule which too commonly attends unsuccessful attempts in science, he communicated his intended experiment to noone but his son, who assisted him in raising the kite,” Priestley wrote.

Ben Franklin Didn't Get Struck By Lightning

So what would this experiment have actually looked like? Although many artists have tried to depict it, “most of the pictures and drawings that you see depicting Franklin in this experiment are inaccurate,” says Harold D. Wallace Jr. , a curator in the division of work and industry at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.

“They show Franklin standing out in the middle of a field,” he says, “whereas most likely he and William were inside some kind of shed or lean-to or something to keep them from getting rained on, in case the rain did start.” (Franklin likely started the experiment after sensing lightning in the air, but before any rain began to fall, says Wallace.)

Franklin’s goal probably wasn’t for the kite and key to get struck by lightning; and indeed, Priestley never claimed that they were struck by lightning. If they had been , Franklin would’ve almost certainly died or at least been seriously injured (in 1753, the German scientist Georg Wilhelm Reichmann died while trying to conduct Franklin’s lightning rod experiment).

What probably happened is that the key picked up some ambient electrical charge from the storm. Priestley wrote that Franklin touched the key and felt the charge, confirming he had caught some electricity from the lightning.

Even if Franklin never actually performed the kite and key experiment, he did come up with the lightning rod idea that others tested. Together, these experiments helped prove that lightning was a form of electricity that people could harness, both to protect tall buildings from damage and to perform more experiments.

“The idea of mitigating natural dangers is such a big game changer,” says Michael Madeja , head of education programs at the American Philosophical Society Library and Museum. “The lightning rod also helped provide a decent source of charge for things like leyden jars or other electrical experiments.”

<strong>HISTORY Vault:</strong> <strong> Benjamin Franklin: Citizen of the World</strong>

Revealing portrait of the Revolutionary War leader and self-educated Renaissance man, renowned as a scientist, inventor, writer, philosopher, statesman, and diplomat.

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10 More Crazy Self-Experiments In The Name Of Science

In the world of science, using other people and animals as test subjects is very useful, but sometimes if you want to get something done right, you have to do it yourself. The following list contains stories of self-experimentation, all done in the name of science. Some experiments ended in great breakthroughs being made, while others ended in disaster.

10 The Human Crash-Test Dummy

Using a massive rocket sled decelerator known as the “Gee Wiz,” Stapp was able to prove that humans could withstand 46 times the force of gravity using the correct harness. The G-forces were ramped up at a rate of 500 Gs per second (he later did another trial up to 38 Gs at a rate of 1,300 Gs per second ). Of course, just because he was alive didn’t mean his body was happy about it: he suffered broken limbs, ribs, a detached retina, burst blood vessels, and an array of other injuries . In his experiments on the effects of altitude sickness and decompression sickness, this human crash-test dummy decided to strip down his B-17 bomber and fly at 13,700 meters (45,000 ft) altitude for 65 hours with an open cockpit in a depressurized cabin. In doing so, Stapp subjected himself to 570 mph winds.

He discovered that if pilots inhaled pure oxygen for 30 minutes before take off, they could handle insanely high altitudes much better. He was able to develop a sideways-facing harness, lap belt, and shoulder strap on fighter seats for greater safety. His discoveries also led to the requirement of seatbelts in cars.

9 Self-Surgery (Appendectomy)

While Kane did have a history of performing self-operations like amputating one of his fingers, this surgery was the first of its kind. Ether was a popular general anesthetic used in the day, but Kane felt it was too dangerous and wished to see the effects of Novocain as a local anesthetic. After he dosed himself up with Novocain, Kane got to work on removing his appendix with the use of mirrors. The operation at the time required a much larger incision than today, making it significantly more dangerous. Despite the risks, the 60-year-old had completed the surgery over 4,000 times on other patients. This operation was no different: he was up and moving the next day. The operation lasted just 30 minutes and the only scary moment occurred when his intestine popped out because of how he was sitting.

Ten years later, at the age of 70, Kane was also able to repair his own hernia. This operation was especially dangerous because of how close the incisions were to his femoral artery. Unfortunately, other complications got to him, and a bad case of pneumonia killed him within a few months.

8 The Human Billy Goat

7 Testing the Testes

One of the men laid out on a table as the other stood over him and added the weights. The observations that were made were just as stoic as we’d expect, using phrases like “slight discomfort in the right groin” or “severe testicular pain on right side at 650 grams.” The men were able to prove that harm to the testicles does produce referred pain as it spread across their back once the weight reached 0.9 kilograms (2.0 lb). In addition, they continued their experiments by numbing certain parts of the testicles to see the effects on the pain. Not surprisingly, their work and conclusions on referred pain by the testes have been unconfirmed since no other scientists has been willing to duplicate their experiment. mad

6 The Sleep Scholar

In another experiment, Kleitman and his assistant wanted to see if humans actually do have a biological clock. Prior to the study, it was unknown whether the 24-hour sleep-wake cycle was voluntary and flexible or hard-wired and unchangeable. In order to study this, they spent 32 days in Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. The cave was a perfect place to try to manipulate their biological clocks to run on a 28-hour sleep cycle because of its lack of natural light, constant temperature, and lack of environment cues. While his partner was able to switch successfully after just a week, Kleitman was not as lucky. He also spent two weeks on a submarine studying the sleep patterns of sailors and finding ways to make them work more efficiently just by tampering with their sleep schedules.

5 The First Real Hippy

He described the trip as being “affected by a remarkable restlessness, combined with a slight dizziness. At home I lay down and sank into a not unpleasant intoxicated like condition, characterized by an extremely stimulated imagination . . . I perceived an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colors.”

In 1943, his most famous and first intentional hallucinatory trip is now commonly called “Bicycle Day.” He gave himself what he thought was a small dose of 250 micrograms of LSD to observe its effects. He experienced vivid and exciting hallucinations on his bicycle ride home from the lab. Hofmann was able to develop an array of other psychedelic drugs that helped to make the decade of the hippies great. Despite taking LSD along with many other psychedelic drugs hundreds of times, Hofmann was able to live until 2008, when he was 102.

4 Giovanni Grassi

In order to ensure he wasn’t already infected prior to ingestion, Grassi had to examine his fecal matter under a microscope for almost a year. Once he was able to confirm he was roundworm-free, he ingested the fecal eggs from the corpse. After a month, Grassi began to experience the discomfort of the roundworms and pulling eggs out of his stool. He was then able to kill them off as easily as he had taken them in by flushing them out with an herbal medicine. This ingestion of worms became something of a craze as students and professors at several universities began ingesting eggs to grow worms up to 1.8 meters (6.0 ft) long inside of them. While it’s not a science project I would want to take part in, Grassi is credited with the discovery that roundworms are transmitted through the fecal matter of humans.

3 The Real Spider-Man

He allowed the female black widow to bite him for 10 seconds (enough time to get all of its venom into his body). He noted that the bite felt like a needle and the burning began to intensify as time went on. The bite was so tiny that Blair couldn’t see it, but the area around the bite had grown pale and his entire finger turned red. The throbbing pain began to spread as his hand grew numb. As the toxins traveled through his lymphatic system, he experienced pain in his lymph nodes and various other parts of his body. The wound began to swell and Blair was brought to the hospital. The pain left him with an impaired ability to speak and breathe as he fell into a state of shock.

At one point, he was given morphine to reduce the pain that lasted for three agonizing days. The suffering that Blair endured gave doctors most of the symptoms that regularly appear in black widow victims allowing them to more easily diagnose bite victims. The symptoms also gave doctors a glimpse into how the black widow’s toxins affect the body. Thanks to his suffering, skeptics who thought black widows weren’t dangerous got over their skepticism. Blair made a full recovery, but refused to partake in a second bite experiment to verify the results. Unfortunately, he also failed to exhibit any of the symptoms reported by Peter Parker following his encounter with a radioactive spider.

