Open Questions

Studies and Experiments 11

The Little Albert Experiment Who was the infant known as Little Albert in Watson and Rayner's 1920 conditioning experiment?

Open The Little Albert Experiment

Why It Is Open Beck and Levinson (2009) identified Little Albert as Douglas Merritte, who died at age 6 of congenital hydrocephalus, but a competing claim by Powell et al. holds he was Albert Barger, arguing Merritte was completely blind, incompatible with the infant's observed behavior in the surviving films.

What Would Settle It Further historical-archival research, medical records verification, or re-analysis of the surviving experimental films against each candidate's documented medical history.

Expertise Needed History of psychology / archival scholarship

Question posed in Wikipedia: Little Albert experiment, John B. Watson section, Little Albert; and Little Albert experiment article.

Asch's Conformity Experiments Does the Asch conformity effect reflect a durable feature of human group behavior, or was it substantially a product of the cultural moment (1950s America) in which it was measured?

Open Asch's Conformity Experiments

Why It Is Open Perrin and Spencer's 1980 British replication found conformity had nearly vanished (one join in 396 trials), arguing the Asch effect was a child of its time. Bond and Smith's 1996 meta-analysis further found conformity rates differ across cultures and genders, with collectivist cultures showing higher rates than individualist ones.

What Would Settle It Systematic cross-cultural and cross-era replication with standardized methodology, isolating cultural-moment effects from a stable underlying conformity mechanism.

Expertise Needed Social psychology / cross-cultural psychology

Question posed in SimplyPsychology: Asch Conformity, Perrin and Spencer 1980/1981; Bond and Smith 1996.

Stanford Prison Experiment Did the Stanford Prison Experiment reveal a genuine, spontaneous psychological effect of institutional roles, or did the guards' abusive behavior result substantially from Philip Zimbardo's own coaching and demand characteristics rather than emerging naturally from the prison situation itself?

Open Stanford Prison Experiment

Why It Is Open Zimbardo's own recordings and instructions to guards, later examined by historian Thibault Le Texier through the Stanford archives, show guards were directly coached toward the study's expected conclusions before the results were interpreted as a spontaneous emergent effect; the original study also had no control condition and was never formally peer reviewed, making it difficult to separate genuine situational influence from guided performance.

What Would Settle It A controlled replication with genuinely blind, uncoached participant instructions and pre-registered analysis, which the ethical concerns the original study itself raised make difficult to conduct today.

Expertise Needed Social psychology, research methodology, and the history of science.

Question posed in Wikipedia: Stanford prison experiment, Critiques of scientific validity section.

The Little Albert Experiment Which child was actually filmed as "Little Albert" in Watson and Rayner's 1920 conditioning experiment?

Open The Little Albert Experiment

Why It Is Open Two independent historical investigations identify two different children from incompatible hospital records -- Douglas Merritte (Beck, Levinson and Irons, 2009) and Albert Barger (Powell, Digdon, Harris and Smithson, 2014) -- and neither identification has been conclusively confirmed against the surviving film and case notes.

What Would Settle It Additional archival or genetic evidence definitively linking the surviving film footage to one specific infant's hospital record.

Expertise Needed History of Psychology

Question posed in Wikipedia: Little Albert experiment, Douglas Merritte; Albert Barger.

Hawthorne Studies How strong was the original Hawthorne effect, really?

Open Hawthorne Studies

Why It Is Open The term was coined in 1953, two decades after the original studies, from a methodologically loose, largely uncontrolled dataset. A 2011 re-analysis of the original illumination-experiment data by economists Steven Levitt and John List found only slight long-run evidence for the effect, far weaker than its popular retelling, and the psychologist Richard Nisbett has dismissed the whole phenomenon as a glorified anecdote, so how much of the classic story survives contact with the original data is unsettled.

What Would Settle It A full re-analysis of the surviving relay-assembly and bank-wiring datasets, not just the illumination-experiment data Levitt and List examined, using modern statistical controls for the original experiments' many confounds (rest breaks, pay changes, seasonal effects).

Expertise Needed Industrial-organizational psychology and applied econometrics

Question posed in Wikipedia: Hawthorne Effect.

Robbers Cave Experiment Were the Robbers Cave experimenters themselves an uncontrolled third group?

