Mind Changers

Mind Changers - Claudia Hammond

Series exploring the development of the science of psychology during the 20th century.

Claudia Hammond revisits the classic case studies that have advanced psychological research.

24x30min episodes mp3

Elizabeth Loftus and Eye Witness Testimony:

Elizabeth Loftus is the highest-ranking female in the list of top 100 psychologists. She's gained world-wide renown for her experiments showing that memory, far from being an accurate record, is influenced by subsequent exposure to information and events and is re-constituted according to the biases these create.

Henri Tajfel's Minimal Groups:

Henri Tajfel's interest in identity and group prejudice was sparked by his own experiences as a Polish Jew during the Second World War. As Professor of Social Psychology at Bristol university he developed a series of experiments known as the Minimal Group Studies, the purpose of which was to establish the minimum basis on which people could be made to identify with their own group and show bias against another.

Walter Mischel's Marshmallow Study:

The psychologist Walter Mischel made his name with his ground-breaking book, Personality and Assessment, in 1968. He followed up with a classic experiment which is still running today.

Seeking to understand how the impulsive behaviour of his own three daughters at age 3 became increasingly regulated and planned by age 4 or 5, Mischel set up his experiment in delayed gratification at the Bing Nursery at Stanford University. Over 6 years he asked more than 300 4-year-olds to decide whether to have one marshmallow right now, or wait and get two, and he examined the cognitive processes which enabled some children to wait.

Case Study: Dora - The Girl Who Walked Out on Freud:

Dora was the pseudonym Sigmund Freud gave to the teenage girl who claimed that her father had offered her to his friend in exchange for the continued sexual favours of the friend's wife. Freud used this, his first case history, to show how the interpretation of dreams could be used in analysis. Also to illustrate his new theory of infant sexuality, and to explain transference. Although Freud said he believed Dora's account of the adults' love triangle, Dora ended the analysis after just 11 weeks. Freud wrote up his account immediately, but didn't publish it until 1905, as Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria.

Case Study: SB - The Man Who Was Disappointed with What He Saw:

Claudia Hammond re-visits the case of Sidney Bradford, born in 1906, who lost his sight when he was 10 months old. When it was finally restored with corneal grafts at the age of 52, a lecturer in Experimental Psychology at Cambridge, Richard Gregory, began a series of tests on SB - a study that would launch Gregory's career as a world-renowned expert in visual perception.

Case Study: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl:

Janet and Ron Reimer's twin sons, Bruce and Brian, were born in Winnipeg in Canada in August 1965. All went well until April 1966, when the twins were circumcised. In the process, Bruce suffered a catastrophic injury to his penis. A year later, on the advice of Dr John Money, founder of the Gender Identity Clinic at Johns Hopkins University Medical Centre in Baltimore, Bruce became Brenda and the Reimers began to raise their son as a daughter.

Case Study: HM - The Man Who Couldn't Remember:

When a 27 year old man known in the text books simply as HM underwent brain surgery for intractable epilepsy in 1953, no one could have known that the outcome would provide the key to unravelling one of the greatest mysteries of the human mind - how we form new memories.

Arden House:

When two psychologists set up the experiment so that residents on two floors of the 360-bed home for the elderly would experience some changes in their everyday life, they had no idea that they were introducing factors which could prolong life.

While residents on both floors were given plants and film shows, only those on the fourth floor had the opportunity to control these events: choosing the plant and looking after it themselves, and choosing which night of the week to view the film.

Harlow's Monkeys:

Claudia visits the Primate Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin, where Harlow conducted his experiments, and meets his former assistant, Helen LeRoy, and the current director of the lab, Professor Christopher Coe. At the University of Massachussets, Amherst, she meets Harlow's last PhD student, now Chair of Psychology, Professor Melinda Novak. She also talks to Roger Fouts, Professor of Psychology at the University of Central Washington, about the perceived cruelty of Harlow's work, and to Dr John Oates, lecturer in the Centre for Childhood, Development and Learning at the Open University.

The Hawthorne Effect:

In the 1920s, at the enormous Western Electric Hawthorne Factory in Cicero outside Chicago, management began an experiment which was to improve the working life of millions and give rise to a phenomenon that anyone planning a psychology experiment would have to take into account in their design.

