Question: What is your favourite piece of research done in psychology?

Wilhelmiina Toivo answered on 8 Mar 2017:

This is a really good question! I couldn’t pick one favourite so here’s a few good ones:

I really like an experiment called the marshmallow test – you can find a video of this on youtube 🙂 It tests whether children can delay the reward they are getting and how this develops with age. The experimenter gives children marshmallows and tells them if they don’t eat them, they will get more later. The experimenter then leaves the room and the child has to decide whether to eat the marshmallow or wait for more! I really like all the experiments with children – researchers often use puppets and other types of toys and it’s just very cute and fun 🙂

One of the older ones (also a really controversial one – this would never be allowed today, which is a good thing, it’s quite horrible!) in social psychology is called the Stanford prison experiment. The researcher divided his participants into prisoners and prison guards, and he wanted to study the effects of perceived power. They had to cut the experiment short because it went really wrong and a lot of the guards ended up being evil and exploiting their position of power. As morally wrong as the study was, it has laid foundations to a lot of psychology research and also started a debate about research ethics, which is good!

Social psychology has very interesting experiments in general; for example, in an experiment about how we comply to groups the experimenters had people in a room (only one of them was a participant and the other ones confederates put there by the experimenter, and the participant was not aware of this) and they made a huge smoke come in from the corner of the room. If none of the confederates said anything, the participant often stayed quiet too, even thought there was a big cloud of smoke!