If you’re anything like us, then you’re deeply fascinated by the field of psychology. There’s so much to learn about the nuances of how the human mind works and what drives our behavior. But discovering new things isn’t as easy as just observing the natural world: you often need to design creative experiments to really understand what’s going on.

In an AskReddit thread, various fans of psychology shared the most bizarre experiments they know about, which yielded very unexpected results. We’ve collected some of the most intriguing ones to share with you. Keep scrolling to hopefully learn something new.

Keep in mind that science is constantly improving and evolving as human knowledge advances. So, a handful of the experiments mentioned by the netizens below may be (slightly) out of date by the time you read this.

Read More: 46 Amazing Psychology Experiments That May Change Your Perspective On Things

#1

The Monopoly Study by Paul Piff. He basically brought two strangers into the lab together and had them play a game of Monopoly together. He randomly assigned one participant to start the game with twice as much money than the other and that participant also got to roll both dice to get around the board (i.e., the other participant started with half the money and could only roll one dice).

At the end of the game when he asked the participants who started with more money why he won the game, they would chock it up to their excellent strategy and gamesmanship rather than the fact that they had started the game with way more resources. It says a lot about how we deal with being born into a privileged state.

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#2

Mice were put on two sides of a wall with a door in. Only the right mouse could open the door. Slowly, they filled the left mouse’s room with water and eventually when right mouse saw them in danger, they opened the door.

However, mice that had previously been on he left side and were now on the right (mice who had previously been “wetted”) opened the door considerably faster because they knew how unpleasant it was to be in the other scenario. Basically mice have empathy.

Image credits: anon

#3

One time I participated in a paid research experiment. I was basically tricked into thinking I was drunk.

I was placed in a room with 2 other people and we were instructed to drink vodka with cranberry juice over a period of time while we socialized. After we drank I was placed in a room where I had to read some flashing words on a computer. I felt pretty drunk at this point. When the researcher came back into the room he gave me my car keys and said I was never actually given alcohol. He briefly told me that because I was anticipating drinking for this experiment that my brain had tricked me into feeling the effects of being intoxicated. I immediately snapped out of it and was completely amazed at how I felt.

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#4

Dunning-Kruger effect is one of my favourites. Basically, people with less expertise in a field will over-estimate their abilities in the given field because they don’t know enough to see the limits of their expertise. At the same time, experts tend to under-estimate their abilities because they know too well what they don’t know.

The phenomenon has – among other factors – been linked to anti vaxxers, who over-estimate their expertise, not seeing what they don’t know, with dire consequences.

Image credits: anon

#5

There have been some experiments conducted, but the negativity effect/negativity bias is really sad to me:

It basically says that negative things have a greater emotional and psychological toll on our health than positive/neutral things. So you got an A on a test, that’s great. But you totally fail a test, and the world crumbles and it’s a total disaster. A hundred things can go right and work perfectly throughout the day, but it goes totally undetected in our minds. Then someone cuts us off in traffic and we fume and rage. I learned about this theory almost three years ago and think about it all the time. Reminds me to appreciate and notice the many little things in my day that do go right.

Image credits: anon

#6

The influence of the colour red in sports: Judges were shown a video of a Tae Kwon Do match and awarded more points to the red competitor (versus the blue competitor). When the colours were digitally reversed, judges awarded more points to the other, now red, competitor.

Red may be a signal of dominance as reddened skin is associated with higher testosterone (or possibly higher fertility in women). Wearing red may induce intrinsic psychological effects which increase dominance in addition to altering the perception of others. Researchers found that putting red leg bands on birds increased dominant behaviour, as they took the “lion’s share” of the food.

For my psychology degree dissertation, I presented photos of men to be rated on a scale of Friendly (0) to Threatening (10). Men received a higher threat score if I photoshopped their t-shirt to be red.

Image credits: IGotSatan

#7

Hedonic Adaptation. Put simply, a person who had just won the lottery and another person who had just been paralysed took a survey to measure their life contentment. Obviously it was high and low, respectively. However, they both took the same survey a year later and both scored similarly.

