Category: Science

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Milgram’s Experiment on Obedience

Stanley Milgram’s famously unethical but ever so interesting experiment on obedience:

The Milgram experiment was a seminal series of social psychology experiments conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram, which measured the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts that conflicted with their personal conscience. Milgram first described his research in 1963 in an article published in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, and later discussed his findings in greater depth in his 1974 book, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View.

The experiments began in July 1961, three months after the start of the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Milgram devised the experiments to answer this question: “Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?”


[Milgram Study of Obedience 1/5 – YouTube]

I didn’t have time to watch the whole thing, but apparently magician/hypnotist Derren Brown reproduced Milgram’s obedience experiment (watch on YouTube). At first I felt confused as to how he got around the ethical violations intrinsic to proceeding with such an experiment in this day and age—but then I realized scientific researchers have ethics boards to get passed; TV producers don’t.

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Amazing Audio Illusion

Play this audio clip again after it finishes and hear it continue to “creep up”.

See Wikipedia’s entry on Shepard Tone for the full scoop.

A Shepard tone, named after Roger Shepard, is a sound consisting of a superposition of sine waves separated by octaves. When played with the base pitch of the tone moving upwards or downwards, it is referred to as the Shepard scale. This creates the auditory illusion of a tone that continually ascends or descends in pitch, yet which ultimately seems to get no higher or lower.

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MoMA Kills Art

One of the senior curators at the MoMA had to end the life of a tiny coat built out of living mouse stem cells after it grew so fast that the cells began to clog the incubator.

From the New York Times article:

One of the strangest exhibits at the opening of “Design and the Elastic Mind,” the very strange show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York that explores the territory where design meets science, was a teeny coat made out of living mouse stem cells. The “victimless leather” was kept alive in an incubator with nutrients, unsettlingly alive. Until recently, that is.

Paola Antonelli, a senior curator at the museum, had to kill the coat. “It was growing too much,” she said in an interview from a conference in Belgrade. The cells were multiplying so fast that the incubator was beginning to clog. Also, a sleeve was falling off. So after checking with the coat’s creators, a group known as SymbioticA, at the School of Anatomy & Human Biology at the University of Western Australia in Perth, she had the nutrients to the cells stopped.

This is just a taste of the interesting kinds of developments we’re going to see from biological science in the near future.

(via)

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Golden Eagle Goat Kill

Golden EagleOne of the most notorious birds of prey, the Golden Eagle develops a wingspan averaging over 2 m (7 ft) and up to 1 m (3 ft) in body length.

If you haven’t already seen it, the following video demonstrates the bird’s vicious killing technique as it literally plucks goats from the side of a mountain sending them tumbling to their doom.

If you’re at all sensitive about seeing animals die, you really shouldn’t watch this. At one point it looks like the goats might get even, and I hate to spoil it, but a few minutes later the bird is still snatching up goats for breakfast.


Disturbing video of the Golden Eagle throwing goats off cliffs

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The Amazing Toyger

Toyger KittensA few years ago I read an article about a new breed of designer cat. These felines, dubbed the “toyger” were being breed to look like wild tigers. Checking back now on the progress of the breed is impressive.

Currently the features demonstrated in the toyger include a bright orange coat, dark markings over their eyes and stripes that mimic their wild counterparts. I would love to have one of these little guys prowling through my kitchen.

Though currently none of the new breed possess all of the criteria for a perfect toyger, some of the cats are incredibly close. Smart, playful, and affectionate, the cats themselves are great pets. Though, as you can see from the photos, the kittens may kill you with cuteness.

Life Article

National Geographic Article.

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The Stroop Effect

The Stroop Effect, named after J. Ridley Stroop who published the effect in 1935, is a demonstration of interference in the reaction time of a task. For example, when a word signifying a colour such as “red” is printed in blue a reader’s reaction time processing the word’s colour, leads to slower test reaction times and an increase in mistakes.

Try out one of my favourite demonstrations of this effect by saying the colours of the words below:

(For example if the word “blue” is printed in green, you would say the word green)

 red   blue  orange  yellow  purple  green  blue  yellow  red  blue  orange  purple  yellow  green  blue  red  green  orange  purple
 yellow  orange  red  green  blue  green  red  green  blue  yellow  orange  purple  green  blue  yellow  red  orange  purple  green

If naming the first group of colours is easier and quicker than the second, then your performance exhibits the Stroop effect.

The Stroop effect illustrates important principles about how the brain works, particularly for mental tasks involving attention, automatic processing, and response selection. It also can be used to examine the subtle effects of adverse conditions on the brain, such as lack of sleep, fatigue, or the effects of high altitudes.

The coloured word test above is only one kind kind of automatic processing that can be studied.

Check out Harvard University’s site in which they continually collects data with their Implicit Association Tests, many of which have fascinating social and political implications.