2 This Will Only Hurt A Little

Following the operations, patients complained of nausea, vomiting, severe headaches, and leg and back pain. Bier had his assistant, Augustus Hildebrandt, administer the anesthesia to him, but as he went to fit the syringe into the needle, he found that it wouldn’t fit and most of the cerebrospinal fluid leaked out. The experiment left him with a rather larger hole in his spine. Even though Bier’s chance at undergoing the anesthesia was ruined, they attempted it on Hildebrandt only a couple of hours later. The numbing of Hildebrandt was a success as he was soon unable to feel his legs or move after the cocaine spinal anesthetic was given to him. In what I believe to be a not-so-subtle form of payback, Bier tested the extent of numbness in Hildebrandt’s body by kicking him in the shins, hitting him with an iron hammer, burning him with cigars, pulling out his pubic hairs, and even smashing his testicles.

Remarkably, Hildebrandt felt nothing and the experiment had been a success. As the anesthetic wore off, both men did experience the severe headaches and symptoms their patients complained of. However, this didn’t faze them because they had discovered a new and successful form of sedation that quickly caught on in the medical world, a discovery they celebrated by drinking excessively.

1 Joseph Barcroft Gets Gassed

In another experiment, Barcroft stayed in a low-oxygen glass chamber to find the minimum amount of oxygen a human needed to survive. For nearly a week , he lived at the equivalent of an elevation of 4,900 meters (16,000 ft), causing his whole body to turn blue. In his last and most drastic self-experiment, Barcroft locked himself naked into a refrigerated chamber to test the effects of freezing on mental activity. Barcroft found that, at a certain point close to lethal hypothermia, the body actually begins to feel warm rather than freezing cold. Barcroft had the ability to voluntarily leave the chamber at any time just as he had entered, but chose to stay until he became unconscious and a research assistant had to rescue him.

Shelby is an undergraduate at Arizona State University studying psychology and medicinal biochemistry. She is constantly fascinated by the mysteries of the world around her. She hopes to go on to medical school once she graduates to be able to search for and solve these mysteries.

More Great Lists

LESSWRONG LW

28 social psychology studies from *experiments with people* (frey & gregg, 2017).

I'm reading a very informative and fun book about human social psychology, Experiments With People (2nd ed, 2018).

... 28 social psychological experiments that have significantly advanced our understanding of human social thinking and behavior. Each chapter focuses on the details and implications of a single study, while citing related research and real-life examples along the way.

Here I summarize each chapter so that you can save time. Some results are old news to me, but some were quite surprising. I often skip over the experimental details, such as how the psychologists used ingenious tricks to make sure the participants don't guess the true purposes of the experiments. Refer to originals for details.

The experiments start in the 1950s and get up to 2010s, and occasionally literatures from before 1900s are quoted.

Chapters I find especially interesting are:

• Chap 14. It lists the many failures of introspection, and raises question as to what consciousness can do.
• Chap 16. It has significant similarity with superrationality and acausal trade.
• Chap 20. It warns about how credulous humans are.
• Chap 27. It is about the human fear of death and the psychological defenses against it.
• Chap 28. It shows how belief in free will can be motivated by a desire to punish immoral behaviors. Understanding why people believe in free will is necessary for a theory of what is the use of the belief in free will.

Chap 1. Conforming to group norms

Asch conformity experiment , from Opinions and Social Pressure (Asch, 1955)

Video demonstration.

Groups of eight participated in a simple "perceptual" task. In reality, all but one of the participants were actors, and the true focus of the study was about how the remaining participant would react.

Each student viewed a card with a line on it, followed by another with three lines labeled A, B, and C (see accompanying figure). One of these lines was the same as that on the first card, and the other two lines were clearly longer or shorter. Each participant was then asked to say aloud which line matched the length of that on the first card... The actors would always unanimously nominate one comparator, but on certain trials they would give the correct response and on others, an incorrect response. The group was seated such that the real participant always responded last.

It was found that

• When there are over 3 actors giving unanimously the wrong answer, the participant went along 1/3 of time.
• Increasing the number of actors above 3 did not increase compliance.
• Even when the difference between the lines was 7 inches, there were still some who complied.
• If there is at least one actor disagreeing with the majority, the participant decreased compliance.
• If the fellow dissenter joins the majority, the participant increased compliance to the same level of 1/3.
• If the fellow dissenter leaves, the participant increased compliance only slightly.

There are two reasons for this compliance. One is heuristic about knowledge: the majority is usually more correct. Another is normative: social acceptance matters more than being correct.

The effect of a dissenting minority is notable.

Research finds that, whereas majorities inspire heuristic judgments and often compliance, minorities provoke a more systematic consideration of arguments, and possibly, an internal acceptance of their position. (Nemeth, 1987) Majorities tend to have a greater impact on public conformity, whereas minorities tend to have more effect on private conformity. (Chaiten & Stangor, 1987)

Chap 2. Forced compliance theory and cognitive dissonance

In When Prophecy Fails , the story of a UFO cult was detailed. When the doomsday prophecy failed, most people left, but some became even firmer believers.

(My own example, not appearing in the book.) In Borges's story A Problem , Borges asks, how would Don Quixote react if he kill a man?

Having killed the man, don Quixote cannot allow himself to think that the terrible act is the work of a delirium; the reality of the effect makes him assume a like reality of cause, and don Quixote never emerges from his madness.

This chapter reviews of Cognitive consequences of forced compliance (Festinger & Carlsmith, 1959)

• Participants were asked to do an extremely boring task.
• Then the experimenter asked the participant to deceive the next participant that the experiment was fun. Half were paid $1, another half paid $20.
• A control group was not asked to lie.
• Then they were nudged to take a survey about how they felt about the experiment.

The result is that, those paid $1 thought the experiment was fun, and those paid $20 thought it was boring, and those that didn't get asked to lie thought it was very boring.

Festinger explains this by the theory of cognitive dissonance:

• An attitude (thinking the experiment was boring) and a behavior (saying it was fun) clashes, creating an uncomfortable feeling.
• The participant then is motivated to remove the discomfort by changing the attitude by rationalization (thinking the experiment was actually fun).
• If the participant was paid $20, then there was no dissonance, as there was a ready explanation of the dissonant behavior.
• If the participant was paid $1, then there was dissonance, because the participant regarded the lying behavior as mostly voluntary .

An alternative explanation from Self-perception: An alternative interpretation of cognitive dissonance phenomena (Bem, 1967) :

• We don't form beliefs about ourselves by direct introspection, instead, we infer it through
• When we behave against previously self-beliefs, this creates an update on our self-beliefs.

See also Chap 14 for more on the lack of introspection.

Current consensus is that both theories are correct, in different situations. The self-perception effect happens when the behavior is mildly different from self-beliefs, and the cognitive dissonance effect happens when the behavior is grossly different.

There are also many complications, such as in Double forced compliance and cognitive dissonance theory (Girandola, 1997) , which reported that even if participants performed a boring task, then told others about how boring it was, afterwards they still felt the task was more interesting afterwards.

There is a lot of ongoing research.

Chap 3. Suffering can create liking

Such curious phenomena as hazing has been studied since The effect of severity of initiation on liking for a group (Aronson, 1959)

An experiment was conducted to test the hypothesis that persons who undergo an unpleasant initiation to become members of a group increase their liking for the group; that is, they find the group more attractive than do persons who become members without going through a severe initiation.

