End results

If you are reading this for the first time, I suggest that you commense reading this blog from the bottom. For progress on the experiments please visit

http://psychology321.wikispaces.com/

Thank you.

Production # 3

The third and final production for me to produce is The Bystander Effect. For this experiment I plan to film a friend pretending to be unconcious. He will be positioned in the center of my high school campus while the bells rings for the students to walk to their next class. I believe that this might be the best experiment because this truly tests The Bystander effect in a newer generation. We will see if the young minds of America are willing to help a person in need. There is a big probability that the results attained from this experiment will differ from results attained from a location full of adults.

Production # 2

The second experiment I will be recreating is Stanley Milgrams Obediance to Authority. In the origional experiment Milgram organized the electric machine with the increasing voltage increments. If I were to recreate that same experiment I would probably be arrested. For this experiment I need to come up with a completely new idea. My plan for this experiment is to ask a regular person to do something they wouldn't do and then ask a police officer to ask a regular person the same thing to see if they obide by the cops rules. Perhaps I might not be able to get a police officer to work with me on the experiment, but If not I will come up with something else. As production # 1, the camera will be hidden inside of an object such as a box or perhaps a bush.

Production

The first experiment on my list to recreate is The Asch Experiment. For this one I will take the same idea that Asch used, which is the charts with the lines. I will probably repeat the experiment a few times with different participants, but the fake participants will remain the same. Because the theme of the experiment is group conformity I cannot have the participant be someone I or any of the actors know because he/she would probably already feel conformed within the group. To make this experiment accurate I must ask a random person from the street to participate, so that he/she is completely consious of the groups thoughts, thus making his actions be intimidated by the group. I plan to have the camera hidden in a box or something similar so that the participant will not suspect it is any type of trick or anything.

Purpose

The Bystander effect proves that your chance of receiving help from someone increases as the number of people available to help decreases. The Milgram Experiment proves that people would commit horrendous actions simply because they are following orders, and the Asch Experiment proves the you can manipulate ones decisions by means of group conformity, but what does it mean? Why are these experiments famous and for what purpose do they qualify for? Are these experiments for means of entertainment or can they be applied in real life? The answer is both. These are not simply experiments. One can read a book and take it literal and interpret exactly what and only what the words in the book say. One has to look beyond the words and see how they relate to society. These experiments portray human emotions. Characters in a movie have distinct behaviors, but share common instincts. A movie wouldn't be realistic if the characters acted in bizarre ways during the course of certain events that no human would act. We all have a common brain structure and that is why human behaviors can be studied as a whole instead of individually. This is why Shakespeare writings are so critically acclaimed. This is why events can be accurately predicted. The purpose of these experiments is just so that one can learn identify them in any way, shape, or form they come in, and put them to good use.

The Asch Experiment

Human beings can be very contentious when in the presence of others. Our actions are altered by what we believe others will think. There are very few people who want to separate themselves from others and remain alone. The majority of us always want to feel accepted. That is why sometimes a person might not speak their mind. This, known as group conformity, is perfectly demonstrated by an experiment known as The Asch Experiment. In the experiment there are five men who are selected to take a test. Four of the five men are actually actors who were told to answer incorrectly on purpose. The fifth person is the only real participant and is free to answer any way he wants too. The point of the experiment is to demonstrate that even though the answer is obvious the participant will be psychologically manipulated to choose the incorrect answer because he wants to fit in with the group. As the experiment is performed the results end up being exactly as predicted.

The Milgram Experiment

The Milgram experiment is an experiment which portrays obedience to authority. In other words the experiment demonstrated that anyone who is dressed as a person of authority, such as a lab coat, uniform, or perhaps wearing a badge, can make a regular person do things he or she wouldn't regularly do. In the experiment there are three people involved. The first person is the figure of authority, who is dressed in a lab coat. The second and third person are supposively two people who have no idea what is going on and are participants in the experiment. In actuality of the two participants one of them is an actor and pretends he does not know what is going on, but the other participant doesn't know that. The man in the lab coat then sends the actor to a separate room and tells the participant to sit with him in his room. There he sits him in front of a machine and tells him to read some questions to the man in the other room and every time he gets a question wrong to press a button on the machine to deliver a shock to him. Every time a shock is delivered it increases by fifteen volts for the next shock. Whenever the participant delivered a shock he would hear the man in the other room scream, but in reality he was not receiving any shocks, he was screaming to make the participant think he was getting shocked because he is an actor. As the experiment progressed the actor would scream louder and louder and he begged the participant to stop the experiment, but the participant would keep the experiment running because the man in the lab coat would urge him too. In the end most of the participants who were chosen to have a part in the experiment made it to the final voltage increment, which was 450 volts, which is fatal, and all because the man in the lab coat told them to do so.

The Bystander effect

The Bystander effect is an effect in which the chances of one to be helped in an emergency decreases as the number of people in the area increases. For example, you are more likely to receive help if you are in need if one or two people see you than if a hundred people see you. When more people are present everyone relies on everyone else for action to be taken because lets face it, most of the time you don't want to be the first in a group to step up. The bystander effect is also known as the Genovese effect because in 1964 a woman named Kitty Genovese was sexually assaulted by a man in front of her very large apartment building. Despite the many people who heard her screams while she was being stabbed no one called the cops because they thought someone else would call them. Genovese was stabbed twice and left in front of the apartment for about ten minutes and no one took any action. The man who assaulted her came back and finished the job. Although there isn't one big famous experiment to demonstrate The Bystander Effect there have been a few minor ones where someone would fake a seizure or a heart attack and surprisingly the statistics were right. You are more likely to be helped when you are in need when there are more people around.

Brain structure

Among humans there are men and women and I have heard in some cases there are humans in between, but that is not the point. The point is that even though there are adults and children, People who wear too much cloth and people who wear no cloth, people who are carnivores and people who are vegetarian, we all have something in common. At least for the most part, we all share a common brain structure, thus human actions can be predicted based on certain situations. Everyone in a society is unique, but only in so many ways. Humans may not think the same thoughts or at the same speed, but we all think in the same way. Thanks to famous psychology experiments human behaviors become stereotypes, which means they occur frequently. Experiments such as the Asch experiment, The Bystander effect, The Milgram experiment, and many more have revealed important unities between human behaviors. During the next two weeks I will attempt to recreate these experiments to demonstrate it's accuracy in modern society.