REVOLUTIONARY, AND WHY THEY ARE DISAPPEARING

SOCIAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL EXPERIMENTS’ IMPACTS ON BEHAVIOURISM – WHY THEY WERE REVOLUTIONARY, AND WHY THEY ARE DISAPPEARING

Shirley Lan Bao (WHS)

Human behaviour is arguably one of the most difficult things for us to understand. It is a product of a great number of interrelated factors, such as genetics, individual thoughts and feelings, social interactions with other individuals, our social identity (the interaction within and between groups,) and the physical environment.

Scientists over the past centuries have been investigating into human behaviour - why do we behave a certain way? Is our brain capable of recognising certain factors, and adjust the way we behave?

Due to our lack of understanding towards the organ that controls human behaviour itself – the brain, it seems quite impossible for us to truly work out the reason for certain actions. However, throughout the last century, scientists and sociologists have been conducting numerous psychological and social experiments, in attempts to provide us with some crucial answers about why human behave a certain way. The results are definitely revolutionary – and have opened new doors for both the medical science and social science world.

Do we mirror certain actions without noticing? Observational Learning - The Bobo Doll Experiment (1961, 63)

The Bobo Doll experiment, conducted during the 1960s, by Albert Bandura, was a series of experiments on observational learning. Its aim was to determine whether social behaviours, such as aggression, can be acquired by observation and imitation. During this experiment, 36 boys and 36 girls were taken from the Stanford University nursery and were each exposed to different scenarios: children were encouraged to watch an adult’s behaviour towards a toy (the Bobo doll). Three models were used – the aggressive model – where some children would watch the adult be aggressive and violent towards the Bobo Doll, the non-aggressive model, where the adult would be playing quietly with the doll, and the control model, where a small group of children watched no particular action. Figure 1: Sourced from “simplypsychology.org”

The results suggested that:

1. Children who observed the aggressive model, were far more likely to carry out similar violent actions towards the Bobo doll compared with other children who were placed in the non-aggressive or control group.

2. Boys imitated more physically aggressive acts than girls, though there was little difference in the verbal aggression between boy and girls.

These results were definitely ground-breaking for the science world. It agreed with Bandura’s “Social Learning Theory”, which suggested the importance of observing, modelling and imitating behaviours of others as well as remained revolutionary in raising awareness over the field of childcare. It acted as the evidence that supported the idea that experiences at childhood may result in certain behaviours in adulthood.

Nowadays, people still refer to this experiment to raise concerns about the effects of television, computer games, social media on the development and growth of a child’s personality and morality and are all cited as reasons for an increased tendency of young people in society towards violence.

Are our adult fears a result of our childhood experiences? Classical Conditioning – The Little Albert Experiment (1920)

The Little Albert Experiment is considered to be one of the most unethical psychological. Experiments of all time. The experiment was conducted by scientists Watson and Rayner in attempts to investigate whether an infant can be conditioned (‘programmed’) to fear an object, by appearing it simultaneously with a loud, feararousing sound. This was intended to answer a popular question at the time – whether humans can also be a subject of classical conditioning.

The theory ‘classical conditioning’ was first proposed by physiologist Ivan Pavlov. It is a learning process that occurs through associations between an environmental stimulus and a naturally occurring stimulus. It was discovered by the physiologist when he was investigating the amount of salivation in dogs and has proven to work in animals – and have been used for centuries before the Little Albert Experiment in training animals.

Figure 2 Sourced from “healthline.com”

During the Little Albert Experiment, a white rat was initially placed in front of the infant, who had no initial fear towards it. Watson then created a loud sound by hitting a piece of metal with a hammer, a noise which little Albert would cry at. After several pairings (presenting the white rat and the noise at the same time), the infant began to develop signs of fear whenever the rat was presented to him. This was then similarly repeated with other objects and animals, such as a rabbit, and little Albert developed fears for all.

This revolutionary study successfully demonstrated that classical conditioning works both in humans and in animals. It also suggested that adult fears are often connected with to early childhood experiences.

Why are these experiments disappearing?

The experiments conducted in the last century has proved revolutionary in changing our understanding towards behaviourism. However, there has been a noticeable great decline in the number of large scale social and psychological experiments today, and most famous cases of social and psychological experiments were conducted in the 1900s. This is largely due to ethical and moral issues. Psychologists and sociologists nowadays have to follow certain rules of conduct, with guidelines being published by psychological and sociological societies. The purpose of these guidelines are to protect research participants, the reputation of psychology and sociology, and psychologists and sociologists themselves.

Some of the rules that are required to be followed are:

1. Investigators need to receive consent from participants. They also need to know what they are agreeing to. The psychologist / sociologist is therefore required to let the participant know to an extent what is involved in the experiment

2. A debriefing period. After the research is over, the participant should be able to discuss with the researcher about the experiment. Participants must also be notified if they were deceived. Their questions must also be answered as full and honestly as possible.

3. Participant protection must be ensured. Distress must not be caused and so participants may not experience any mental harm, and cannot be frightened, embarrassed or offended.

These rules were another revolutionary act in the world of social experiments, as they ensured human rights and protected both the ethical and the reputation aspects of these experiments.

Text Box However, as a result of these regulations being imposed, it is also extremely hard for a psychologist or socialist to perform an experiment in investigating behaviourism due to these regulations. They can no longer model and track or deliberately create emotions in a participant in any way, due to the strict guidelines on eliminating distress for the participants. It is also difficult in keeping the results of these experiments reliable, since participants already know what the experiment is about, and may potentially change the way they behave.

It is very uncertain what our understanding of behaviourism would be in the future – and whether the absence of these social experiments will still allow us to have access to monitor the way behave, and how we behave.

The experiments conducted by famous psychologists and sociologists would definitely remain revolutionary and will forever be remembered for its great contributions towards the field of science.

Bibliography

House of Lords – Behaviour Change – Science and Technology Committee, Publications Parliament UK (2021) understanding what influences behaviour https://publications.parliament.uk/ pa/ld201012/ldselect/ldsctech/179/17906. htm#:~:text=Influences%20on%20behaviour%20 can%2C%20however,and%20the%20 macro%2Dsocial%20environment.

McLeod, S. A. (2014, Febuary 05). Bobo doll experiment. Simply Psychology. https://www. simplypsychology.org/bobo-doll.html

Shuttleworth, M. (2008) Bobo doll experiment https:// explorable.com/bobo-doll-experiment

Cherry, K. (2019) What is classical conditioning?

https://www.verywellmind.com/classicalconditioning-2794859

McLeod, S. A. (2015, January 14). Psychology research ethics. Simply Psychology. https://www. simplypsychology.org/Ethics.html