50 Fun Facts About Social Psychology

What did volunteers in Stanley Milgram's Yale obedience experiments think they were giving a learner for wrong answers?

The electric shocks were fake, but in the first study every volunteer went up to 300 volts on a machine that ran to 450. Milgram wanted to know how far ordinary people would go when an authority figure told them to continue.

In 1971 Philip Zimbardo turned a psychology building basement at which university into a mock jail with student guards?

Stanford gave the prison experiment its name, and Zimbardo ended it on the sixth day of a planned two weeks. He stopped after Christina Maslach, the psychologist he later married, objected to what she saw.

Whose 1964 murder outside her Queens apartment building prompted Darley and Latané to study why witnesses fail to help?

Kitty Genovese's death became a textbook case after reports that her neighbors heard her cries and did nothing. Those reports were later found to be wrong in key details.

Which American founding father names the effect in which doing someone a favor makes you like that person more?

Benjamin Franklin won over a rival legislator by asking to borrow a scarce book from the man's library. He told the story in his autobiography, along with an old maxim about kindness.

In Albert Bandura's 1961 study of imitated aggression, children watched an adult attack which toy?

A Bobo doll was the inflatable target, and children who watched an adult hit it with a toy mallet were more likely to act aggressively themselves. Bandura used the result to support his social learning theory.

After Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, Iowa teacher Jane Elliott taught prejudice by dividing her class by what?

Eye color, rather than skin color, decided who counted as superior in Elliott's classroom the day after King's death. Her pupils' essays about the experience were picked up by the Associated Press.

Irving Janis used the failed Bay of Pigs invasion to illustrate which term for close-knit teams making poor decisions?

Groupthink was modeled on "doublethink" from George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Janis also blamed it for America's failure to anticipate the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Norman Triplett ran an early social psychology experiment in 1898 after noticing which athletes were faster in company?

Cyclists posted quicker times beside a rival than alone, so Triplett had 40 children wind fishing reels to test the idea. The speed-up in company is now called social facilitation.

Leon Festinger introduced which term after infiltrating a doomsday cult whose predicted flood never arrived?

Cognitive dissonance is the stress of holding beliefs that clash with events. When no flood came, the most devoted cult members grew more convinced, not less, and began courting publicity.

Psychologists named the subconscious habit of copying another person's gestures and speech patterns after which animal?

The chameleon effect, also called mirroring, tends to build rapport because matching gestures make people feel more connected. Infants do it too, which helps them develop empathy.

What did Darley and Latané demonstrate in 1968 by pumping smoke into a room where students filled in questionnaires?

The bystander effect means people are slower to act when others are present. Students sitting alone noticed the smoke within about five seconds, while those in groups took up to twenty and were unlikely to report it.

Which psychologist's 1950s experiments had students judge line lengths aloud after actors gave obviously wrong answers?

Solomon Asch found that 74% of participants went along with the actors' wrong answer at least once. Tested without that pressure, people got the same line task wrong less than 1% of the time.

Which phenomenon, named by Edward Thorndike, leads people to assume an attractive person is also successful and popular?

The halo effect has a darker twin, the horn effect, in which someone unattractive is more readily blamed for a crime. Researchers have since studied its sway over courtrooms and classrooms.

Which technique did Freedman and Fraser name in 1966 after asking homeowners for a small sign, then a huge one?

Foot-in-the-door works by starting small: 76 percent of people who had first shown a little safe-driving sign agreed to an unsightly one in the front yard. Only 17 percent agreed when asked cold.

Which term did Robert K. Merton coin in 1948, illustrating it with a bank run sparked by rumor?

Self-fulfilling prophecy was the sociologist's own coinage: savers who think a sound bank is failing rush to withdraw, and the rush itself ruins the bank.

Which European capital's 1973 bank siege named the syndrome in which hostages bond with their captors?

Stockholm lent its name after a convict on the run from prison held four bank employees in a vault for six days. The criminologist who invented the term never met or spoke to the hostages.

Robin Dunbar used primate brain sizes to propose that a person can maintain roughly how many stable relationships?

150 is known as Dunbar's number, which he summed up as the people you would not feel embarrassed to join uninvited for a drink. His original prediction was 148.