The point being that regardless what happens to you in life, good or bad, you will always adapt and spend most of your life feeling “neutral.”

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#8

If you stare into a dimly lit (i.e. candle-lit) mirror for 10+ minutes you start to see hallucinations. What individuals see tends to vary, but they’ve used this as a test to simulate schizophrenia before because some see monsters / deformities / general weird stuff.

I did a variation of it for a mate at uni and completely wimped out of it. After my face started not looking like my face anymore (I had a complete dissociation) I stopped looking and just waited out the time.

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#9

I just recently heard of blind-sightedness during one of my cognitive psychology classes. Basically the area of the brain that processes what our eyes see is located at the back of the head, just where your skull starts to get smaller, towards your neck. Because of this, if you hit your head back there quite often everything will go black for a moment before sight returns again. Sometimes though, following severe trauma to this area of the brain (like after falling off a ladder onto a curb or something) a person is never able to see again.

For a long time it was assumed that the eyes were somehow incapable of seeing following the trauma and that was why people were blind, however it’s been shown that it is just the processing of the images that is damaged-in other words your eyes are still working away, viewing images but your brain is unable to process the images so you can’t “see” them.

Some experiments looking into this have found that people with damage to this area can still navigate around things in front of them, without realising they are doing it. So if you told someone with this damage to walk down a corridor, and you placed obstacles in their way, they wouldn’t be able to see the obstacles but they could avoid bumping into them because their eyes are still able to view them and send signals to other areas of the brain to avoid knocking things. This is known as blind-sightedness.

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#10

The Elevator Groupthink study, very amusing and sad at the same time. The experiment involved several actors entering an elevator with an oblivious participant. They then begin to perform a series of odd behaviours, such as they all stood facing the rear of the elevator. Inevitably, everyone else who got on ended up also facing the rear so as not to stand out from the rest. The study demonstrates how easily people succumb to group pressure to behave in a certain way.

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#11

The monster experiment! Although it is horrible how they left the children with mental health issues at the end, this experiment gave very good insight to how to parent a child.

On this experiment, they took groups of orphaned children and separated them into 3 groups. One was the control, the second were told they has a lips and were doing bad, and the third was told that their speech was perfect.

As the experiment went on, group 2 began developing lisps after being berated constantly. They became shy and reserved. They were scared to speak because they didn’t want to get in trouble because of their poor speaking skills. Group 3, however, had the opposite happen. They talked better, they were more willing to improve. They were encouraged to keep speaking and told that their speech was amazing and perfect.

By the end of the experiment, they had one group with no change, one group with now mentally ill children with a speech impediment, and one group with great speaking skills.

It truly shows that encouraging children is the way to go and that verbal abuse can be just as, if not more, harmful as physical abuse.

Image credits: Buniny

#12

Reconsolidation: when you retrieve a memory from your long term memory it is susceptible to being manipulated. This can lead to to memories being totally changed from the source. This is why eyewitness accounts cannot be fully seen as true. This knowledge is also being used to help people with PTSD by changing the negative memories they have of their particular trauma.

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#13

The power of a Placebo: Michael of VSauce fame teamed up with a group of PhD candidates in the psychology department of McGill for his show MindField. They recruited three kids with different disorders: eczema with skin-picking disorder; ADHD; and chronic migraines after a concussion.

The kids were each told they were going to be the first to receive a new experimental treatment for their condition, which consisted of putting them into a fake, non-functional MRI machine. Before doing so, they told them that the machine had the power to help them heal their brain. Michael even got a bunch of famous Youtubers to make fake videos discussing the new technology to make the kids believe it. While they were in the machine, the researchers (dressed as doctors) asked the kids if they were feeling the effects of the machine, and that they believed it was working. They never lied to the kids, they just told them it would give them the power to heal themselves.

All three of the kids had markedly improved symptoms several weeks later. The girl with eczema pretty much entirely stopped picking her skin to the point that she felt comfortable wearing short sleeve shirts for the first time. The mother of the kid with ADHD reported that he was much more calm and not as hyperactive. The kid with chronic migraines went from having something like 5-10 debilitating migraines per day to absolute zero, as shown by the chart his mom kept to track them.