The group was a made-up thing by the experimenters. It purports to discuss interesting sexual things, but the participants, after finally "joining", would only hear a very boring group discussion about animal sex.

This hypothesis was derived from Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance." 3 conditions were employed: reading of "embarrassing material" before a group, mildly embarrassing material to be read, no reading. The results clearly verified the hypothesis.

The "embarrassing material" are lists of obscene words. The "mildly embarrassing material" are lists of mildly sexual words.

Result: the very embarrassing ritual increased liking for the group.

Explanation was by the theory of cognitive dissonance: "I have already invested so much to join the group. I must be a fool if the group turned out to be bad! And I'm not a fool."

Cognitive dissonance has been used for brainwashing, persuasion, education, and many other kinds of things.

One of the authors learned from an investigative journalist about how a dodgy car company... had customers unnecessarily wait or hours while their finance deal was supposedly being negotiated upstairs.

[ Commitment and community: Communes and utopias in sociological perspective (Kanter, 1972)] noted that

19th-century utopian cults requiring their member to make significant sacrifices were more successful. For example, cults that had their members surrender all their personal belongings lasted much longer than those that did not.

Some bad investments are continued far after they had become clearly unprofitable, this is the sunk cost fallacy .

Chap 4. Just following orders

The banality of evil is the theory that everyday people can do great evils such as the Holocaust, by simply following orders.

Behavioral study of obedience (Milgram, 1965) reported the famous Milgram experiment . A video recreation is here .

This is a very famous experiment with many followups. There is sufficient material freely online, such as the Wikipedia page. So I won't recount it here.

I was most surprised to learn that personality had very little effect. That is, obedience exhibited by the participants in this experiment was mostly situational , instead of stemming from the personality of the participants.

Chap 5. Bystander apathy effect

The murder of Kitty Genovese stimulated research into the "bystander effect". On March 13, 1964 Genovese was murdered... 38 witnesses watched the stabbings but did not intervene or even call the police until after the attacker fled and Genovese had died...

In Bystander intervention in emergencies: Diffusion of responsibility (Latané & Darley, 1968) attributed the lack of help by witnesses to diffusion of responsibility : because each saw others witnessing the same event, they assumed that the others would take responsibility.

This phenomenon has a big literature, and is very popularly known, possibly due to the dramatic stories.

Concerning the original experiment by Latane and Darley, I was again surprised that personality factors had little effect, except one: growing up in a big community is correlated with a lower probability of helping.

Chap 6. The effect of an audience

When people perform a task in the presence of others, they perform better if the task is easy, and worse if the task is hard. One theory is that presence of others increases physiological arousal , which then enhances performance of simple tasks and decreases performance of hard tasks. Other theories

In Social enhancement and impairment of performance in the cockroach (Zajonc, 1969) , it is found that this is true even for cockroaches. In the experiment, Zajonc gave cockroaches two possible tasks: going through a straight maze, or a more complex maze. They either did the task alone, or while being watched by others outside (the maze was transparent).

While being watched, cockroaches solved faster on the straight maze but slower on the complex maze. This demonstrates that the physiological arousal theory is correct in cockroaches: the effect of an audience can happen without any complex cognitive ability.

However, complex cognitive ability sometimes does occur in humans. As reported in Social facilitation of dominant responses by the presence of an audience and the mere presence of others (Cottrell et al, 1968) , blindfolded audience does not exert an effect on the performer.

Chap 7. Group conflicts from trivial groups

This chapter begins with the Robbers Cave experiment , which was a study that investigates the realistic conflict theory , which sounds very common-sense:

• group conflicts and feelings of resentment for other groups arise from conflicting goals and competition over limited resources
• length and severity of the conflict is based upon the perceived value and shortage of the given resource
• positive relations can only be restored with goals that require cooperation between groups

Then it recounts the blue eyes-brown eyes experiment . The problem, then, is, what is the least amount of group-difference in order to make a difference? Enter the minimal group paradigm of Experiments in intergroup discrimination (Tajfel, 1970) . Participants first took a test on estimating dot numbers, then divided into "overestimators" and "underestimators", while in truth they were random. Then, they were given points (convertible to cash) to divide among the groups. Participants favored their own groups significantly more.

In fact, the most favored strategy was to maximize (own group) - (other group), even though it did not maximize (own group). Thus, even the most minimal social groups induced ingroup-outgroup conflict.

The minimal group paradigm has been studied in many ways. It was also found that outgroup homogeneity effect , that is, "they are all the same; we are diverse", could also arise from minimal groups.

One theoretical explanation is Tajfel and Turner's social identity theory (Tajfel & Turner, 1979) , which states that: 0. A person's self-esteem depends on having a good identity.

• A person's identity has two parts: personal and social.
• Personal identity are about one's own traits and outcomes.
• Social identity are derived from social groups and comparison between groups.
• A person is motivated to improve self-esteem, and thus social identity.
• Thus, one is motivated to improve the standings of one's ingroups and decrease the standings of one's outgroups.

One supporting evidence is that when a person has more self-esteem, they are less discriminating against outgroups (Crocker et al, 1987) .

Chap 8. The Good Samaritan Experiment

In the parable of the Good Samaritan ,

a traveller is stripped of clothing, beaten, and left half dead alongside the road. First a priest and then a Levite comes by, but both avoid the man. Finally, a Samaritan happens upon the traveller. Samaritans and Jews despised each other, but the Samaritan helps the injured man.

This inspired an experiment reported in "From Jerusalem to Jericho": A study of situational and dispositional variables in helping behavior. (Darley & Batson, 1973) , participants were theology students asked to give a short talk in another building.

People going between two buildings encountered a shabbily dressed person slumped by the side of the road. Subjects in a hurry to reach their destination were more likely to pass by without stopping.

The experiment was 2 x 3: the participant was asked to either give a short talk on the parable of the Good Samaritan, or on an irrelevant topic. They were either very hurried, hurried, or not hurried by the experimenter.

Hurrying made significant difference in the likelihood of their giving the victim help. The topic of the talk had some influence, according to a reanalysis by (Greenwald, 1975) , despite the original paper's claim of no influence. Self-reported personality and religiosity made no difference.

The lesson from this as well as many other social psychology experiments is that seemingly trivial situational variables have a greater impact than personality variables, even though people tend to explain behaviors using personality. See The Person and the Situation: Perspectives of Social Psychology (Lee Ross, Richard E. Nisbett, 2011)

Chap 9. External motivation harms internal motivation

Extrinsic motivations are motivations that "come from the outside", such as money, praise, food. Intrinsic motivations are from the inside, such as self-esteem, happiness. Both can motivate behaviors. However, it's interesting that sometimes extrinsic motivations can harm internal motivation.

In Undermining children's intrinsic interest with extrinsic reward: A test of the" overjustification" hypothesis (Lepper et al, 1973) , children are given markers to draw with. Some were told that they would be rewarded with a prize for playing, others got a prize unexpectedly, others were left alone as control group.

After some days, the amount of time children spent playing the markers were: got expected prize < control group < got unexpected prize

The book didn't talk much about why the unexpected prize created higher motivation, but I think it is similar to how gambling addiction comes from variable reward .

There are some explanations for why extrinsic reward lowered subsequent motivation. One is that extrinsic reward provides overjustification effect , where external rewards "crowd out" internal rewards,

Once rewards are no longer offered, interest in the activity is lost; prior intrinsic motivation does not return, and extrinsic rewards must be continuously offered as motivation to sustain the activity.

Another explanation is that humans heuristically view means to an end as undesirable. In (Sagotsky et al, 1982) , children were given two activities, playing with crayons and markers. They were equally fun at the beginning, but one group was told that in order to play with crayons, they had to play with markers first. After a while, they became less interested in playing with markers. The other group, the reverse.

