Hundreds of thousands of physical experiments have been carried out over the thousand-year history of science. It is difficult to select a few "most-most." Among US physicists and Western Europe a survey was conducted. Researchers Robert Creese and Stoney Book asked them to name the most beautiful physics experiments in history. Igor Sokalsky, a researcher at the Laboratory of High-Energy Neutrino Astrophysics, Ph.D.
1. Experiment of Eratosthenes of Cyrene
One of the oldest known physical experiments, as a result of which the radius of the Earth was measured, was carried out in the 3rd century BC by the librarian of the famous Library of Alexandria, Erastofen of Cyrene. The scheme of the experiment is simple. At noon, on the day of the summer solstice, in the city of Siena (now Aswan), the Sun was at its zenith and objects did not cast shadows. On the same day and at the same time in the city of Alexandria, located 800 kilometers from Siena, the Sun deviated from the zenith by about 7 °. This is about 1/50th of a full circle (360°), which gives the Earth a circumference of 40,000 kilometers and a radius of 6,300 kilometers. It seems almost unbelievable that measured so simple method the radius of the Earth turned out to be only 5% less value obtained by the most accurate modern methods, according to the site "Chemistry and Life".
2. Experiment of Galileo Galilei
In the 17th century, the point of view of Aristotle dominated, who taught that the speed of the fall of a body depends on its mass. The heavier the body, the faster it falls. Observations that each of us can make in everyday life would seem to confirm this. Try to release a light toothpick and a heavy stone at the same time. The stone will touch the ground faster. Such observations led Aristotle to the conclusion about the fundamental property of the force with which the Earth attracts other bodies. In fact, the rate of fall is affected not only by the force of gravity, but also by the force of air resistance. The ratio of these forces for light and heavy objects is different, which leads to the observed effect.
The Italian Galileo Galilei doubted the correctness of Aristotle's conclusions and found a way to test them. To do this, he dropped a cannonball and a much lighter musket ball from the Leaning Tower of Pisa at the same moment. Both bodies had approximately the same streamlined shape, therefore, for both the core and the bullet, the air resistance forces were negligible compared to the forces of attraction. Galileo found that both objects reach the ground at the same moment, that is, the speed of their fall is the same.
The results obtained by Galileo are a consequence of the law of universal gravitation and the law according to which the acceleration experienced by a body is directly proportional to the force acting on it and inversely proportional to the mass.
3. Another experiment of Galileo Galilei
Galileo measured the distance that the balls rolling on an inclined board overcame in equal time intervals, measured by the author of the experiment using a water clock. The scientist found that if the time is doubled, the balls will roll four times further. This quadratic relationship meant that the balls under the influence of gravity move with acceleration, which contradicted Aristotle's accepted belief for 2000 years that bodies subject to a force move at a constant speed, whereas if a force is not applied to a body, then it rests. The results of this experiment by Galileo, as well as the results of his experiment with the Leaning Tower of Pisa, later served as the basis for formulating the laws of classical mechanics.
4. Henry Cavendish experiment
After Isaac Newton formulated the law of universal gravitation: the force of attraction between two bodies with masses Mit, distant from each other at a distance r, is equal to F = γ (mM / r2), it remained to determine the value of the gravitational constant γ - To do this, it was necessary to measure the force attraction between two bodies with known masses. This is not so easy to do, because the force of attraction is very small. We feel the gravity of the earth. But it is impossible to feel the attraction of even a very large mountain that is nearby, because it is very weak.
A very subtle and sensitive method was needed. It was invented and applied in 1798 by Newton's compatriot Henry Cavendish. He used a torsion balance, a yoke with two balls suspended from a very thin cord. Cavendish measured the displacement of the rocker (turn) when approaching the balls of weights of other balls of greater mass. To increase the sensitivity, the displacement was determined from the light spots reflected from the mirrors fixed on the rocker balls. As a result of this experiment, Cavendish was able to quite accurately determine the value of the gravitational constant and for the first time calculate the mass of the Earth.
5. The experiment of Jean Bernard Foucault
French physicist Jean Bernard Léon Foucault in 1851 experimentally proved the rotation of the Earth around its axis using a 67-meter pendulum suspended from the top of the dome of the Paris Pantheon. The swing plane of the pendulum remains unchanged relative to the stars. The observer, who is on the Earth and rotates with it, sees that the plane of rotation slowly turns in the direction opposite to the direction of the Earth's rotation.