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#14

It’s not that psychopaths lack empathy, but rather, they have the manual settings. A specific region of the brain lights up when people experience empathy. For most people it’s an automatic, subconscious, response. But in a study where they showed emotional videos to psychopaths and non while scanning their brains, psychopaths would only light that region of the brain when specifically asked to feel for the character, while the control participants would light up automatically.

Image credits: poopyinthepants

#15

The self-fulfilling prophecy studies are very important to social psychology and their findings have many real world applications.

Basically they brought together a group of kids and formed a class with a real teacher. They gave the kids a test for overall academic skill at the start of the course, but didn’t really use the scores. Instead they told the teachers that a few students, picked at random, were very brilliant and scores very highly. They then observed the class for a long period of time and noticed that the teachers gave the kids they thought were brilliant much more attention. At the end of the study the kids took the test again, and they found that the kids who were randomly named brilliant at the start actually scores higher than the rest of the class. The kids, again, at the start didn’t score any different from the rest of the class, but through the self fulfilling prophecy they became the best in their class.

This obviously has tons of application in the world and especially education.

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#16

Subjects were tested for introvert versus extrovert personality types. Prediction was that when placed in a sensory deprivation chamber the introverts would be able to handle it easily while the extroverts would not. Exactly the reverse was found. Introverts became agitated quickly and performed all manners of self-stimulation. Extroverts quickly went to sleep.

What the finding showed was that it’s introverts who are the sensation seekers, needing stimulation from the outside world. Extroverts create their own internal sensation and project that out to the world.

Image credits: there_ARE_watches

#17

Diet and behaviour in children. Tl;dr – Sugar and sweets don’t make kids hyper. I love this one because its so counter-intuitive and every parent loves to tell you how their kid definitely does.

Researchers took a bunch of parents and their kids, and split them into two groups – those who get healthy fruit, and those who get sugary sweets.

The kids were separated from their parents for a moment and given the fruit or the sweets.

A few minutes later the parents were brought back in, and either told the truth about what they’d been given, or lied to and told the opposite. The parents and kids were left by themselves with an assortment of toys, and the parents were asked to rate their kids behaviour.

What they found is that irrespective of what they were actually given to eat, parents who were told their kids had sugary sweets reported worse behaviour than those who were told they had fruit (again, irrespective of what they actually had)

/|Given Fruit|Given Sweets
:–|:–|:–
Told the kids had fruit|Kids Behaved|Kids Behaved
Told the kids had sweets|Kids Misbehaved|Kids Misbehaved
Not told what they’d had|Kids behaved|Kids behaved

The interesting thing is that when you actually looked at the kids behaviour they really were misbehaving. Generally being more inclined to screech, throw toys around or ignore instructions.

Turns out it’s actually the parents behaviour that determines how the kids act.

The same study has also been done with sugary drinks v.s. water. Same result.

Image credits: PhonicUK

#18

Context: I have a PhD in psychology/cognitive neuroscience.

I studied neuroeconomics, which is an interdisciplinary field that combines neuroscience, psychology, and behavioral economics to study how we make decisions based upon our brain’s representations of value.

One body of work that has always fascinated me has been that of Luke Clark at UBC. In a nutshell, he has been interested in studying how the brain responds to different gambling outcomes (wins vs. losses), and comparing those brain responses between “average” people, and those with clinically diagnosed problem gambling disorders.

He was especially interested in how different people (and their brains) processed *near* losses, and *near* wins (think of just barely missing the mark on a roulette wheel). What his lab has found is that the brains of individuals *without* problem gambling disorders “appropriately” represented near wins as losses, the brains of individuals *with* problem gambling disorders processed near wins (which are objectively losses, mind you) as *wins*. I believe the degree to which they processed these losses as wins was also correlated with a behavioral indicator of willingness/interest in continuing to gamble in the context of that experiment.

