Obedience to authority

Some of you may be familiar with the MacDonald’s incident of 2005 where a hoax caller masqueraded as a policeman and delivered orders over the phone. Astonishingly he was obeyed despite the extreme nature of his instructions (read about the event  here ). I recently gave a talk in London including this event in my talk […]

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Mind Changers

Many of you will be familiar with the excellent BBC radio series called Mind Changers which has included programmes on Milgram, Piaget, Ainsworth, Bartlett, Kohlberg, Zimbardo, Harlow, Asch. Some of these are currently available as podcasts here or you can go to PsychBLOG where Jamie has downloaded some and there are also some available on Spokenword (free subscription […]

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Photo Archive

Just found this excellent set of ‘Mind Bites’ – funky little poster style summaries of psychological research. Excellent I think for lessons on hypothesis formulation and testing. There’s also a brilliant photo archive here , containing hundreds of images of old psychological research equipment. (Including Milgram’s fake shock machine ). I love all this stuff…. maybe it’s a bloke thing, […]

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Milgram …. bovvered?

A clip from the classic obedience studies conducted by Stanley Milgram. If you haven’t studied this experiment already on your psychology course, you can pretty much guarantee that you will at some point. The studies are controversial because of ethical concerns: Did Milgram do enough to look after his participants? The conventional argument is no, he did […]

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