6. Isaac Newton's experiment
In 1672, Isaac Newton did a simple experiment that is described in all school textbooks. Having closed the shutters, he made a small hole in them, through which a ray of sunlight passed. A prism was placed in the path of the beam, and a screen was placed behind the prism. On the screen, Newton observed a "rainbow": a white sunbeam, passing through a prism, turned into several colored rays - from purple to red. This phenomenon is called light dispersion.
Sir Isaac was not the first to observe this phenomenon. Already at the beginning of our era, it was known that large single crystals of natural origin have the property of decomposing light into colors. Even before Newton, the first studies of light dispersion in experiments with a glass triangular prism were carried out by the Englishman Khariot and the Czech naturalist Marci.
However, prior to Newton, such observations were not subjected to serious analysis, and the conclusions drawn from them were not rechecked by additional experiments. Both Chariot and Martzi remained followers of Aristotle, who argued that the difference in color is determined by the difference in the amount of darkness "mixed" with white light. Purple, according to Aristotle, occurs with the greatest addition of darkness to light, and red - with the least. Newton did additional experiences with crossed prisms, when light passed through one prism passes through another. Based on the totality of his experiments, he concluded that “no color arises from whiteness and blackness mixed together, except for intermediate dark
the amount of light does not change the appearance of the color." He showed that white light must be considered as a composite light. The main colors are from purple to red.
This experiment by Newton is a wonderful example of how different people, observing the same phenomenon, interpret it differently, and only those who question their interpretation and make additional experiments come to the correct conclusions.
7. Thomas Young's experiment
Until the beginning of the 19th century, ideas about the corpuscular nature of light prevailed. Light was considered to be composed of individual particles - corpuscles. Although the phenomena of diffraction and interference of light were observed by Newton ("Newton's rings"), the generally accepted point of view remained corpuscular.
Considering the waves on the surface of the water from two thrown stones, you can see how, overlapping each other, the waves can interfere, that is, cancel out or mutually reinforce each other. Based on this, English physicist and the physician Thomas Young made experiments in 1801 with a beam of light which passed through two holes in an opaque screen, thus forming two independent sources of light, analogous to two stones thrown into water. As a result, he observed an interference pattern consisting of alternating dark and white bands, which could not have formed if the light consisted of corpuscles. Dark bands corresponded to areas where light waves two slits cancel each other out. Light streaks appeared where the light waves mutually amplified. Thus, the wave nature of light was proved.
8. Klaus Jonsson's experiment
The German physicist Klaus Jonsson conducted an experiment in 1961 similar to Thomas Young's light interference experiment. The difference was that instead of beams of light, Jonsson used electron beams. He obtained an interference pattern similar to that which Jung observed for light waves. This confirmed the correctness of the provisions of quantum mechanics about the mixed corpuscular-wave nature of elementary particles.
9. Robert Milliken's experiment
The notion that electric charge of any body is discrete (that is, it consists of a larger or smaller set of elementary charges that are no longer subject to fragmentation), arose back in early XIX century and supported by such famous physicists, like M. Faraday and G. Helmholtz. The term "electron" was introduced into the theory, denoting a certain particle - the carrier of an elementary electric charge. This term, however, was at that time purely formal, since neither the particle itself nor the elementary electric charge associated with it were discovered experimentally. In 1895, K. Roentgen, during experiments with a discharge tube, discovered that its anode, under the action of rays flying from the cathode, is capable of emitting its own, X-rays, or Roentgen rays. In the same year, the French physicist J. Perrin experimentally proved that cathode rays are a stream of negatively charged particles. But, despite the colossal experimental material, the electron remained a hypothetical particle, since there was not a single experiment in which individual electrons would participate.
The American physicist Robert Milliken developed a method that has become a classic example of an elegant physical experiment. Millikan managed to isolate several charged water droplets in space between the capacitor plates. By illuminating with X-rays, it was possible to slightly ionize the air between the plates and change the charge of the droplets. When the field between the plates was switched on, the droplet slowly moved upward under the action of electric attraction. With the field turned off, it descended under the influence of gravity. By turning the field on and off, it was possible to study each of the droplets suspended between the plates for 45 seconds, after which they evaporated. By 1909, it was possible to determine that the charge of any droplet was always an integer multiple of the fundamental value e (electron charge). This was strong evidence that the electrons were particles with the same charge and mass. Replacing water droplets with oil droplets, Millikan was able to increase the duration of observations to 4.5 hours, and in 1913, eliminating possible sources of error one by one, published the first measured value of the electron charge: e = (4.774 ± 0.009) x 10-10 electrostatic units .