I think this is the psychological basis of some ethical intuitions in the style of Kant :

we should never act in such a way that we treat humanity as a means only but always as an end in itself.

A third explanation is that people consider extrinsic rewards a threat to their freedom and autonomy, and thus tend to rebel against it. I saw a news today about Amazon's program to gamify work . Some complained that it was threatening the workers' autonomy, which is a strange complaint: if gamification actually increases intrinsic motivation for work, doesn't it increase autonomy? Autonomy is freedom to follow one's intrinsic motivation, and thus, if a worker acquires an intrinsic motivation to do a good job, they would have more autonomy.

I think this complaint can be explained as a different kind of autonomy: freedom from prediction. Humans are evolved to want to be unpredictable (at least by others), because to be predictable is to be threatened by manipulation, which often decreases fitness.

Chap 10. Actor-observer asymmetry

Other people did what they did because of who they are. We did what we did because of outside events.

In 1975, parts of the Watergate scandal was recreated in a very dramatic psychology experiment, reported in Ubiquitous Watergate: An attributional analysis (West, 1975) .

80 criminology students were asked to meet the experimenter privately for a mysterious reason. There, they were asked to join a burglary team for secret documents in an ad agency. There were four versions presented:

• The burglary plan was sponsored by a government agency, for secret investigation purposes. Government would provide immunity if caught.
• Same, but without immunity.
• The plan was sponsored by a rival ad agency, with $2000 reward.
• The student was asked to only join a test run of the plan, without stealing anything.

Afterwards, they were debriefed and asked to explain their decision to join/not join.

Separately, 238 psychology students were presented the above situation, and asked to guess what percentage would agree to the plan.

Then, half of the participants were asked, "Suppose John agreed to participate, explain why John agreed."

• About 45% of participants agreed to join the burglary in the government-with-immunity situation. Otherwise, about 10%.
• Most students in the second part thought they would not agree to the burglary plan.
• Students in the first part who agreed to join the burglary explained their behavior as due to the circumstances.
• Students in the second part explained the hypothetical John's behavior as due to John's personality.

The criminology students were "actors", and the psychology students were "observers". An asymmetry was that actors attributed their behavior to situations, while the observers attributed to personalities. This is the actor-observer asymmetry.

Complications in this asymmetry are noted in The actor-observer asymmetry in attribution: A (surprising) meta-analysis (Malle, 2006) . Malle found that there are two kinds of biases: when the behavior is negative, the actor blames the situation and the observer blames the person. When the behavior is positive, the reverse happens. As such, this can be explained as a self-serving bias.

The authors conclude with a funny note:

it's interesting to how athletes often publically thank the Lord for a personal victory, but do not publically blame the Lord for a defeat!

Chap 11. We are number 1

They never shout, "They are number 1."

People like to think good about themselves. Even in collectivistic societies, people regard themselves as above average in collectivistic traits, according to Pancultural self-enhancement (Sedikides et al, 2003)

Americans... self-enhanced on individualistic attributes, whereas Japanese... self-enhanced on collectivistic attributes

An experiment is reported in Basking in reflected glory: Three (football) field studies (Ciadini et al, 1976) , where students are asked to describe a recent university sports team's victory/defeat. Before that, half received criticisms that decreased to their self-esteem, and others received praises that increased their self-esteem.

The result was that among those who had higher self-esteem, they described the sports outcome using "we won" or "we lost" 1/4 of the times. For those who had lower self-esteem, they used "we won" 40% of the times when the team won, but used "we lost" only 14% of the times when the team lost.

The explanation is that people in need of boosts to self-esteem try to BIRG (Basking in reflected glory) and CORF (Cut off from reflected failures). Reflected glory also improves their social standing.

Methods of increasing one's social standing are called impression management , and include:

• BIRG and CORF, as noted above;
• ingratiation: we praise and agree with others, so as to be liked;
• self-handicapping: a student gets drunk before a big test, so that if they fail, they could blame on the drunkenness instead of their study ability;
• exemplification: behave virtuously and make sure others saw it.

A lot of these techniques are listed in (Jones and Pittman, 1982) .

Chap 12. Deindividuation

Effects of deindividuation variables on stealing among Halloween trick-or-treaters (Diener et al, 1976) reported an experiment in real life .

The experiment was run in a Halloween. An experimenter place a bowl of candy in her living room for trick-or-treaters. A hidden recorder observes. In one condition, the woman asked the children identification questions such as their names. In the other condition, children were completely anonymous. Some children came individually, others in a group.

In each condition, the woman invited the children in, claimed she had something in the kitchen she had to tend to, and told each child to take only one candy.

Result: being in a group and being anonymous both increased frequency of transgression (taking more than one candy). If the first child to take candies in a group transgressed, other children were also more likely to transgress.

The authors then defined deindividuation as when private self-awareness is reduced.

The truly deindividuated person is alleged to pay scant atetntion to personal values and moral codes... to be inordinately sensitive to cues in the immediate environment.

One study, The baiting crowd in episodes of threatened suicide (Mann, 1981) , examined 21 cases from newspapers, in which crowds were present when a person threatened to jump off a high place.

Baiting or jeering occurred in 10 of the cases. Analysis of newspaper accounts of the episodes suggested several deindividuation factors that might contribute to the baiting phenomenon: membership in a large crowd, the cover of nighttime, and physical distance between crowd and victim (all factors associated with anonymity).

Two theories of why deindividuation were given. One is that anonymity makes people feel safe to transgress. Another is that (Reicher & Postmes, 1995) people in a crowd would categorize themselves mainly by their social identity, and their behaviors would reflect the group norm than their personal norms.

I was disappointed that the authors did not give evolutionary psychological explanations for deindividuation. Humans are the only animals that wage wars. A deindividuation effect can be an evolutionary adaptation to prepare humans to fight more effectively in a crowd.

Chap 13. Mere exposure effect

People prefer familiar things. Really, that's quite a banal observation. What's delightful about this chapter is the ingenuity of the experiment design.

Think about your own face. You see them in a mirror image (unless you take a selfie), but others see it directly. This means that you are familiar with your face in the mirror image, but others in the direct image.

This is exploited in Reversed facial images and the mere-exposure hypothesis (Mita et al, 1977) . Couples were separately shown photos of the female one's face, some mirrored, others not. They were asked to pick the one they prefer. The female one preferred the mirrored photo, and the male one preferred the direct photo.

Mere exposure effect is robust in real life and across species. (Grush et al, 1978) found that

previous or media exposure alone successfully predicted 83% of the [US congress election] primary winners

And (Cross et al, 1967) found rats who heard Mozart music in infancy preferred Mozart over Schoenberg as adults, and vice versa.

One possible evolutionary psychological explanation were given: preference familiarity is safer, and thus more adaptive. The authors warned however that it's not so simple, as people also have a preference for mild novelty.

Chap 14. Shortcomings of introspection

This chapter reviews a study that shows a particular instance of introspection failure:

people's ideas about how their minds work stem not from private insights but from public knowledge. Unfortunately, however, this public knowledge is often not accurate. It is based on intuitive theories, widely shared throughout society, that are often mistaken.

The book referenced Verbal reports about causal influences on social judgments: Private access versus public theories (Nisbett, 1977) , although I find Telling More Than We Can Know: Verbal Reports on Mental Processes (Nisbett & Wilson, 1977) to be better.