This experiment is interesting because it provides some pretty compelling neural data that may help explain some well established behavioral hiccups that occur during gambling, such as the illusion of control (“All I have to do is _____ and I’m more likely to win”), and the gambler’s fallacy (“I’ve been playing for a while, I’m *due* for a win!”).

#19

Split brain studies.

One example: by providing differing information to each hemisphere of the brain in split brain individuals (those with a severed corpus callosum, meaning there’s no communication between the two hemispheres) they found that people would actually physically grab their own hand with their other hand if they saw it making a “mistake”. Basically each side of the brain controls one side of your body, and in split brain people you can actually make both sides display a disagreement with the other… which is insane, if you think about it.

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#20

The Car Crash Experiment.

It demonstrated that the way investigators word a question has an immediate effect on the subject’s memory of an event. It was part of a suite of studies by Elizabeth Loftus (with various other co-researchers) that began to call in to question the veracity of eyewitness accounts.

[https://www.simplypsychology.org/loftus-palmer.html](https://www.simplypsychology.org/loftus-palmer.html).

Image credits: EnormousChord

#21

Aron and Dutton (1974) – Misattribution of arousal.

Men who had just walked across bridge (either steady or unsteady) were approached by a female psychology student, posing to do a project on the effects of exposure to scenic attractions on creative expression. The men had to complete a questionnaire and write a short dramatic story about a picture she provided and she gave them her phone number if they had more questions. Men who walked across the shaky bridge were more likely to call her up because they misattributed the arousal from the bridge to the woman.

TLDR: watch a horror movie on the first date.

Image credits: anon

#22

The Three Christs of Ypsilanti

Psychologist forces three people who believe that they are Jesus Christ to live together.

It does not go well.

The psychologist, Milton Rokeach, had heard of a case where two women who believed that they were Mary, mother of Christ, were forced to live together and one of them broke free from their delusion.

So he figured, three Christs…what would happen.

They were angry at each other. Often had physical fights. They eventually started getting along by avoiding the topic. He would ask them about the others and each would say that the others were crazy. That they, of course, were the real Jesus.

No cures. Some unethical stuff. Interesting though.

#23

When I was about 18 or 19 in the 1970’s, I tried an experiment for a few days: I would smile and say hello to EVERYONE I passed by. I wanted to see who would acknowledge me back. Surprisingly to me, over 90% of people smiled, said hello or acknowledged me back. That told me that if I were to approach someone I didn’t know, 90%+ time they would be receptive. Changed my whole attitude in life. BTW, I am a very outgoing person. Not sure if this experiment brought that out, but it certainly helped my confidence.

Edit: Chicago, Illinois.

Image credits: NeeNee9

#24

Henry Murray conducted experiments on Harvard students where he had them write an essay about “personal beliefs and aspirations”. They would them shame them by repeatedly using this information. On one particular student they noticed he had an acute response to a point that it traumatized him for life. This student was Ted Kaczynski, aka the Unibomber. He sent his bombs primarily focused at faculty from different institutions.

Image credits: SpewPewPew

#25

The Robber’s Cave experiment. Basically, they took 24 boys into the woods and split them up into groups of 12. Each group was told to make a flag and a name. They were put through teambuilding exercises, and went through the predicted storming-norming-conforming phases. When put in competition with the others, rivalries grew, which were demonstrated when the boys were forced to eat together (and not segregate themselves). Later on, the researchers cut off the water supply to the camp and forced the two tribes to work together to fix it. They ended up going through the same storming-norming-conforming process and put aside their rivalries, eventually becoming one homogenous tribe, even going as far as all talking as one group on the bus home.

#26

If people have the upper hand they will put others down to keep it. An experiment told a class of kids that having blue eyes meant you were smarter, achieved more etc. All of a sudden kids with blue eyes formed their own groups. Things like bullying and exclusion of other eye colours started too. They repeated the experiment with different eye colours in different classes, all with the same results.

#27

Our psych class repeated an experiment where half the class held a pencil in between their teeth, and the other half balanced on their top lips. We then rated how funny we thought a comic strip was. Turns out using face muscles associated with smiling (pencil between teeth) made the comic strip subjectively funnier then those associated with frowning (pencil balanced on top lips). Choosing to smile or frown can change how you feel and perceive life.