10. Ernst Rutherford's experiment
By the beginning of the 20th century, it had become clear that atoms were made up of negatively charged electrons and some sort of positive charge, which kept the atom generally neutral. However, there were too many assumptions about what this “positive-negative” system looks like, while experimental data that would make it possible to make a choice in favor of one or another model was clearly lacking. Most physicists have accepted J.J. Thomson's model: the atom is a uniformly charged positive ball about 108 cm in diameter with negative electrons floating inside.
In 1909, Ernst Rutherford (assisted by Hans Geiger and Ernst Marsden) set up an experiment to understand the actual structure of the atom. In this experiment, heavy positively charged a-particles moving at a speed of 20 km/s passed through a thin gold foil and scattered on the gold atoms, deviating from their original direction of motion. To determine the degree of deflection, Geiger and Marsden had to observe, using a microscope, flashes on the scintillator plate that occurred where an a particle hit the plate. In two years, about a million flashes were counted and it was proved that about one particle in 8000, as a result of scattering, changes the direction of motion by more than 90 ° (that is, turns back). This could not have happened in a "loose" Thomson atom. The results unequivocally testified in favor of the so-called planetary model of the atom - a massive tiny nucleus about 10-13 cm in size and electrons revolving around this nucleus at a distance of about 10-8 cm.
Modern physical experiments are much more complicated than the experiments of the past. In some devices, they are placed on areas of tens of thousands of square kilometers, in others they fill a volume of the order of a cubic kilometer. And still others will soon be held on other planets.
Psychology is famous for its unusual and sometimes monstrous experiences. This is not physics, where you need to roll balls on the table, and not biology with its microscopes and cells. Here the objects of research are dogs, monkeys and people. Paul Kleinman described the most famous and controversial experiments in his new work "Psychology". AiF.ru publishes the most notable experiments described in the book.
prison experiment
Philip Zimbardo conducted a curious experiment, which is called the Stanford Prison Experiment. Scheduled for two weeks, it was terminated after 6 days. The psychologist wanted to understand what happens when a person's individuality and dignity are taken away - as happens in prison.
Zimbardo hired 24 men, whom he divided into two equal groups and distributed the roles - prisoners and guards, and he himself became the "head of the prison." The entourage was appropriate: the guards walked in uniforms, and each had a club, but the “criminals”, as befits people in this position, were dressed in poor overalls, they were not given underwear, and an iron chain was tied to their leg - as a reminder about the prison. There was no furniture in the cells, only mattresses. The food wasn't outstanding either. In general, everything is real.
The prisoners were kept in cells designed for three people around the clock. The guards could go home at night and generally do whatever they wanted with the prisoners (except for corporal punishment).
The very next day after the start of the experiment, the prisoners barricaded the door in one of the cells, and the guards poured foam on them from a fire extinguisher. A little later, a VIP cell was created for those who behaved well. Very soon, the guards began to have fun: they forced the prisoners to do push-ups, strip naked and clean the latrines with their hands. As punishment for rebellions (which, by the way, the prisoners regularly organized), mattresses were taken away from them. Later, a normal toilet became a privilege: those who rebelled were not allowed out of the cell - they only brought a bucket.
Approximately 30% of the guards showed sadistic tendencies. Interestingly, the prisoners also got used to their role. At first they were promised to give 15 dollars daily. However, even after Zimbardo announced that he would not pay the money, no one expressed a desire to go free. People voluntarily decided to continue!
On the seventh day, a graduate student visited the prison: she was going to conduct a survey among the experimental subjects. The picture simply shocked the girl - she was shocked by what she saw. Looking at the reaction stranger, Zimbardo realized that things had gone too far, and decided to stop the experiment ahead of schedule. The American Psychological Association strictly forbade it ever being repeated on ethical grounds. The ban is still in effect.
invisible gorilla
Perceptual blindness is a phenomenon when a person is so overloaded with impressions that he does not notice anything around him. Attention is completely absorbed by only one object. All of us suffer from this kind of visual blindness from time to time.
