psydekick:

Conformity

In the 1950s, Solomon Asch demonstrated how high the rate of conformity can be among peer groups by administering line tests that involved choosing which of three lines on one card matched the line length of the key card, while sitting among a group of people who were all secretly part of the experiment. Sometimes the rest of the group would choose the right answer, sometimes it would purposely choose the wrong answer. Asch found that almost 75% of the participants followed the herd at least once, even if the answer they chose was not the answer they knew to be true.

Obedience

In 1961, Stanley Milgram recruited 40 men to participate in an experiment where each would act as a  “teacher” delivering shocks to a “student” any time a wrong answer to a question was given. The shocks would supposedly increase in voltage up to 450 volts with each wrong answer. In reality, the “shock” machine did absolutely nothing and the “student” was an actor, but the “teacher” didn’t know that. As the experiment would progress, the “student” would cry in pain, beg and plead for the “teacher” to stop, and even complain about heart conditions. However, with prompting from the experimenter, 65% of the participants in the study went on to deliver the maximum voltage of shocks, citing that they did so simply because they were told to by an authority figure.

Fear

In the 1920s, Little Albert was the unfortunate child featured in an experiment to demonstrate one of the possible ways people might acquire a fear or anxiety through conditioning. When Albert was nine months, John Watson — yes, I know, move past it — exposed the kid to a variety of objects and creatures, such as a rat, a rabbit, a monkey, some masks, and a burning newspaper. As is to be expected, nine-month-old Albert didn’t seem particularly afraid of any of this things. The next time Watson showed Albert the rat, however, Watson created a loud noise by hitting a metal pipe with a hammer, which of course frightened the child. After doing this several more times (pairing the rat with the loud noise), Albert would begin to cry and attempt to crawl away merely at the sight of the rat alone. The interesting part is that this fear of white rats was generalized into fear of other white, furry objects, including Santa Claus beards.