Open Robbers Cave Experiment

Why It Is Open Some boys in the wider study series ganged up on the experimenters themselves, showing an awareness of being manipulated, and the social psychologist Michael Billig has argued the experimenters constituted a third group, and arguably the most powerful one, deliberately engineering the friction and later the reconciliation rather than passively observing it. If so, how much of the realistic-conflict-theory result reflects the boys' own group dynamics versus the experimenters' own stage-managing is unresolved by the study's own design.

What Would Settle It A close reading of the original unpublished field notes and staff journals against a blind coding of which specific incidents were spontaneous versus staff-engineered, which no published replication of Robbers Cave-style summer-camp design has attempted at this scale.

Expertise Needed Social psychology and research ethics

Question posed in Wikipedia: Robbers Cave Experiment.

Implicit Association Test Studies Does the Implicit Association Test measure a stable trait or situational noise?

Open Implicit Association Test Studies

Why It Is Open Individual Implicit Association Test scores show only middling test-retest reliability, around 0.60, and researchers dispute whether the test measures a stable automatic association, widely shared cultural knowledge regardless of the test-taker's own attitude, or the momentary salience of certain attributes, with a meta-analysis by Oswald and colleagues finding implicit measures only weakly predictive of actual discriminatory behavior and no better than explicit self-report at predicting it.

What Would Settle It Converging physiological, behavioral and longitudinal measures of the same individuals over time, isolating how much variation in IAT score reflects a stable trait versus test-retest noise or momentary situational context.

Expertise Needed Psychometrics and social cognition

Question posed in Wikipedia: Implicit-Association Test.

Facilitated Communication Studies Why did facilitated communication persist for years after it was discredited?

Open Facilitated Communication Studies

Why It Is Open Despite more than fifty controlled studies by 2005 showing facilitators, not the person being facilitated, controlled the typed messages, and the American Psychological Association stating in 1994 there was no scientifically demonstrated support for the technique, some practitioners and family members continued to use and defend it for years afterward. The sources consulted here do not settle how much of that persistence reflects genuine belief formed from specific favorable cases versus institutional and emotional investment that made abandoning the technique difficult.

What Would Settle It A study of practitioner and family decision-making that traces why individual cases and institutions continued after the aggregate controlled evidence became clear, rather than only re-testing whether the technique itself produces authentic communication.

Expertise Needed History and sociology of science, clinical psychology

Question posed in Wikipedia: Facilitated Communication.

Rosenhan Experiment Did all eight of the pseudopatients David Rosenhan described in his 1973 "On Being Sane in Insane Places" study genuinely exist and undergo the hospitalizations as published?

Open Rosenhan Experiment

Why It Is Open Susannah Cahalan's 2019 archival investigation (The Great Pretender) could confirm only two of the eight claimed pseudopatients, Rosenhan himself and one graduate student whose own account allegedly conflicts with the published article, and found other inconsistencies and apparently fabricated quotations in Rosenhan's papers.

What Would Settle It Identification and independent corroboration (hospital admission records, first-person testimony) of the six remaining pseudopatients Rosenhan claimed but never named.

Expertise Needed History of Psychology

Question posed in Wikipedia: Rosenhan Experiment, Accusation of fraud section.

Rat Park Experiment Did later attempts to replicate the Rat Park experiment support Alexander's original findings?

Open Rat Park Experiment

Why It Is Open Bruce Petrie, a graduate student of Alexander's, attempted a replication correcting for methods issues in the originals and could not replicate the results. Subsequent researchers have shown little interest in replicating the studies further, citing methodological problems in the originals themselves: a small number of subjects, oral morphine dosing that does not mimic real use and introduces a bitterness confound, inconsistent measurement of morphine consumption between conditions, plus equipment failures, lost data and rat deaths.

What Would Settle It A modern, adequately powered replication using a consistent, non-oral dosing method and standardized morphine-consumption measurement across all housing conditions, addressing the equipment and data-loss problems that undermined the original series.

Expertise Needed Behavioral pharmacology and addiction research

Question posed in Wikipedia: Rat Park.

Pygmalion in the Classroom Did later studies replicate Rosenthal and Jacobson's original Pygmalion in the Classroom effect?

Open Pygmalion in the Classroom

Why It Is Open Rosenthal originally claimed the treated group's IQ gain exceeded the control group's by 24.8 points and that the gain was persistent and widespread, but the instrument used to assess the children's IQ was seriously flawed, and studies since the 1980s have repeatedly failed to replicate a strong effect, instead finding only a weak effect in a small minority of students (5 to 10 percent), one that resets after a period of weeks.