Daniel Simons showed the subjects a video where people dressed in black and white T-shirts threw a ball to each other. The task was simple - to count the number of throws. While two groups of people were tossing the ball, a man dressed in a gorilla costume appeared in the center of the sports ground: he pounded his chest with his fists, just like a real monkey, and then quietly left the field.
After watching the video, the participants in the experiment were asked if they noticed anything strange on the site. And as many as 50% answered in the negative: half simply did not see a huge gorilla! This is explained not only by the focus on the game, but also by the fact that we are not ready to see something incomprehensible and unexpected in everyday life.
Killer teachers
Stanley Milgram known for his outrageous hair-raising experiment. He decided to study how and why people obey authority. The psychologist was prompted by the trial of a Nazi criminal Adolf Eichmann. Eichmann was accused of having ordered the extermination of millions of Jews during World War II. Lawyers built a defense based on the claim that he was just a military man and obeyed the orders of commanders.
Milgram advertised in the newspaper and found 40 volunteers ostensibly to study memory and learning abilities. Everyone was told that someone would be the teacher and someone would be the student. And they even held a draw so that people would take what was happening at face value. In fact, everyone got a piece of paper with the word "teacher" on it. In each pair of experimental subjects, the "student" was an actor who acted in concert with the psychologist.
So, what was this shocking experiment?
1. The “student”, whose task was to memorize the words, was tied to a chair and electrodes were connected to the body, after which the “teachers” were asked to go to another room.
2. There was an electric current generator in the "teacher's" room. As soon as the “student” made a mistake while memorizing new words, he had to be punished with a current discharge. The process began with a small discharge of 30 volts, but each time it increased by 15 volts. The maximum point is 450 volts.
So that the "teacher" does not doubt the purity of the experiment, they beat him with an electric shock with a voltage of 30 volts - quite noticeably. And that's the only real one.
3. Then the fun begins. The "student" remembers the words, but soon makes mistakes. Naturally, the experimental "teacher" punishes him, as it should be according to the instructions. With a discharge of 75 volts (of course, fake), the actor groans, then squeals and begs to untie him from the chair. Each time the current increases, the screams only get louder. The actor even complains of pain in the heart!
4. Of course, people were scared and wondered if it was worth continuing. Then they were clearly told not to stop in any case. And the people obeyed. Although some trembled and laughed nervously, many did not dare to disobey.
5. At around 300 volts, the actor furiously pounded on the wall with his fists and shouted that he was in a lot of pain and that he could not bear this pain; at 330 volts it was completely quiet. Meanwhile, the “teacher” was told: since the “student” is silent, this is the same as the wrong answer. So, the quiet "student" must be shocked again.
7. The experiment ended when the "teacher" chose the maximum discharge of 450 volts.
The conclusions were terrible: 65% of the participants reached highest point and "draconian" figures of 450 volts - they applied a discharge of such force to a living person! And these are ordinary, “normal” people. But under the pressure of authority, they subjected those around them to suffering.
Milgram's experiment is still criticized for being unethical. After all, the participants did not know that everything was for fun, and experienced serious stress. No matter how you look at it, inflicting pain on another person turns into a psychological trauma for life.
Heinz dilemma
Psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg studied moral development. He believed that this is a process that continues throughout life. To confirm his guesses, Kohlberg offered children of different ages complex moral dilemmas.
The psychologist told the children a story about a woman who was dying - she was being killed by cancer. And then, by a lucky chance, one pharmacist allegedly invented a medicine that could help her. However, he asked for a huge price - $ 2,000 per dose (although the cost of manufacturing the drug was only $ 200). The woman's husband—his name was Heinz—borrowed money from friends and raised only half the amount, $1,000.
Arriving at the pharmacist, Heinz asked him to sell the medicine for his dying wife cheaper, or at least on credit. However, he replied, “No! I created a cure and I want to get rich.” Heinz fell into despair. What was to be done? That same night, he secretly entered the pharmacy and stole the medicine. Did Heinz do well?
Such is the dilemma. Interestingly, Kohlberg did not study the answers to the question, but the reasoning of children. As a result, he singled out several stages in the development of morality: starting from the stage when the rules are perceived as absolute truth, and ending with the observance of one's own moral principles - even if they run counter to the laws of society.