Subjects are sometimes (a) unaware of the existence of a stimulus that importantly influenced a response, (b) unaware of the existence of the response, and (c) unaware that the stimulus has affected the response. It is proposed that when people attempt to report on their cognitive processes... they do not do so on the basis of any true introspection. Instead, their reports are based on a priori , implicit causal theories, or judgments about the extent to which a particular stimulus is a plausible cause of a given response.

In the experiment, a subject is given a fictitious application from Jill for the job of staff at crisis center. These applications are the same except on a few attributes of the applicant: attractiveness, intelligence, etc. Then, the subject is asked how much each attribute is correlated with the decision to accept.

The situation is then described to some observers (who didn't do the job application review), who are asked how much each attribute is correlated with the decision of the subject to accept.

Subjects who read that Jill had once been involved in a serious car accident claimed that the event had made them view her as a more sympathetic person. However, according to the ratings they later gave, this event had exerted no impact... the only exception pertained to ratings of Jill's intelligence. Here, an almost perfect correlation emerged between how subjects' judgments had actually shifted and how much they believed they had shifted. Why so? The researchers argued that there are explicit rules, widely known throughout a culture, for ascribing intelligence to people. Because subjects could readily recognize whether a given factor was relevant to intelligence, they could reliably guess whether they would have taken it into consideration.

The determinations of subjects and observers coincided almost exactly.

There are other introspection failures demonstrated by social psychology. People are unaware of the halo effect at work in their own judgments of others (Nisbett &Wilson, 1977) . People are unaware of the source of their own arousal . People are unaware of their bias even if they know of such bias (Pronin et al, 2002) .

In a further twist, introspection can degrade judgment. In (Wilson & Kraft, 1993) , participants reported how they felt about their romantic partners. Their expressed feelings correlated well with the duration of relationship. However, if they introspected on the reason of their feelings, before reporting their feelings, the correlation disappeared.

The authors conclude by suggesting that traveling, by putting oneself into novel situations, would be particularly helpful for one to know oneself.

Chap 15. Self-fulfilling prophecies

Again, a very well-known subject with a lot already written. This chapter reviews Social perception and interpersonal behavior: On the self-fulfilling nature of social stereotypes (Snyder et al, 1977)

Male "perceivers" interacted with female "targets" whom they believed to be physically attractive/unattractive. Tape recordings of each participant's conversational behavior were analyzed by naive observer judges for evidence of behavioral confirmation... targets who were perceived to be physically attractive came to behave in a friendly, likeable, and sociable manner in comparison with targets whose perceivers regarded them as unattractive. It is suggested that theories in cognitive social psychology attend to the ways in which perceivers create the information that they process in addition to the ways that they process that information.

Philosophically, a self-fulfilling prophecy is a prediction about a future that is true iff the act of prediction is done. Usually, predictions themselves are supposed to be independent of the future that they talk about. Of course, all useful predictions must affect the future -- the predictor would try to profit from the prediction. However, such effects on the future are on the predictor , not on the predicted .

Social psychologists have found that human behaviors are more influenced by the situation than the personality (as noted in The Person and the Situation book). Snyder et al suggested that, in fact, personality traits are one of those self-fulfilling prophecies.

our believing that others possess certain traits may cause us to behave in certain consistent ways toward them. This may cause them to behave in consistent ways in our presence.

In other words, a lot of the persistence of personality could arise from the fundamental attribution error .

Chap 16. How to live like a predeterminist

So then, God has mercy on whom he chooses to have mercy, and he hardens whom he chooses to harden. -- Romans 9:18, which Calvinists quote a lot.

Suppose an urge to smoke and a propensity to lung cancer are both genetically determined, and smoking does not cause lung cancer, why not smoke? If you feel the urge to smoke, it's already too late.

Believers of Calvinism think that God has chosen some people to be saved, and others are damned. Those who are favored by God would both be naturally free from the urge to sin in this world, and enjoy paradise after death. Those who are not, would feel the urge to sin in this world, and go to hell after death.

So if a Calvinist feels an urge to sin, it's already too late. Why not sin? Instead, Calvinists keep resisting the urge to sin, and moreover, deny that they are resisting such urges, and insisting that they are effortlessly virtuous, evidence of God's favor.

In Causal versus diagnostic contingencies: On self-deception and on the voter's illusion (Quattrone & Tversky, 1984) two experiments are reported.

In the first one, participants exercised, then were asked to put their hands in ice water until the pain makes them withdraw. Then they were told a version of the lung cancer puzzle: There are two kinds of hearts, type 1 and type 2, caused by unchangeable genetics. Type 1 heart is associated both with health and with a higher tolerance to the ice water after exercise. Type 2 heart is associated with early death and a lower tolerance. They then did the ice water test again, and they exhibited longer tolerance to the ice water, even though many of them denied that they were trying to do so.

In the second experiment, subjects encountered one of two theories about the sort of voters who determine the margin of victory in an election. Only one of the theories would enable voting subjects to imagine that they could "induce" other like-minded persons to vote. As predicted, more subjects indicated that they would vote given that theory than given a theory in which the subject's vote would not be diagnostic of the electoral outcome, although the causal impact of the subject's vote is the same under both theories

One explanation is that the unconsciousness deceived the consciousness, but the authors find this unreasonable, for it still does not explain what motivates the unconsciousness to deceive. They instead favored Greenwald's theory that people avoid analyzing in detail threatening information, just like how we throw away junk mail without looking in detail.

In conclusion, self-deception is not the result of one center of intelligence hoodwinking the other. Rather, it is the result of a low-level screening process that banishes suspicious cognitions before they have the opportunity to be fully entertained by the conscious mind.

Similarity to superrationality and acausal trade.

The behavior of Calvinists is similar to superrationality and acausal trade , in which agents behave in a way that is diagnostic of good outcomes, even if it does not cause good outcomes.

Assuming the superrational player has access to their opponents' source codes/simulations, the superrationality strategy can be justified, but then it would just be usual rationality.

I think normative decision theories are incompatible with sufficiently good prediction. Normative decisions are only defined for agents with apparent free will. An agent apparently has free will only to someone who cannot predict the agent's behavior well. Superrationality and acausal trade both attempt to make a decision theory for agents that are aware that they are too predictable (to themselves or to someone they play with). This is similar to the situation where someone sees the future and then "decides" to rebel against the future. Either they saw the true future and did not rebel, or they did not see the true future at all. It's illogical to say they both saw the future and rebelled against it.

Similar problems happen with Scott Aaronson's solution to Newcomb's paradox (I'm a "Wittengenstein"). A determinist who is self-aware of their determinism would, instead of offering a decision theory ("I should take one box because..."), offer a prediction theory ("I probably would take one box because...").

Chap 17. Partisan perceptions of media bias

People often complain of media biases. People report differently about the same event. Why?

In The hostile media phenomenon: biased perception and perceptions of media bias in coverage of the Beirut massacre (Vallone et al, 1985) , the researchers studied how people perceived news about the Bairut massacre ,

killing of civilians, mostly Palestinians and Lebanese Shiites... carried out by the militia under the eyes of their Israeli allies.

The researchers took some neutral reports on the event, and as expected, pro-Israel people thought they are biased to be anti-Israel, while anti-Israel people thought they are biased to be pro-Israel.

In a study on biases (Lord et al, 1984) , participants avoided bias by this command:

"Ask yourself at each step whether you would have made the same evaluations had exactly the same study produced results on the other side of the issue.

Chap 18. Empathy-altruism hypothesis

Several theorized psychological mechanisms of human altruistic actions are studied in More evidence that empathy is a source of altruistic motivation (Batson, 1982) reported an experiment on whether people would help a person in need.

It was found that: If (empathy OR guilt), then (helping). That is, people can be motivated to act altruistically by empathy without expectation of gain, or to gain relief from guilt. This argues against the theory of psychological hedonism .

