What is the coolest psychology experiment?

I can't quite remember the study, so I'll need to look it up again, but basically it was a "driver distraction" study. People drove around on a closed course, and drivers in the "distraction" condition had to eat a cheeseburger while driving.

From what I recall, their performance didn't really decrease all that much, proving once and for all that eating dinner on the way home from work is ok.

Got to be the one where subjects, on command, give what they believe to be painful electric shocks to a person.

That would be the Milgram experiments :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment

I loved Skinner's odd ones. I don't know the titles offhand, but you surely remember the ones there he and his colleagues taught pigeons to pilot missiles, to make superstitious responses, and to "read". Yeah, good times.

P.S. Love the blog! How did I never find it before?!

How about Zimbardo's prison experiment?

These are all great - and classics!
What about some newer ones?

Psychobunny...I don't know!!! haha...

My PSYCH 101 prof, Stephen Spencer (at the University of Waterloo) did a study that I thought was kind of neat.

He had a couple groups of people do a math test, and before the test, one group of people was told that it was expected that women would do worse on it than men. In the group that was told, the women did much worse than the men. In the group that wasn't told, they did about the same.

I think he tried the same thing with black people, and got the same results.

He also had another situation where before the math test, people watched commercials where women were portrayed as cheerleaders, house wives, etc., and the women who saw the commercials did much worse than those who saw neutral commercials. The men weren't affected in either case.

I wrote a post like two years ago, after Simon won an Ig Noble for the gorilla experiment, in which I said that the experiment he did in Cambridge, MA, where he had people ask directions from people on the street, and while they were giving directions, switched out the person they were talking to, was the coolest experiment ever. I'm still blown away by the results.

Ryan:

The experiments you describe are about "stereotype threat", the self-fulfilling prophecy that a stereotype about your in-group creates. It works the other way too - in an older experiment, teachers were told that some of their pupils (chosen at random) would make good progress. Sure enough, those kids showed improved IQ at the end of the year.

The twist is that the kids were never told any of this. The teacher's expectations was enough in itself to produce the effect.

Man, I wish I had the energy to dig out the source. It'll be in any social psychology textbook.

I like the attention experiment where people were asked to count the number of passes in a basketball game and most people didn't notice the person in the gorilla suit that walked right through the middle of the court.

that's the gorilla experiment by Dan Simons' - already on the list :)

How about cool psychology experiments you can do at home?
Any thoughts there?

At-home experiments, huh? How about watching people play darts, dice, video lottery, etc. as a demonstration of adventitious reinforcement leading to superstitious behaviors? It's not so much an experiment as an exercise in behavioral observations, but it's always fun and it really amazes people once you tell them what to look for. It also happens pretty reliably if you can watch a group of people play for at least an hour.

Habituation and dishabituation are fun too, if a bit cruel to spring on a person. Well, that and once they see how it works (dishabituation especially), you just can't stop the younger set from trying it again and again -- but that's just an opportunity for them to learn about extinction and spontaneous recovery, right? :)

And there's always the old standby of pet training. If you can keep them alive long enough, even goldfish can learn to do some neat tricks for food.

At home experiment:

close your right eye, and look toward your nose with your left eye (basically, look to the right). Move an object, or your finger, just to the right edge of your visual field. Make sure you can't see it anymore, just barely too far to the right.

Now, keeping everything else still, look forward. You should be able to see that object in the periphery now! Your nose cuts off your field of view if you look to the right, but since your eye is round, your visual field should be wider when you look straight forward (because the front of your eye is further forward now).

It's hard to explain over a message board, so don't get too stressed if it doesn't work for you (you might have square eyes anyway).

"My PSYCH 101 prof, Stephen Spencer (at the University of Waterloo) did a study that I thought was kind of neat."

Hey I have him for my social psychology class next term!

I find the perceptual and memory disorders (or enhancements) and the experiments that go along with them to be the most interesting. Synaesthesia is really neat, seeing sounds, or hearing colors etc.

Nice at-school or at-meeting experiment: Have all (or most) attendants agree beforehand on some desirable behavior on the part of the speaker, such as standing close to the door, or having the back to the audience, or removing their glasses. Whenever the speaker does one of these things, or does something similar, attendees would give subtle social cues of approval: looking at the speaker interestedly, lean forward a little, or perhaps smile a bit. Whenever the speaker moves away from a target behavior, do the opposite: lose attention, perhaps fold your arms, look a little bored, let your eyes wander.

If you're reasonably subtle about it, at the end of the lecture you can have the speaker standing next to the door, much needed glasses in hand, speaking to the audience over his shoulder.

these are great! keep em' coming!

Of course, we get the usual round of Milgram and Zimbardo nominations, but my own preference is for Darley & Batson 1973

Gotta love the sheer audacity of it.

As for cool experiments you can do at home, most of the ones I know have to do with things you can do to reveal the structure and function of the eye. Just pressing on and poking your eye in various ways can reveal all sorts of things about how your eye works.

Here's a good one: If you go outside on a sunny day with clear blue sky, then jump around vigorously a few times to get your heart pumping, then stare at the sky with one eye open, the RBCs in the capillaries in your retina will cast shadows as they move, so that you can see the capillaries, or at least, where they are. The RBCs look like little rubber tire inner tubes, and flex and change shape as they move. Also, they move with your pulse, so put your hand on your heart to get this part. They disappear between heartbeats, when they hold still.

The bright blue light helps because the RBCs absorb it and cast a higher contrast shadow, but it'll also work with neutral gray sky. Gotta have the uniform background without structure though, so the blue cloudless sky is good for that.

The O'Reilly book Mind Hacks has a lot of really fun psych experiments you can do at home.

Hmmm, could we call it an "experiment" that one last time when Phineas Gage was stuffing the sticks of dynamite in the hole....?

if you believe in god - it could be a divine experiment!
hahah