For whom the Bell Tolls
Many people know that Ivan Pavlov studied reflexes. But few people know that he was interested in the cardiovascular system and digestion, and he also knew how to quickly and without anesthesia insert a catheter in dogs in order to track how emotions and drugs affect blood pressure (and whether they affect at all).
Pavlov's famous experiment, when researchers developed new reflexes in dogs, became a grandiose discovery in psychology. Oddly enough, it was he who largely helped to explain why a person develops panic disorders, anxiety, fears and psychoses (acute states with hallucinations, delusions, depression, inadequate reactions and confused consciousness).
So how did Pavlov's experiment with dogs go?
1. The scientist noticed that food (an unconditioned stimulus) causes a natural reflex in dogs in the form of saliva. As soon as the dog sees the food, it starts to salivate. But the sound of the metronome is a neutral stimulus, it does not cause anything.
2. Dogs were given a lot of time to listen to the sound of the metronome (which, as we remember, was a neutral stimulus). After that, the animals were fed immediately (they used the unconditioned stimulus).
3. After a while, they began to associate the sound of the metronome with eating.
4. The last phase is the formed conditioned reflex. The sound of the metronome was always salivating. And it doesn’t matter if the dogs were given food after it or not. It just became part of the conditioned reflex.
Drawing from the book "Psychology" by Paul Kleinman. Publishing house "Mann, Ivanov and Ferber".
Excerpts courtesy of Mann, Ivanov & Ferber
The third wave is a psychological experiment conducted by history teacher Ron Jones on American high school students. In early April 1967, Jones spent a week in a Palo Alto school class trying to make sense of the behavior of the German people under repressive National Socialism. Having established strict rules for schoolchildren and becoming the creator of a youth group, he, to his surprise, did not meet resistance from either students or adults. On the fifth day, Jones stopped the experiment, explaining to the students how easily they are manipulated, and that their obedient behavior these days is not fundamentally different from the actions of ordinary citizens of the Third Reich.
Experiment
Ron Jones taught history at high school Ellwood Cubberle in Palo Alto, California. While studying World War II, one of the schoolchildren asked Jones how ordinary Germans could pretend not to know anything about the concentration camps and mass extermination of people in their country. Since the class was ahead curriculum, Jones decided to allocate one week for an experiment dedicated to this issue.
On Monday, he explained to the students the power of discipline. Jones told the students to sit in the "at attention" position, as it is more conducive to learning. Then he ordered the students to stand up and sit down several times in a new position, then he also repeatedly ordered them to leave the audience and silently enter and take their seats. The students liked the “game” and they willingly followed the instructions. Jones told the students to answer questions clearly and vividly, and they obeyed with interest, even the usually passive students.
On Tuesday, Jones explained the power of community to a class that had sat down on their own. He had the students chant in unison: "Strength in discipline, strength in community." The disciples acted with obvious enthusiasm, seeing the strength of their group. At the end of the lesson, Jones showed the students the greeting they were supposed to use when meeting each other - a raised, curved right hand to the shoulder - and called this gesture the salute of the Third Wave. In the following days, the students regularly greeted each other with this gesture.
On Wednesday, 13 more students volunteered to join the 30 students in the experimental class, and Jones decided to issue membership cards. He talked about the power of action. According to him, individual rivalry is often frustrating, while group activities lead to greater learning success. Jones told the students to work together to design a Third Wave banner, convince twenty children from a neighboring elementary school in the correct landing "quietly" and name one reliable schoolboy who could join the experiment. Three students were given the task of reporting to Jones on violations of the established order and criticism of the Third Wave, but in practice about 20 people volunteered to report. One of the students, Robert, who was distinguished by a large physique and low learning abilities, told Jones that he would be his bodyguard, and followed him throughout the school. The three most successful students of the class, whose abilities were not in demand in the new conditions, informed their parents about the experiment. As a result, Jones received a phone call from a local rabbi, who was satisfied with the answer that the class was studying the German personality type in practice. The rabbi promised to explain everything to the parents of the schoolgirls. Jones was extremely frustrated by the lack of resistance even from the adults, the principal of the school greeted him with the salute of the Third Wave.