Other potential sources of altruism are collectivism (act for the benefit of a group) and principlism (uphold a principle for its own sake). Effective altruism is one example of principlism based on utilitarianism.

Chap 19. Expanding the self to include the other

A psychological phenomenon of love (close personal relationships, such as lover, best friend) is to include that person in one's self. This involves perceiving, and allocating resources to, that person, in a similar way as to one's self.

Three experiments are described, from Close relationships as including other in the self (Aron, 1991) .

When allocating money, they allocate about the same to themself as to their friend.

They were asked to imagine nouns paired with their selves, mothers, or strangers. They recalled fewer nouns imagined with self or mother than nouns imagined with a stranger, suggesting that mother was processed more like self than a stranger. They explained the reason why it was recalled less by that we usually look at strangers directly, but only ourselves upon reflection (literal or not), and so it's harder to imagine ourselves than strangers.

When faced with a task to sort a list of adjectives into 4 piles: "true/false about me, and true/false about my spouse", they reacted slower on adjectives that were true about one but false about the other. This was explained by that differences between one's own and a close other's properties caused dissonance in the same way that holding opposite attitudes within oneself can cause dissonance.

Chap 20. Believing precedes disbelieving

Descartes divided the mind up into intellect and will. The intellect writes up potential beliefs about the world; the will then chooses which to endorse. Spinoza said that we believe everything that we happen to understand, and then disbelieve only if we find it necessary. You Can't Not Believe Everything You Read (Gilbert, 1993) presented three experiments that supports Spinoza's theory, and discussed its sociological effect.

... we asked subjects in Experiment 1 to play the role of a trial judge and to make sentencing decisions about an ostensibly real criminal defendant. Subjects were given some information about the defendant that was known to be false and were occasionally interrupted [by a distraction task]... We predicted that interruption would cause subjects to continue to believe the false information they accepted on comprehension and that these beliefs would exert a profound influence on their sentencing of the defendant...

Experiments 1 and 2 provide support for the Spinozan hypothesis: When people are prevented from unbelieving the assertions they comprehend... they did not merely recall that such assertions were said to be true, but they actually behaved as though they believed the assertions.

If you want to read more, I have written in detail about this .

Chap 21. Inferred memories

When we recall a memory, that memory is an inference about past based on a number of clues that we have in the present. It is not necessarily accurate.

Experiment from Women's theories of menstruation and biases in recall of menstrual symptoms (McFarland, 1989) found that when women report, day-to-day, their unpleasant emotions, there is no difference between premenstrual, menstrual, and inter-menstrual days (they feel equally unpleasant). But when asked to recall how unpleasant it was, they recall significantly more unpleasant pre-menstrual and menstrual days, and less unpleasant inter-menstrual days.

This is explained by that, when they recall, they used intuitive theories about PMS to infer "how it must have felt" instead of "how it actually felt". This also, as a side effect, casts doubt on whether PMS actually exists .

Memories can be completely made up, as in repressed memory therapies .

The fact that those inferences about the past are felt as genuine recalls, shows how little conscious introspection can give true knowledge about the self.

Chap 22. Ironic process theory

Try to not to think of a polar bear!

The theory of ironic process is that there is a cognitive process called intender who is looking for contents that matches some desired mental state. There is also a monitor who notifies consciousness about errant thoughts.

The intender is a costly process, and the monitor is a cheap process, so when one is under cognitive load, the intender doesn't work well, but the monitor still works well, and ironically, trying to not think of something results in thinking of it.

Ironic Processes of Mental Control (Wegner, 1994) reported an experiment. Participants were asked to consciously improve/deprove their moods with happy/sad thoughts. Half were also asked to do a memory task as cognitive load .

Those not under cognitive load were successful in their mood control, while those under cognitive load achieved the opposite.

This suggests that if you are under some cognitive load (such as busy studying), and you want to improve your mood, you should try consciously to feel worse. Also, if you are in a noisy and distracting environment, and want to sleep, you should try to stay awake.

Another experiment showed that people who try to avoid sexist language become ironically more prone to sexist language when under cognitive load. This is true no matter if they are sexist or not.

Chap 23. Implicit Association Test

In Single-target implicit association tests (ST-IAT) predict voting behavior of decided and undecided voters in swiss referendums (Raccuia, 2016) , compared to self-reported political orientation, implicit association was found to be a weaker, but somewhat independent, predictor of voting behavior.

Other similar methods to probe the unconsciousness are studied, and the results are new and mixed.

Chap 24. Prospect theory

People don't behave as expectation-maximizers. Instead they are better modelled by prospect theory:

• Gains and losses are measured compared to a changeable default, instead of an absolute zero.
• Losses are weighted more than gains, and both have decreasing marginal utilities.

An experiment The systematic influence of gain-and loss-framed messages on interest in and use of different types of health behavior (Rothman et al, 1999) . It was found that people used more bacteria-killing mouth wash, if they received positive advertising (about maintaining good health). They used more disclosing mouth wash (which merely detects dental diseases) if they received negative advertising (about the potential disease).

This theory, along with some others, is explained in great detail in Thinking, Fast and Slow (Kahnemann, 2011) , which I recommend.

Other mental heuristics include mental accounting (Thaler, 1980) , with its own set of irrational effects.

Chap 25. Social isolation increases aggression

If you can't join them, beat them: Effects of social exclusion on aggressive behavior (Twenge, 2001)

Social exclusion was manipulated by telling people that they would end up alone later in life or that other participants had rejected them. These manipulations caused participants to behave more aggressively. Excluded people issued a more negative job evaluation against someone who insulted them, blasted a target with higher levels of aversive noise both when the target had insulted them and when no interaction had occurred. However, excluded people were not more aggressive toward someone who issued praise.

In particular,

These responses were specific to social exclusion and were not mediated by emotion.

This was shown by two experimental facts:

Participants who were told they would end up alone later in life or that other participants had rejected them, did not feel worse than average.

Participants who were told they would end up unlucky later in life, did not act more aggressively than average.

Some psychological theories are given. One is self-determination theory from Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being (Deci and Ryan, 2000) , which says that people have three needs:

• relatedness (to some other people)
• efficacy (can do important things)
• autonomy (can control their own future)

Other relevant factors are self-esteem, and stability over time. Stability and level of self-esteem as predictors of anger arousal and hostility (Kernis et al, 1989) found that in feelings of anger and hostility,

unstable high self-esteem > low self-esteem > stable high self-esteem

There is no evolutionary explanation, though. Social exclusion causes fewer offsprings, and aggression only worsens it. An evolutionary psychological explanation would be good. Either it has evolutionary benefit, or it is a side effect of something else.

Chap 26. Social effects of gossiping

Gossip is found to have a prosocial function. The virtues of gossip: Reputational information sharing as prosocial behavior (Feinberg, 2012)

... prosocial gossip , the sharing of negative evaluative information about a target in a way that protects others from antisocial or exploitative behavior.

In the study, they found experimental support for four hypotheses about the function of gossip:

• prosocial : gossip is motivated by a desire to protect vulnerable people, without promise of material reward.
• frustration : seeing antisocial behavior makes people feel bad, which . Prosocial people are more prone to this frustration.
• relief : gossiping reduces the frustration.
• deterrence : threat of gossip makes antisocial people behave more prosocially.

Chap 27. Fear of death

Good news: we will be worm food one day!

Good news for worms, I meant.

Terror management theory argues that the terror of death creates such a profound, subconscious, anxiety, that humans spend their lives denying it in various ways, creating culture, religion, and many other social phenomena in the process.