The Pseudo-Patient Study:

Between 1969 and 1972, the clinical psychologist David Rosenhan and seven other people - none of whom had a psychiatric diagnosis - got themselves admitted to 12 different psychiatric hospitals around the United States. They did this by presenting with a single symptom, saying that they heard a voice which said words such as 'empty', 'dull' and 'thud.' Once admitted, they acted completely normally. Nevertheless, they were kept in for periods of between 8 and 52 days. Seven of them were diagnosed with schizophrenia and were released as being 'in remission'; not one of them was judged to be sane.

Case Study: Little Hans:

A phobia of horses developed by a small boy living in Vienna in 1904 seemed unlikely evidence for the Oedipus complex. But for Sigmund Freud, this was the proof he had been waiting for. His study of Little Hans was the first recorded case of child psychoanalysis, and, with its detailed recording of a how a child makes sense of the world, continues to provide rich pickings for all who are interested in child development.

Claudia investigates the legacy of the study, and visits one of the centres run by Childhood First, which deals with some of the most disturbed and damaged children using a model informed by psychoanalysis.

Case Study: The Man with a Hole in His Head:

Phineas Gage was a railway worker in 19th-century Vermont who survived a bizarre accident. A metre-long iron rod shot through his head, changing him and the study of neuroscience forever.

Case Study: The Wild Boy of Aveyron:

In 1800, 12-year-old Victor emerged from the woods of the Aveyron District, naked and behaving like an animal. It was estimated that he had been living wild since the age of about four.

Case Study: Kitty Genovese:

When a young woman was brutally killed in an attack in New York in 1964, not one of 38 witnesses called for help. The case led to the naming of the phenomenon as Bystander Effect.

The Bobo Doll:

Claudia revisits the first experiment to broach the subject of how children respond to TV and computer game violence. Albert Bandura's ground-breaking Bobo Doll experiment in 1961 first alerted the world to the dangers of imitative behaviour.

The Heinz Dilemma:

Lawrence Kohlberg designed the first experiment to quantify the human capacity for ethical reasoning. Fifty years on, aspects of the original experiment in Chicago are replicated with volunteers in the UK.

The Stanford Prison Experiment:

When Philip Zimbardo set up a mock prison, he had no idea that the resulting behaviour would be so extreme that he would have to abandon the experiment. Over 30 years later, when he saw photos of the abuse in Abu Ghraib, it was with the shock of recognition that he went on to testify in the defence of one of the accused soldiers.

Hans Eysenck:

Ask anyone to sum up their personality and the chances are that they'll include the fact that they're an introvert or an extrovert. These traits have crept into the universal psyche since they were first identified during a study of traumatised soldiers conducted in 1947, by the prolific psychologist Hans Eysenck.

Mary Ainsworth:

John Bowlby's name is synonomous with the theory of attachment - the bond between mother's and babies. But the experiment on which his work is based was carried out by an American psychologist, Mary Ainsworth. Through her observational work with mothers and infants in Africa, she designed the 'strange situation', a tool which is still used today to examine the parent-child relationship.

John Watson and Little Emotional Albert:

JB Watson, the psychologist considered the father of behaviourism, who famously conducted behavioral experiments on an 11 month boy called 'Little Albert'.

Sir Frederic Bartlett – The War of the Ghosts:

Sir Frederic Bartlett discovered that when he asked people to repeat an unfamiliar story they had read, they changed it to fit their existing knowledge, and it was this revised story which then became incorporated into their memory. Bartlett's findings led him to propose 'schema' - the cultural and historical contextualisation of memory, which has important implications for eyewitness testimony and false memory syndrome, and even for artificial intelligence!

Jean Piaget – The Three Mountains:

We have to thank the Swiss developmental psychologist, Jean Piaget for 'learning by play' applied to the classroom - a personal discovery which he believed to be far more effective than sitting in rows learning by rote. His idea was that children don't just store facts, they process them. As they interact with things around them every day they build a model of the world in their minds, so in the classroom they need the chance to experiment.

Solomon Asch - Conformity:

Every day we try to fit in. We may like to think we're individual but most of the time we don't actually want to stand out too much. It's this idea of conformity that the American social psychologist Solomon Asch studied in the 1950s, using nothing more complex than straight black lines drawn on pieces of card - it's one of the classic experiments in psychology.

Asch believed people wouldn't go along with the crowd; he set up his experiment to prove that people would stand up against group pressure. Unknown to his subjects, the rest of the group were stooges or plants, who'd been instructed to say A was longer than B, even though it patently wasn't. Contrary to his expectations, Asch discovered that a third of people went along with the group, even when it contradicted the evidence of their own eyes.