On Thursday morning, the audience was trashed by the father of one of the students, who was waiting for Jones in the hallway. He was not himself, explained his behavior by the German captivity and asked to understand him. Jones, who was trying to speed up the completion of the experiment, explained to the students the power of pride. 80 schoolchildren gathered in the class heard that they are part of a nationwide youth program whose task is political transformation for the benefit of the people. Jones ordered four escorts to escort three girls from the auditorium and escort them to the library, whose loyalty was questionable. He then said that hundreds of Third Wave chapters had been set up in other regions of the country, and that the movement's leader and new presidential candidate would announce their creation on television at noon on Friday.
On Friday afternoon, 200 students crowded into the classroom, including representatives of youth subcultures who were not interested in school affairs in principle. Jones' friends posed as photographers as they circled the audience. At noon, the TV was turned on, but nothing appeared on the screen. Seeing the bewilderment of the schoolchildren, Jones admitted that the movement does not exist, and the students abandoned their own opinions and easily succumbed to manipulation. According to him, their actions did not differ much from the behavior of the German people in the critical years. Schoolchildren dispersed in a depressed state, many could not hold back their tears.
Effects
The experiment was spontaneous and for a long time remained unknown to the general public, which was facilitated by the shame of its participants for their actions. In the late 1970s, Jones published the history of the experiment in his pedagogical book. In 1981, the novel and television movie The Wave, based on the experiment, was released. In 2008, the heavily dramatized German film Experiment 2: The Wave was released.
Continuing the series of stories about "classic" or "famous" psychological experiments, it should be noted that many of them could not be staged in our time. Modern ethical rules, requiring the unconditional prevention of both physical and mental trauma in the subject, would not allow Stanley Millgram's experiment (TrV-Science, No. 86), nor Philip Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment (TrV-Science, No. 102).
Behavior is everything
An experiment set up by the founder of behaviorism, John Brodes Watson ( John Broadus Watson) and entered the history of psychology under the name "little Albert", can also be put on a par with these experiments.
The full namesake of biographer Sherlock Holmes was born in 1878. In 1913, he announced the creation of a new direction in psychology - behaviorism. According to this theory, the subject of psychology is behavior, not the human psyche. Behavior, according to this theory, depends on external stimuli and the external environment, and not on internal mental processes.
Behaviorism quickly gained momentum, and in 1916, for one year, Watson was elected president of the American Psychological Association (86 years later, the author of the Stanford Prison Experiment also held this position).
Little Albert
At the very end of 1919, Watson and his assistant and mistress Rosalie Rayner set up an experiment that is designed to show the correctness of the behavioral theory. Their task is to evoke, through external stimuli, a complex mental emotion where it was not there before.
Watson and Rayner chose an 11-month-old infant, "Albert B.", for the experiments. He was a normally developed child, phlegmatic, and most importantly - accessible for research: his mother worked as a nanny in a local shelter for disabled children.
First, the experimenters tested Albert's reactions by showing him a white rat, various masks, a burning newspaper, and cotton yarn. None of these items showed fear in the baby.
Watson and her assistant then proceeded to develop a fear response. Simultaneously with the child being allowed to play with a white rat, the experimenter hit the meter-long steel strip hard with a hammer so that the child could not see the hammer and the strip. The loud sound frightened Albert. Of course, quite quickly the child began to be frightened of the rat itself - without a blow. The first phase of the experiment was over - the conditioned reflex of fear to the rat was really fixed in the baby.
Then a pause was taken for five days. Albert was again with the experimenters. They tested his reaction: ordinary toys did not cause a negative reaction. The rat still frightened the baby. Now it was necessary to check whether there was a transfer of the fear reaction to other animals and similar objects. It turned out that the child is really afraid of a rabbit (strongly), a dog (weakly), a fur coat, cotton yarn (minimum), a researcher's hair, a Santa Claus mask.
Further, Watson and Rayner (they say) planned to demonstrate the ability to remove (redefine) the fear responses evoked, but could not, because the child was taken from the hospital where the studies were being conducted. However, in the very first article about the experiment, it is said that psychologists knew perfectly well when the baby would be taken away, and only indicates how they would like to relieve fear. Only in subsequent publications and interviews did they say that the child was taken away “suddenly”.
However, now for such methods of "treatment of fear" a psychologist in the United States could get a very long prison sentence for rape and pedophilia - after all, these methods included not only a candy offered to a baby at the same time as a rat, but also stimulation of the child's genitals.
Interestingly, in the article, Watson not only wrote about the correctness of his theory, but also did not fail to kick the theory of Sigmund Freud.
