Archives of the History of American Psychology

After landing in a cheap-but-decent motel in Streetsboro, Ohio, we set out Saturday morning for Akron, home of the Archives of the History of American Psychology (and Alcoholics Anonymous, incidentally). The Archive has a nice series of displays of equipment and artifacts from some watershed moments in American Psychology. This site was of particular interest to both of us as we are both interested in psychology, and also it was free admission.

Some of the notable displays...

The Stanford Prison Experiment - where subjects were arbitrarily divided into guards and prisoners and placed in a prison environment. The prisoners and guards both quickly internalized the roles they were assigned, and the guards began to subject to prisoners to dehumanizing treatment. 

Items from the Stanford Prison Experiment

The Milgram Experiment - subjects were assigned the role of "teacher", and were told to provide electric shocks to another person, the "learner" at the direction of the experimenter. The learner was actually an actor, and the shocks were not real, although the teacher did not know that. Roughly two-thirds of teachers administered what they believed to be potentially fatal shocks to the learner in obedience to the commands of the experimenter.

How far would you go?

Some of the other exhibits were more lighthearted. There were several displays of old laboratory equipment, optical illusions, letters, notable items (for example, the original Bobo Doll) and what you might call scientific oddities (including a machine that tells your career aptitudes via phrenology). My favorite - an advertisement for handwriting analysis.

The archives certainly give one a sense of how far this science has progressed over the years, some of the pitfalls of psychological research and the sometimes disturbing results that are uncovered.