Back in highschool I really enjoyed learning about all the classic psychological studies (Stanford prison experiment, pavlov's dogs, Asch line conformity, invisible gorilla and many others). I even enjoy occasionally opening up a psychology research magazine and reading through some recent papers. So I thought it would be fun to read some proper books too.
I'm not looking for anything that feels like a self help book or a therapy manual. I'm also more interested in experiments on general populations, rather than case studies on exceptional people. I want to see interesting experiment setups, ingenious ways in which researchers make sure their studies maintain real-world validity, and ways in which the findings have been applied to real world problems.
Bonus points for unethical and unhinged studies that could not be carried out anymore, but which did provide valuable insights. Like really, giving baby monkeys artificial mothers made of steel? Are these guys disney villains?
by zechamp
4 Comments
You should have a read of Humankind by Rutger Bregman. It goes into detail about experiments like the Stanford Prison Experiment, the Milgram Experiment and others. It explains exactly why they weren’t rigorous, the results were arguably invalid and actually prove the opposite of what most people believe they did.
I can only think of movies. You should look for Iceman (Schepisi 1984). Also Abre Los Ojos or its remake Vanilla Sky.
Flowers for Algernon for sure
The latest Dan Brown fiction, The Secrets of Secrets, delves into such topics. His last 2 novels were clunkers, but the latest was pretty good.