“Twenty years from now, the Freudians, if their hypotheses do not change, analyzing Albert’s fear of a fur seal coat (provided that he comes to their session), they will probably beg him to retell the contents of his dream to them and say that Albert is in At the age of three, he tried to play with his mother's pubic hair and was beaten for it. (We in no way deny that this might have elicited the conditioned response in any other case.) If the psychoanalyst had prepared Albert sufficiently to accept such a dream as an explanation for his avoidant tendencies, and if the psychoanalyst had the power and personal authority to to achieve his goal, then Albert would probably have been fully convinced that his dream really revealed all the factors that led to the emergence of this fear.
Beginning of the End
Watson was triumphant, but, oddly enough, the experiment proved to be the beginning of the end for behaviorism.
Firstly, the subsequent “fitting” and “smoothing” of the experimental results showed that methodologically the experiment is not doing well. It turned out that Watson from time to time “reinforced” fear reactions at the second stage and prevented the child from turning on compensatory mechanisms (Albert sucked his finger and calmed down, Watson pulled his finger out of his mouth).
Secondly, the further fate of Albert remained unknown - as well as the long-term effect of "fixing" fear.
Thirdly, no one succeeded in repeating the experiment subsequently. Including Watson himself: six months after publication, he had to leave Johns Hopkins University in connection with an ethical scandal. True, no one was worried about the fate of the baby - the affair of a married Watson with a graduate student outraged society much more. The psychologist had to go into advertising.
With this experiment, Watson tried to prove his thesis, now torn into quotes in textbooks: “Give me a dozen healthy, normally developed babies and my own special world in which I will raise them, and I guarantee that by choosing a child at random, I can make him at his own discretion by a specialist of any profile - a doctor, a lawyer, a merchant, and even a beggar or a thief - regardless of his talents, inclinations, professional abilities and the racial affiliation of his ancestors.
True, few people quote the continuation: “I draw conclusions that are not sufficiently supported by facts, and I admit it, but so do the defenders of the opposite point of view, and they have been doing this for millennia.”
Watson J. B., Rayner R. Conditioned emotional reactions // J. exp. Psychol. 1920. No. 3(1). P. 1–14.
Background of the experiment
Winthrop Kellogg - American psychologist (1898-1972), who gained fame as an odious experimenter. The fact is that he conducted experiments in the field of comparative psychology of primates, and more specifically, Kellogg tried to raise a chimpanzee as a person in a normal average family.
Winthrop Kellogg and Gua (1931)
The idea came to him while studying at Columbia, when Kellogg encountered journalistic articles about "wolf children" in India. Most of all, Winthrop was interested in the fact that the “Mowglis” returned to the bosom of civilization could not fully socialize and often showed the habits of their “parents”.
However, the researcher believed that these children are born with normal intellectual abilities, as they perfectly adapt to the conditions around them. Winthrop Kellogg believed that the main problem in the socialization of children raised by wild animals was not their fundamental underdevelopment, but the exceptional influence of early experience and the existence of a special, critical mental experience experienced in infancy and childhood.
Inspired by stories about Mowgli children, Winthrop Kellogg decides to test the theses he formulated in the article “Humanizing of ape”. The article itself was published in Psychological Review #38. The psychologist was interested in "the relative influence of nature and nurture on behavior."
By virtue of the fact that to conduct an experiment in which the subject would be a child would mean to violate those few ethical standards that existed in the scientific and psychological environment of that time, they decided to abandon this option:
“A human infant with normal intelligence will be placed in a wild environment and [will be observed] ... for its development in this environment”
So Kellogg and his wife Luella created an experimental design in which the conditions of upbringing would be reversed. That is, a wild animal would be placed in a human social environment and brought up in it. A similar experiment had already been done a year before the Kelloggs Carlisle Jacobsen (1930), but the results were negative.
In addition, Winthrop Kellogg criticized the failed experiment. The scientist argued this as follows: Carlisle chose an already one-year-old chimpanzee, who, moreover, lived in a zoo for some time, which means that he had an attitude towards people as masters, and towards himself as an animal. In contrast, Winthrop formulated the key position of his project as follows:
"Creating an atmosphere in which the animal was always perceived as a person, and never as a pet."
