Famous Psychology Studies & Cognitive Biases

Participants were told to give increasingly strong shocks to a “learner” (an actor). About 65% went all the way to the maximum 450 volts when urged by an authority figure.

When confederates gave an obviously wrong answer about line lengths, about 75% of participants conformed at least once.

College students assigned to be guards or prisoners quickly took on abusive and submissive roles. It was stopped after 6 days instead of 2 weeks and is now heavily criticized for its methods.

The bystander effect: people are less likely to help when others are present, because of diffusion of responsibility.

People paid $1 to say a boring task was fun later rated it more enjoyable than people paid $20. Cognitive dissonance: with too little justification, they changed their attitude.

Infant monkeys preferred a soft cloth “mother” to a wire one that gave milk, showing the importance of contact comfort in attachment.

Infant attachment styles: secure, insecure-avoidant and insecure-resistant (ambivalent). Disorganized was added later.

Children who watched an adult hit a Bobo doll were more likely to act aggressively themselves: observational learning.

A baby was classically conditioned to fear a white rat by pairing it with a loud noise; the fear generalized to other furry things.

People who heard the word “smashed” instead of “hit” estimated higher car speeds and were more likely to falsely remember broken glass: the misinformation effect.

Competition between two groups of boys caused hostility; working toward shared superordinate goals reduced it.

Healthy people admitted to psychiatric hospitals after faking symptoms were kept for weeks and their normal behavior was read as symptoms, questioning the reliability of diagnosis.

After facing shocks they could not escape, dogs stopped trying to escape even when they could. It became a model for depression.

With the corpus callosum cut, each hemisphere works separately; the left usually controls language, so patients could not name objects seen only by the right hemisphere.

Confirmation bias

Anchoring

Availability heuristic

Representativeness heuristic

Hindsight bias

Overestimating personality and underestimating the situation when explaining other people's behavior.

Explaining your own behavior by the situation but other people's by their personality.

Self-serving bias

The Dunning–Kruger effect

Making different choices depending on how the same information is presented, such as “90% survival” versus “10% mortality.”

Sunk cost fallacy

Halo effect

Belief perseverance

In-group bias