In this chapter are reviewed the first 4 of the 7 experiments from How sweet it is to be loved by you: the role of perceived regard in the terror management of close relationships (CR Cox, J Arndt, 2012) . This paper studies

... whether people turn to close relationships to manage the awareness of mortality because they serve as a source of perceived regard.

Perceived regard means "am I a good person as viewed by someone else?" The paper in particular showed that people who have death on their mind exaggerate how much they think they are loved by a partner. Perceived regard from their own selves, and from average strangers, did not change. Having intense physical pain on the mind also did nothing.

They also found that having death on the mind makes people claim to love their partners more. They theorized that this is mediated by increased perceived regard:

death on the mind -> more perceived regard from their partner -> more love for their partner

Study 4 revealed that activating thoughts of perceived regard from a partner in response to MS reduced death-thought accessibility. Studies 5 and 6 demonstrated that MS led high relationship contingent self-esteem individuals to exaggerate perceived regard from a partner, and this heightened regard led to greater commitment to one's partner. Study 7 examined attachment style differences and found that after MS, anxious individuals exaggerated how positively their parents see them, whereas secure individuals exaggerated how positively their romantic partners see them. Together, the present results suggest that perceptions of regard play an important role in why people pursue close relationships in the face of existential concerns.

Personal comment : It has been commented that Transhumanism can be analyzed as a religion. Is there value in analyzing transhumanism through terror management theory? There is at least one paper, Software immortals: Science or faith? (Proudfoot, 2012) , that did so. This is important, because if transhumanism is indeed a religion, then the chance is high that it is deluded/unfalsifiable, like most religions have been shown to be.

Also, this would explain why moral nihilism is usually suffered as a mental disease than accepted as a working hypothesis. Despite its theoretical simplicity and moderate empirical support, it just doesn't offer any protection against terror of death.

Chap 28. Motivated belief in free will

Free to punish: A motivated account of free will belief (Clark, 2014)

a key factor promoting belief in free will is a fundamental desire to hold others morally responsible for their wrongful behaviors

Five experiments from the paper are recounted in detail. The authors praised the paper highly for its comprehensiveness.

participants reported greater belief in free will after considering an immoral action than a morally neutral one... due to heightened punitive motivations... reading about others’ immoral behaviors reduced the perceived merit of anti-free-will research... the real-world prevalence of immoral behavior (as measured by crime and homicide rates) predicted free will belief on a country level.

Taken together, these results provide a potential explanation for the strength and prevalence of belief in free will: It is functional for holding others morally responsible and facilitates justifiably punishing harmful members of society.

Personal comment : Instead of philosophically studying whether free will exists, it's more productive to assume it doesn't exist , and see what behaviors can be explained. If everything can be explained without free will, then the problem of free will dissolves. Else, we will have concentrated what free will is for, and made subsequent studies more focused.

It is also useful to study the human intuitive belief in free will, as important phenomena about humans, independent of whether they are right or wrong. This is analogous to the study of folk psychology and naive physics . See From Uncaused Will to Conscious Choice: The Need to Study, Not Speculate About People’s Folk Concept of Free Will (Monroe, 2009)

the core of people’s concept of free will is a choice that fulfills one’s desires and is free from internal or external constraints. No evidence was found for metaphysical assumptions about dualism or indeterminism.

In the "Afterthoughts", the authors considered what a post-free-will society could be like. I think that such a society's theory of crime and punishment would be more like "because this follows the natural order of things", than "because criminals are morally bad".

Think of the joke about "my brain made me commit the crime"

The criminal: "My brain made me commit the crime." The judge: "My brain made me sentence you."

And now, instead of taking it as a joke, imagine both of them saying them very seriously. That's what I think could be true in the future.

The first edition of this book was published in 2003. In 2005, Ioannidis' paper "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False" started the reproducibility avalanche. How well have these experiments replicated? My university library only has the first edition. I can see from the Amazon preview of the second edition (2017) that the authors address this, but I can't see enough pages to see what their response is. I understand from other sources that priming and ego-depletion have not stood up well.

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3 Famous People Who Grew Up Rich And 3 Who Are Actually Self-Made

"Once the door was opened, it was up to me to walk through it and thrive."

22 Famous Scientists Who Changed How We View the World (and the Universe)

From medicine to physics and astronomy, these scholars have saved lives and improved our understanding across all aspects of the natural world.

Whether it’s a medicine that has saved countless lives or an equation that helped propel the evolution of energy and technology, these breakthroughs arose from the scientific method of observation and experimentation.

Here are 22 of the most famous scientists from the 15 th century to today and how their crucial contributions in many fields of study still impact us.

Nicolaus Copernicus

Astronomer and mathematician 1473-1543

For centuries, people incorrectly believed the Earth was the center of the universe. Copernicus theorized otherwise, with the belief that the size and speed of a planet’s orbit depended on its distance from the centralized sun.

Rather than a breakthrough, however, Copernicus’ hypotheses were met with controversy as they deviated from the beliefs of the Roman Catholic Church. The church even outright banned his research collection, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres , in 1616 long after the German scientist’s death.

Galileo Galilei

Physicist and astronomer 1564-1642

Galileo changed how we literally see the world by taking early telescopes and improving their design. The Italian scientist made lenses capable of magnifying objects twenty-fold .

When Galileo used his tools to look toward the heavens, he discovered Jupiter’s four largest moons, now named in his honor , and stars far off in the Milky Way not visible to the human eye. His findings built the foundation for modern astronomy.

Learn More About Galileo Galilei

Robert Hooke

Astronomer, physicist, and biologist 1635-1703

Englishman Hooke coined the term “cell,” now known as the basic structural unit of all organisms, in his 1665 book Micrographia after observing the cell walls in slices of cork tissue. But his studies weren’t limited to biology. He is famous for Hooke’s Law, which states that the force required to compress or extend a spring is proportional to the distance of compression or extension. He also helped redesign London buildings destroyed by the city’s “Great Fire” in 1666.

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Sir Isaac Newton

Physicist and mathematician 1643-1727

You probably know about Newton’s three laws of motion, including that objects will remain at rest or in uniform motion unless acted upon. But did you also know his theory of gravity allowed the Englishman to calculate the mass of each planet and Earth’s ocean tides? Although Albert Einstein would later improve on some of his theories, Newton remains one of the most important minds in history.

Fun fact: Newton’s mother tried to pull him out of school at age 12 to become a farmer. Seems like a good thing that plan fell through.

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Charles Darwin

Biologist 1809-1882

Growing up in Great Britain, Darwin was raised in a Christian family and held creationist beliefs. That’s not what you’d expect from the man whose landmark 1859 book On the Origins of Species by Means of Natural Selection provided a detailed description of the theory of evolution. In his writings, he outlined his natural selection concept, in which species that evolve and adapt to their environment thrive while the others perish.

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Ada Lovelace

Mathematician and computer scientist 1815-1852

A computer scientist in the 1800s? Yes—Lovelace’s notes and instructions on mentor Charles Babbage ’s “analytical engine” are considered a breakthrough on the path to modern computers. For example, the London-born Lovelace first theorized a process now called looping, in which computer programs repeat a series of instructions until a desired outcome is reached.

Although her contributions weren’t recognized until the 20 th century, her legacy was forever cemented in 1980 when the U.S. Department of Defense named the new computer language Ada in her honor.

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Gregor Mendel

Geneticist 1822-1884

Mendel, from Austria, became an Augustinian monk and an educator, instead of taking over his family’s farm as his father wished. His growing skills did pay off, as Mendel used pea plants to study the transmission of hereditary traits. His findings that traits were either dominant or recessive and passed on independently of one another became the foundation for modern genetic studies.