In the end, it was decided to raise the monkey in a home environment, along with their nine-month-old baby, baby Donald. The original plan of the experiment was to move to West Africa, but the banal lack of funds almost destroyed the prospect of research. The Kelloggs were saved by Robert Yerkes, from whom Winthrop took care of the seven-month-old female chimpanzee Gua in 1931.
Experiment progress
Donald and Gua were brought up on an equal footing, without making a difference between them. Both of them were dressed, put on a highchair, during meals, spoon-fed, washed and taught. Not surprisingly, the chimpanzee and the child quickly bonded and became inseparable.
Gua and Donald in anticipation of tests for speed of reaction.
A few months later, Winthrop and Luella began tests of intelligence, quickness of reaction, and the ability to determine the direction of the sound. One of the tests looked like this: they hung cookies on a thread in the middle of the room, and Donald and Gua were given sticks, watching who figured out how to get a treat faster.
In another test, the chimpanzee and the baby were blindfolded and called by name. Both subjects were given the same items (a spoon, pencils and paper, like a bicycle) and compared the speed of mastering the items. There were several reaction tests: loud noise, for a long exposure (the child and the chimpanzee were twisted on a chair around its axis for a long time), for a delayed reaction (mom or dad hid behind a screen, and the experimental subjects had to follow them).
Gua showed great ingenuity in everything related to mobility and ways of obtaining food, while Donald mastered the objects familiar to us at times: a spoon, a plate, pencils and paper.
In total, the monkey and the human cub spent 9 months together: the experiment began in 1931, and ended on March 28, 1932. It was assumed that the experiment would last 5 years. From the above, it is not difficult to guess that the study was not completed, because the Kelloggs failed to make a person out of a chimpanzee. Their biggest successes are teaching the Gua upright posture and the use of a spoon while eating. The chimpanzee understood human speech a little, but she herself could not speak, even the most simple words. The monkey could not even master such a simple human game as "patties", unlike Donald. And yet, why was the experiment interrupted so early?
The fact is that Winthrop and Luella were frightened by the lag in the development of their son Donald. At 19 months, the boy knew and used only three words, begging for food, hooting and imitating the barking of monkeys. The boy began to imitate his "sister" too much, and the Kelloggs ended the experiment. It cannot be said that Winthrop Kellogg's hypothesis about the influence of the natural environment and education on the formation of behavioral patterns has been completely refuted, but it is obvious that the general educational environment is not enough to direct mental development in the right direction.
Unfortunately, Donald's fate remains unknown, while a little more is known about Gua. The life of the test subject was tragic: she was returned to the primate research center, where she died a few years later. More such experiments were not carried out.
Criticism
Surprisingly, Winthrop Kellogg's rather strange experiment was relatively favorably received in the scientific community. Although such loyalty can be easily explained by the trends in American psychological science at the beginning of the 20th century, radical behaviorism and scientific positivism were bearing fruit. In an article in Time (Baby & Ape), the researcher wrote:
“The Gua, perceived as a human child, behaved like a human child, except when her body and brain interfered with her. The experiment has been terminated."
In the end, the materials of the experiment formed the basis of Kellogg's book "The Ape and The Child", published in 1933. However, there was also criticism. So several psychologists expressed disapproval due to the fact that an infant was chosen as the object of research. It seemed unethical to them. Others criticized Kellogg for weaning the chimpanzee from its mother and animal society, which automatically made Gua's life extremely difficult, even in a research facility.
conclusions
It seems that the attempt to humanize animals, even primates related to us, cannot be crowned with success. The impact of the environment, which the Winthrops hoped for, was not strong enough, while communication with a piece of wildlife negatively affected their son.
Donald and Gua playing ball (late 1931).
If you look at the results of the study from the position of Kellogg, then everything looks a little different. The study showed the limits of the influence of heredity, independent of environment, and revealed the benefits mental development, due to the enriched environment.
As stated above, Gua never lived up to Kellogg's expectations of human language acquisition, as she was unable to imitate human speech. On the contrary, the same cannot be said of Donald, who imitated some of the Gua sounds, which says
It seems that such an experiment should once again convince the scientific community of the failure of the superstructure, in the form of a highly organized and overcomplicated society, but this does not happen. So, a special case of unsuccessful researchers.
However, everything is as usual, someone may not like it.
1. W.N. Kellogg - "Humanizing the ape" (1931).
2. W.N. Kellogg - "Babe & Ape" (Time, 1933).