Robert Zajonc showed that an audience speeds up simple tasks by timing which insects along a straight runway?

Cockroaches reached the end of the runway faster when other roaches were present, which suggested social facilitation is not only a human quirk. A 2020 replication with the same species found no such effect.

Thomas Gilovich's spotlight effect study sent students into a room of strangers wearing a T-shirt of which singer?

Barry Manilow shirts made wearers think about half the room had noticed them. In fact, closer to 20 percent of the strangers recognized who was on the shirt.

Lee Ross coined which term for blaming behavior on someone's personality while overlooking the situation they are in?

The fundamental attribution error was named a decade after a study in which readers assumed essay writers truly admired Fidel Castro, even when told the writers had been assigned their side.

Max Ringelmann found that men pulled less hard on a rope in a team than alone, the first evidence of which effect?

Social loafing was confirmed in 1974 with a trick: when assistants only pretended to pull, the one real puller still eased off. That showed the drop came from motivation, not clumsy teamwork.

Which Oklahoma state park hosted Muzafer Sherif's 1954 experiment that made rivals of two groups of boys at summer camp?

Robbers Cave, reputedly a hideout of outlaws such as Belle Starr, lent its name to the study. The 22 boys stayed at a Boy Scout camp inside the park.

Stanley Milgram began his obedience research three months after which Nazi official went on trial in Jerusalem?

Adolf Eichmann's claim that he was only following orders made Milgram ask whether ordinary people would do the same. He designed the study to help explain the psychology of genocide.

Which phenomenon, named for a 1920s factory study in Cicero, Illinois, describes people changing behavior when observed?

The Hawthorne effect came from 1920s studies in which changes to the factory lighting were said to raise output. Researchers concluded that illumination itself made no difference, so something else was at work.

Robert Sternberg's triangular theory says love combines intimacy, passion and which other component?

Commitment is the decision to maintain a love over the long term. In Sternberg's model, the type of love a couple shares depends on how strong each part is relative to the others.

Elliot Aronson eased tensions in newly integrated Texas schools with a classroom technique named after which puzzle?

Jigsaw classrooms hand each pupil one piece of the lesson, so every member of the group is equally important. Aronson designed the method in Austin to weaken racial cliques.

Which fictional Minnesota town from Garrison Keillor's radio stories names the habit of rating yourself above average?

Lake Wobegon was invented for the radio show A Prairie Home Companion, whose host signed off each week by boasting how exceptional everyone there was. Psychologists also call the habit illusory superiority.

Garrett Hardin's 1968 essay used herders overgrazing a shared pasture to name which problem of depleted resources?

The tragedy of the commons arises because each herder keeps the gain from an extra cow while everyone shares the damage. Elinor Ostrom later won a Nobel Prize for work that some economists think refuted Hardin.

Claude Steele's 1995 experiments showed that which worry about confirming a negative group image can lower test scores?

Stereotype threat eased when the same test was described as a problem-solving exercise instead of a measure of ability. Steele later agreed that removing it does not erase the gap in scores between groups.

Which German-born psychologist, a mentor of Leon Festinger, is often recognized as the founder of social psychology?

Kurt Lewin was one of the first to study group dynamics and organizational development. Those he mentored also included Morton Deutsch, the founder of modern conflict resolution.

Melvin Lerner studied which belief that people get what they deserve, a view that leads observers to blame victims?

The just-world hypothesis grew out of Lerner's dismay at seeing observers blame victims for their own suffering. He saw the research as an extension of Stanley Milgram's work on obedience.

Which term did Leon Festinger and colleagues coin in 1952 for people losing inner restraints when submerged in a crowd?

Deindividuation was later studied by issuing volunteers large coats and hoods that hid who they were. The idea is that anonymity inside a group loosens the checks people normally keep on themselves.

In Darley and Batson's Good Samaritan study, what best predicted whether a theology student stopped to help a stranger?

How hurried they felt mattered most: neither religious views nor personality predicted who stopped. Even preparing a talk on the parable itself made no significant difference.

Dutton and Aron's 1974 study found men were likelier to phone a female interviewer they had met on what?

