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Experiments

Famous psychology and neuroscience experiments referenced from the KB. Distinct from experimental methods (EEG, fMRI, single-unit recording, …) — this page catalogues specific historical studies and how much weight current literature still places on them.

Schema

Each entry: status · experiment — year, PI. Headline finding, then a one-line role in the KB. Links: cross-refs.

Status flags — ✅ replicated and stable · ⚠️ partially discredited (caveat noted in take) · ❌ debunked / unsafe to cite without strong qualification · 🎞️ filmed replication / teaching artifact (not peer-reviewed primary research).

Social psychology — conformity, authority, role

  • ✅ Asch conformity experiments — 1951, Solomon Asch. Subjects asked to match line lengths conform to obviously wrong group answers ~⅓ of the time when peers (confederates) all give the same wrong answer. Robust effect — has replicated cross-culturally with magnitude varying. Anchors the "social inputs reshape perceptual report" thread; useful when the KB discusses how agency and qualia interact with social context. Links: Я и другие (1971 film).
  • ⚠️ Milgram obedience experiment — 1961–63, Stanley Milgram. Ordinary subjects, instructed by an authority figure, deliver what they believe are dangerous electric shocks to a stranger; reported ~65% went to maximum voltage in the canonical condition. Trust with caveats. Gina Perry's 2013 archival work (Behind the Shock Machine) showed Milgram aggregated variant conditions with very different obedience rates, pressured experimenters to push reluctant subjects past the script, and many subjects later said they suspected the setup. The directional finding (authority → compliance with harm) survives; the headline 65% figure does not. Still load-bearing for the KB's agency / social cognition layer, but cite the nuance not the slogan. Links: Stanford Prison Experiment.
  • ❌ ⚠️ Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE / Zimbardo prison experiment, ZPE) — 1971, Philip Zimbardo. Students randomly assigned to "guard" and "prisoner" roles in a mock prison rapidly developed cruel / submissive behavior, supposedly demonstrating the "power of the situation." Heavily discredited. Tape recordings and archival material released ~2018 (plus Thibault Le Texier's Histoire d'un mensonge, 2018; American Psychologist re-evaluations, 2019) showed Zimbardo coached the guards into cruelty, scripted iconic moments, and the "spontaneous emergence of evil" narrative does not survive scrutiny. Many psych textbooks have removed or heavily caveated it. Useful in the KB as a case study in bad social psychology / demand characteristics / researcher-driven results, not as evidence about human behavior. Links: Milgram.
  • 🎞️ Я и другие (I and Others) — 1971, Felix Sobolev (dir.) · Valeria Mukhina (consulting psychologist). Soviet popular-science film (Kievnauchfilm) staging Asch-style conformity, eyewitness suggestibility, and self-attribution vignettes with Soviet children and adults — including the famous "sweet porridge" pyramid task where children agree all servings are sweet because peers say so. Cultural artifact more than primary research — but the on-camera footage is one of the most concrete demonstrations of the Asch / conformity literature in any medium, and remains a teaching staple in Russian-language psychology. Pair with the Asch entry above. Links: Asch.

Volition and agency

  • ✅ ⚠️ Libet readiness-potential experiment — 1983, Benjamin Libet et al. Subjects asked to flex their wrist whenever they felt the urge, while EEG and a precision clock recorded both brain activity and the reported moment of conscious intention. The readiness potential (RP) — preparatory cortical activity — began ~550 ms before the action and ~350 ms before subjects reported the conscious decision to act. Empirically robust — the RP timing replicates. The interpretation is contested. Libet himself proposed a "veto window": conscious will doesn't initiate actions but can cancel them in the ~200 ms before execution. Schurger et al. (2012) reframed the RP as stochastic accumulation crossing a threshold rather than evidence of unconscious decision, weakening the deterministic reading further. Anchor empirical entry for the free will discussion in the KB; cite the timing, not the strong "no free will" slogan. Links: free will, Gazzaniga's Who's in Charge?.

When an experiment earns its own page

Once an experiment accumulates more than an entry's worth of notes — original protocol, replications, methodological critiques, KB cross-links — extract to experiments/<slug>.md and replace the entry with a link. The list stays the index.