preview

Classic Study Essays

Better Essays

Classic studies in psychology are not worthy of the term — all such studies are vastly over-rated. Discuss.

Classic studies are well known in the world and widely discussed by psychologists, journalists, politicians and public (Smith & Haslam, 2012). Being labeled as “classic studies”, the most important feature is that those studies can address fundamental questions of human behavior, for instance, it explains the obedience of human beings and empathy of humanity (Devine & Brodish, 2003). The findings explain the most common phenomenon and always challenged what people assumed about human behaviour and proved with experimental results (Smith & Haslam, 2012). There is no doubt that those studies had a massive contribution to …show more content…

Little Albert’s was chosen because of his strong emotional stability and researches think his personality could be “relatively little harm by carrying out such experiments…” (Wastson & Rayner, 1920, p. 3). However, from psychologists’ point of view, his emotional reaction was far from mild and experimenters did not put effort to comfort him (Smith & Haslam, 2012). Although the principles of classical conditioning are useful in treatment of phobias and even medical implications, it is questioned whether its worth to cause harm to the subject in order to complete the study. The unethical research method of classic studies brings potential damages to the participants (Russell & Purcell, 2009). The ignorance of such damages overrates the experimental result and conclusion. Studies should be morally and ethically grounded.
In addition, classic experiments often carry out in an artificial laboratory environment in which causing low validity and confound the‬. The tight control over the experiment may lead not be able to generalize the results into real life situation or replicable. In this case, such studies may mislead people and it is not worth to be focused. In the study of Asch (1951), a group of eight individuals (7 confederates and 1 naïve participant) sat in a room and they were asked which of three unequal vertical lines matched the given one. The study has low validity ecological validity as it was carried out under controlled

Get Access