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.
