What do you know about psychology's most infamous experiments? Test your knowledge in this quiz.
From shocking studies to ESP, what do you know about the most infamous and bizarre psychological experiments ever conducted?
Psychology is a relatively young science. The first person to call himself a psychologist, Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt, began his work in the 1860s in Germany and established the first-ever psychology lab in 1879. In the early 1900s, the science of behaviorism arose. It focused less on the internal processes of the mind and more on how people acted under given circumstances, some of which could be quite unusual, depending on the experiment.
Over the past century, psychologists have come up with a variety of creative (and sometimes questionable) ways to study the human mind and behavior. Some of these experiments occurred before strong protections for participants' safety; others were ethical but went to strange lengths to isolate a single variable or outcome. Test yourself on the weird history of some of psychology's most infamous studies here.
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Stephanie Pappas is a contributing writer for Live Science, covering topics ranging from geoscience to archaeology to the human brain and behavior. She was previously a senior writer for Live Science but is now a freelancer based in Denver, Colorado, and regularly contributes to Scientific American and The Monitor, the monthly magazine of the American Psychological Association. Stephanie received a bachelor's degree in psychology from the University of South Carolina and a graduate certificate in science communication from the University of California, Santa Cruz.