A suspension bridge leaves walkers with a pounding heart, and the men seem to have mistaken that leftover fear for attraction. Those met on a sturdy crossing got in touch with her less often.

Theodor Adorno's F-scale, a personality test for authoritarian traits, takes its letter from which ideology?

Fascism is what the F stands for: the test, devised in California in the 1940s, set out to measure prejudice and anti-democratic tendencies at the level of personality.

A classic 1939 study compared autocratic and democratic leadership with which third style, named in French?

Laissez-faire leaders give followers complete freedom to make decisions and step in only when asked. Some researchers suggest it barely counts as leadership at all.

In Stanley Milgram's best-known obedience study, what share of volunteers kept obeying to the very end?

65% of volunteers obeyed to the end, far more than anyone forecast. Yale psychology majors polled beforehand had guessed that barely one person in a hundred would go that far.

Which Harvard psychologist argued in The Nature of Prejudice that contact between rival groups can reduce hostility?

Gordon Allport, who taught at Harvard from 1930 to 1967, said contact only helps under the right conditions. Later researchers applied his idea to prejudice well beyond race.

Which tendency leads a student to credit a good exam grade to intelligence but blame a poor one on unfair questions?

Self-serving bias protects self-esteem, and it shows up in teams too: people take more credit for a group's work than they give the other members. A 1975 study by Miller and Ross was among the earliest to assess it.

MIT student James Stoner's 1961 'risky shift' finding grew into which term for teams reaching more extreme decisions?

Group polarization cuts both ways: discussion pushes a cautious group toward even more caution, and a bold one toward greater risk.

Which Polish-born psychologist showed bias between groups split by a taste for the paintings of Klee or Kandinsky?

Henri Tajfel found that even people grouped on so trivial a basis handed more rewards to their own side. With his student John Turner he went on to develop social identity theory.

Which measure, introduced by Anthony Greenwald's team in 1998, uses response speed to reveal unconscious attitudes?

The Implicit Association Test has people sort words with two keys, on the idea that pairings they link in memory come faster. Critics have questioned how well its scores predict behavior.

What did California teacher Ron Jones call the classroom movement he created to show how Germans accepted Nazi rule?

The Third Wave ran for five days at a Palo Alto high school, drilling pupils in discipline and community. The story was retold in a 1981 American film and a 2008 German one.

In Festinger and Carlsmith's study, students paid what sum to call a dull task fun later rated it more enjoyable?

$1 was too small a reward to excuse the fib, so those students changed their opinion of the task instead. It had involved an hour of chores such as turning 48 square pegs.

Which Texas city names Jerry Harvey's paradox about a family taking a 50-mile trip to dinner that nobody wanted?

Abilene was the destination suggested by Harvey's father-in-law while the family played dominoes on a porch in Coleman. Harvey saw the same silent going-along in the Watergate cover-up.

Jack Brehm developed the theory of which unpleasant urge to resist rules or advice that restrict personal freedom?

Reactance is why reverse psychology can work: told what to do, people may pick the opposite to win back their freedom. Brehm noted the hostility is aimed more at the messenger than the message.

Charles Horton Cooley introduced which 1902 term for forming an identity from the way we imagine others judge us?

The looking-glass self works like a mirror: we imagine how we appear to others, guess their verdict, and feel pride or shame as a result.

Lee Ross and colleagues gave which name in 1977 to the habit of overestimating how widely others share our views?

The false consensus effect makes our own choices seem normal and fitting, so we overrate their popularity. Close to 50 papers reported data on it within a decade of the original study.

In Charles Hofling's hospital study, 21 of 22 of which staff obeyed a risky order phoned in by a stranger?

Nurses were phoned by an unknown "doctor" and told to give a patient a fictional drug called Astroten, and nearly all set off to do it. Asked beforehand, most of a separate panel had said they would refuse.

In Elliot Aronson's 1966 pratfall effect study, a highly capable quiz contestant grew more likeable after doing what?

Spilling coffee made the knowledgeable contestant more attractive to listeners, while the same blunder made an average one less appealing. Aronson put it down to sympathy for successful people who slip up.