26Smoke-filled room experiment
The smoke-filled room experiment is an experiment which shows that even if there's smoke filling a room, people will stay for as long as 20 minutes if no one else is reacting to it. Otherwise, they'd leave quickly.
27. In a housing experiment that moved families from poor neighborhoods to wealthier ones, boys experienced PTSD rates comparable to those of combat soldiers, while psychological well-being improved for girls.
28. The children's movie "The Secret of NIMH" was inspired by a real rat utopia experiment that ended in societal collapse.
29. Through a series of experiments in the Polytechnic Institute of New York, a robotic fish ended up becoming the leader of a school of live fish.
30. The "fact" that you eat 8 spiders a year was a social experiment to show how fast false information spreads on the internet.
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31Ron Jones
In 1967, a history teacher named Ron Jones performed an experiment with his class to find out why people allowed the Nazis to commit terrible acts. He brainwashed them using Nazi ideals and at the end of the week had several hundred teenage followers under his complete control before he revealed the truth.
32. In 1746, Jean-Antoine Nollet (French physicist) conducted an experiment in which 200 monks formed a circle (1.6 km in circumference) and were linked by iron wire. He then had electricity pass through them which shocked all the monks simultaneously. He concluded that the speed of electricity was very high.
33. The Monster Study was an experiment designed to induce stuttering in otherwise normal-speaking orphan children. Some of the children were praised for their speech, while others ridiculed and belittled. These children later developed speech problems that lasted their entire life.
34. A 2011 Johns Hopkins study gave healthy adults a few sessions of Psilocybin (magic mushrooms). A year later, 94% of the individuals said the experiment was in their top 5 most meaningful experiences of their lives and 39% said it was the single most meaningful experience of their lives.
35. In 1958, as an experiment, Bank of America mailed 60,000 residents of Fresno, California a small plastic card with a $500 credit line. Bank of America figured if it failed, there'd be no media coverage because it was in Fresno. The experiment was hugely successful and the program became Visa.
