Psychology is a science the main idea of which is to study behavior of individuals or groups by setting up general bases and researching specific conditions. Today we see that every discipline uses different kinds of experiments in order to reach primary goals. Also, nowadays is well known the fact that experiment is an orderly action carried out with the final result.
Generally, scientists from all over the world are dividing experiments on successful or failed, depending on the reached results.
Now, let us take a look at psychology experiments. What makes them differ from others? The main difference is that the research object is not material or physical. It means that formally the psychology experiment could not be successful or failed. Overall, experiments have different goals, but always are based on repeated actions and consequential analysis of the results. Any psychology experiment gives us a result that we probably could not analyse logically, because it does not describe the human nature. It is more natural to name any result of psychology experiment positive.
Let us consider in detail one of the most famous psychological experiments in history. The experiment was conducted at Stanford University in August 1971, by a psychology professor Philip Zimbaro and his team of researchers. The main goal of “Stanford prison experiment” was to figure out the ways in which people play social roles. A group of male students took part in the experiment. They should play roles of prisoners and security guards in a mock prison on the base of university. The results were unexpected. On the second day of experiment, the professor noticed that the ordinary young people turned into savagely sadistic guards or invertebrate prisoners. After just six days from the beginning, Zimbardo suddenly advised to stop the experiment. He argued that the prisoners had got used to their roles in a very deep way and a few of students got serious psychological problems after all.
The primary goal was not reached. Formally, we can name it failed, but soon after the experiment was closed, the results were reported to real prisons to solve the existing problems. The results of “Stanford prison experiment” have also demonstrated theory of cognitive dissonance and the strong power of authority in social relations. However, we also cannot tell that the real results of this research are not useful for nowadays.
The results of psychological experiments of any kind could not be name failed.