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Louis Pasteur

Chemist and microbiologist 1822-1895

Pasteur used his observations of microorganisms to suggest hygienic methods we take for granted today, like sterilizing linens, dressings, and surgical instruments. The process of treating food items with heat to kill pathogens—known as pasteurization—also bears his name.

However, the French scientist is arguably most renowned for his efforts in creating vaccines for diseases such as cholera, smallpox, anthrax, and rabies. He worked on the rabies vaccine despite suffering from a severe brain stroke in 1868.

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Sigmund Freud

Psychologist 1856-1939

Although his research initially focused on neurobiology, Freud—who was born in what is now the Czech Republic but grew up in Austria—became known for his psychoanalytic theory that past traumatic experiences caused neuroses in patients. He also proposed the ideas of the id, ego, and superego as the three foundations of human personality and that dreams were a method of coping with conflicts rooted in the subconscious.

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Nikola Tesla

Physicist and mathematician 1856-1943

Chances are you’re reading this in a lit room. If so, you have the Croatia-born Tesla to thank. He designed the alternative current, or AC, electric system, which remains the primary method of electricity used throughout the world (rival Thomas Edison created a direct current system).

Additionally, his patented Tesla coil used in radio transmission antennas helped build the foundation for wireless technology. The scientist also helped pioneer remote and radar technology.

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George Washington Carver

Botanist and agricultural scientist Circa 1864-1943

Washington Carver is best known for his work with the peanut plant. Born into slavery , the Missouri native developed more than 300 uses for it —including shaving cream, shampoo, plastics, and of course, recipes for foods like bread and candies. But he also looked out for farmers by teaching them livestock care and cultivation techniques. Washington Carver built fruitful friendships with major figures like automaker Henry Ford , whom he worked with to create a soybean-based alternative to rubber and an experimental lightweight car body.

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Marie Curie

Physicist and chemist 1867-1934

Curie, originally from modern-day Poland, was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize —in physics—and also became the first person to win two Nobel prizes .

The scientist, with the help of husband Pierre Curie , discovered radioactivity and the elements polonium and radium. She also championed the use of portable X-ray machines on the battlefields of World War I. Curie died from aplastic anemia, likely caused by her exposure to radiation.

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Albert Einstein

Physicist 1879-1955

In addition to his frizzy hair and reported distaste for wearing socks, Einstein became famous for his theory of relativity , suggesting that space and time are intertwined . And, of course, the famous equation E=MC², which showed that even the tiniest particles can produce large amounts of energy.

The German scientist was also a champion for civil rights , once calling racism a “disease.” He joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in the 1940s.

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Physicist 1885-1962

Bohr studied and played soccer at Denmark’s University of Copenhagen before embarking to England to work with J.J. Thomson , who discovered the electron. Bohr proposed an entirely different model of the atom, in which electrons can jump between energy levels. This helped pave the way for quantum mechanics.

Bohr was also a key contributor to the Manhattan Project, in which the United States developed an atomic bomb during World War II. Bohr worked with project director J. Robert Oppenheimer , the subject of the 2023 biopic Oppenheimer .

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Rachel Carson

Biologist 1907-1964

Carson penned the famous book Silent Spring in 1962. The American scientist’s research on the adverse effects of DDT and other pesticides in nature is credited with beginning the modern environmental movement . Soon after the book’s release, the Environmental Protection Agency was established in 1970, and the use of DDT was banned by 1972. Carson, who died of breast cancer, posthumously received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1980.

Learn More About Rachel Carson

Alan Turing

Computer scientist and mathematician 1912-1954

A skilled cryptanalyst, Turing helped decipher coded messages from the German military during World War II. The British mathematician is also considered the father of computer science and artificial intelligence, with his Turing Test purported to measure a machine’s ability to exhibit behaviors comparable to human beings.

Turing’s life and efforts during the war were the basis for the 2014 movie The Imitation Game , starring Benedict Cumberbatch .

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Gertrude B. Elion

Biochemist and pharmacologist 1918-1999

Elion, who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1988, developed 45 patents in medicine throughout her remarkable career. Hired by Burroughs-Wellcome (now GlaxoSmithKline) in 1944, the American soon went on to develop a drug, 6-MP, to combat leukemia. In 1977, she and her team created the antiviral drug acyclovir that debunked the idea that any drug capable of killing a virus would be too toxic for humans. It’s used to treat herpes, chickenpox, and shingles.

Learn More About Gertrude B. Elion

Katherine Johnson

Mathematician 1918-2020

Each of NASA’s early milestones—from sending an astronaut, Alan Shepard , to space for the first time in 1961, to Neil Armstrong and the Apollo 11 crew landing on the moon eight years later—were all possible because of Johnson. The West Virginia native helped perform the mathematical calculations necessary to determine their correct flight paths .

In a show of gratitude, NASA named a building at its Langley Research Center in Virginia after Johnson in 2017. Her inspiring true story was told in the 2016 movie Hidden Figures , with Taraji P. Henson playing her on the big screen.

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Rosalind Franklin

Chemist and biophysicist 1920-1958

Franklin began working at King’s College London in 1951 and used X-ray diffraction techniques to find that human DNA had two forms: a dry “A” form and wet “B” form. However, Franklin’s discovery was overlooked after a colleague leaked her findings to scientists Francis Crick and James Watson . That pair went on to create the double helix model for DNA structure. Franklin died from ovarian cancer at age 37.

Learn More About Rosalind Franklin

Jane Goodall

Primatologist 1934-present

Goodall’s extensive study of chimpanzees has helped us understand how similar humans are to our evolutionary relatives. After arriving in Tanzania in 1960, the British scientist discovered chimps create and use tools, develop complex language and social systems, and aren’t exclusively vegetarian as once believed.

Once she understood chimpanzees, Goodall turned her efforts to preserving their habitats and preventing unethical treatment of the animals in scientific experiments.

Learn More About Jane Goodall

Tyler Piccotti first joined the Biography.com staff as an Associate News Editor in February 2023, and before that worked almost eight years as a newspaper reporter and copy editor. He is a graduate of Syracuse University. When he's not writing and researching his next story, you can find him at the nearest amusement park, catching the latest movie, or cheering on his favorite sports teams.

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China Is Testing More Driverless Cars Than Any Other Country

Assisted driving systems and robot taxis are becoming more popular with government help, as cities designate large areas for testing on public roads.

A Baidu driverless robot taxi with nobody in the front seats traveling in Wuhan, China, last month. Credit... Qilai Shen for The New York Times

Supported by

By Keith Bradsher

Reporting from Wuhan, China

• June 13, 2024

The world’s largest experiment in driverless cars is underway on the busy streets of Wuhan, a city in central China with 11 million people, 4.5 million cars, eight-lane expressways and towering bridges over the muddy waters of the Yangtze River.

A fleet of 500 taxis navigated by computers, often with no safety drivers in them for backup, buzz around. The company that operates them, the tech giant Baidu, said last month that it would add a further 1,000 of the so-called robot taxis in Wuhan.

Across China, 16 or more cities have allowed companies to test driverless vehicles on public roads, and at least 19 Chinese automakers and their suppliers are competing to establish global leadership in the field. No other country is moving as aggressively.

The government is providing the companies significant help. In addition to cities designating on-road testing areas for robot taxis, censors are limiting online discussion of safety incidents and crashes to restrain public fears about the nascent technology.

Surveys by J.D. Power, an automotive consulting firm, found that Chinese drivers are more willing than Americans to trust computers to guide their cars.

“I think there’s no need to worry too much about safety — it must have passed safety approval,” said Zhang Ming, the owner of a small grocery store near Wuhan’s Qingchuan Pavilion, where many Baidu robot taxis stop.

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