#28

Not a psychologist, but the one where given a choice between sitting down doing nothing and shocking oneself, people tend to choose the shock. Ergo, we would choose pain over boredom.

#29

Not just one experiment, but a whole thesis and series of works supporting it:
we expect good or bad things to happen to people for a reason and go to pretty interesting length to make up for the lack of justice. Like someone winning the lottery and us thinking they deserve it.

#30

Recent small sample size experiment in toddlers (18mo, I think) investigating the link between fine + gross motor skills and time spent on a computer tablet.
Results showed no difference in gross motor skills between children who had spent lots of time on a tablet, and children who had spent no time at all on one.
Fine motors skills, and understanding the task was largely increased in those who had spent time on tablets.

Editor’s note: While the study found no difference in gross motor skills, it’s important to note that the impact of screen time on fine motor skills is still being researched and may vary depending on factors like the type of screen activity and the child’s age and individual development.
It’s also important to consider the potential benefits of tablet use for learning and development, alongside the potential impact on motor skills. 

#31

The marshmallow test , a child was offered a choice between one small reward provided immediately or two small rewards if they waited for a short period, approximately 15 minutes, during which the tester left the room and then returned. In follow-up studies, the researchers found that children who were able to wait longer for the preferred rewards tended to have better life outcomes.

#32

“The Selective Laziness of Reasoning” is an article I found and then “partially replicated” in my research methods class during my undergraduate, it’s so so great with a very interesting method and results that make you think about discussions and arguments a lot!

Basically: The researchers presented participants with different syllogisms (logic puzzles like all men are mortal, Socrates is a man, so Socrates is moral etc.); and they asked them to provide their answers and also their reasoning for the answers. Later on, the participants were asked to return and they presented some of their old answers but the answers were reversed to be exactly what they had written down previously, BUT, if their own argument from prior was presented as someone else’s they would disagree with it.

The lesson: We critically evaluate other peoples’ arguments with a lot more focused lens, and we afford ourselves less loopholes to jump through to validate / substantiate our own claims.

#33

There is an optical variable called tau, expressed as image size divided by image expansion rate, and it has been shown to be used to perceive time to contact of an approaching object. Even diving birds have been shown to use it. The most interesting part is that the tau quantity is perceived as a whole, directly, and not arrived at by any sort of implicit calculations. Also, it’s time derivative, called tau-dot, is used to control deceleration toward an object, e.g. braking in a car.

Physical activity, in the form of aerobic activity, does a better job of maintaining cognitive ability in aging than any brain training game or cognitively stimulating activities.

Casual video games can reduce stress. (Like candy crush, sushi cat)

Exposure to nature reduces stress and improves cognitive ability.

#34

There is currently evidence to suggest that psychological trauma experienced as a child can have such a powerful affect that it changes part of your biology. In particular it seems to leave an imprint in the immune system, which seems to be involved in the ‘flight or fight’ reaction that activates in response to stress. This immune imprint seems to modulate the response in a way that causes a form of depression.

Ofcourse there are some people who are resistant to this as a child and will grow up healthy. Also there seem to be many types of depression, which have different but similar pathologies, so not everyone who is depressed has a maladaptive immune system.

Further evidence to support this comes from arthritis patients who are depressed. They take anti-inflammatory medicine, which calms down the immune systems response to stressors, and they experience a lifting of their mood before their arthritis symptoms start to disappear.

#35

Don’t know if you guys would care for it, but there are tons of experiments concerning babies and how they perceive the world. One interesting one that stuck with me was when one research team found out that babies recognise consonants of almost every language known to man. But as they grow up, they lose this ability.

This supports Chomsky’s concept of “a language centre” in our brains. But there are tons of other researches disapproving it too.

#36

White rats and black rats were raised separately without seeing each other. When a black rat was placed in the white rats cage, the other rats ostracized him. When white and black rats are raised together and a new black rat is placed in a cage, the white rats accept him.

So basically rats are racist, unless raised to accept differences.

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