What Would Settle It A large, pre-registered classroom replication using a validated IQ instrument and blinded teacher-expectation manipulation, tracking effect persistence over a full school year rather than a period of weeks.

Expertise Needed Educational psychology and psychometrics

Question posed in Wikipedia: Pygmalion Effect.

Psychological Phenomena 8

Overconfidence Effect In what year was the overconfidence effect first identified or named as a distinct phenomenon in the psychological literature?

Open Overconfidence Effect

Why It Is Open The surveyed Wikipedia article names three component forms, overestimation, overplacement and overprecision, and cites many later studies, but states no founding study or coining year for the overconfidence effect itself, unlike the other five entities worked this pass which each name a clear year.

What Would Settle It A citation to the earliest peer-reviewed study or review naming and defining the overconfidence effect as a distinct phenomenon, rather than one of its three later-named component forms.

Expertise Needed history of psychology

Question posed in Wikipedia: Overconfidence effect, no origin year stated in surveyed source.

Not Invented Here In what year was the not invented here phenomenon first identified or named in management or organizational research?

Open Not Invented Here

Why It Is Open The surveyed Wikipedia article documents a 1982 empirical study (Katz and Allen) providing evidence for the syndrome, but states no year for when the phenomenon or term was first named or described.

What Would Settle It A citation to the earliest source naming or describing the not invented here syndrome, distinct from the 1982 Katz and Allen study already cited as empirical evidence.

Expertise Needed history of psychology

Question posed in Wikipedia: Not invented here, no origin year stated in surveyed source.

Automation Bias In what year was automation bias first identified or named as a distinct phenomenon in human factors research?

Open Automation Bias

Why It Is Open The surveyed Wikipedia article discusses automation bias research from 1997 onward (Mosier et al.) but states no year for when the phenomenon or term was first identified or named.

What Would Settle It A citation to the earliest peer-reviewed study or review naming and defining automation bias as a distinct phenomenon, prior to the 1997 Mosier et al. study already cited.

Expertise Needed history of psychology

Question posed in Wikipedia: Automation bias, no origin year stated in surveyed source.

Default Effect In what year was the default effect first described or named in the psychology or behavioral-economics literature?

Open Default Effect

Why It Is Open The English Wikipedia article on the default effect (the source already cited on this entity) describes the concept, its endogenous and exogenous forms and its applications in detail but names no year, paper or author for when it was first described or named; a full raw-extract read of the article (9384 characters) contains no four-digit year at all.

What Would Settle It A citable paper, textbook or reference work naming the year and author or authors who first described or coined the term for the default effect.

Expertise Needed behavioral economics

Question posed in Wikipedia: Default effect.

Intentionality Bias In what year was intentionality bias first described or named in the psychology literature?

Open Intentionality Bias

Why It Is Open The English Wikipedia article on intentionality bias (the source already cited on this entity) describes the concept in a short lead paragraph with an empty References section and names no year, paper, or author for when the bias was first described or named; a full raw-extract read of the article contains no four-digit year at all.

What Would Settle It A citable paper, textbook, or reference work naming the year and author or authors who first described or coined the term intentionality bias.

Expertise Needed history of psychology

Question posed in Wikipedia: Intentionality bias, entire article, References section empty.

Selective Perception In what year was selective perception first identified or named as a distinct concept in psychology?

Open Selective Perception

Why It Is Open The cited Wikipedia article traces the concept only to Gestalt psychology in the early 20th century and says it attracted more scholarly attention in the mid 20th century, naming Leon Festinger 1957 cognitive dissonance theory as a later explanatory milestone, but it gives no specific year for when selective perception itself was first described or named.

What Would Settle It A citable primary source, textbook, or history-of-psychology reference naming the specific year or publication that first used or defined the term selective perception.

Question posed in Wikipedia: Selective perception, Wikipedia: Selective perception, History section.

Zero-Risk Bias In what year was zero-risk bias first described or named as a distinct concept?

Open Zero-Risk Bias

Why It Is Open The cited Wikipedia article cites Baron, Gowda and Kunreuther (1993) and Viscusi, Magat and Huber (1987) as early studies documenting the effect, and an economics study by Kunreuther (1991), but does not state in what year the bias itself was first named or described, and the 1987 study title does not use the term.

What Would Settle It A citable source naming the specific year or publication where the term zero-risk bias was first coined.

Question posed in Wikipedia: Zero-risk bias, Wikipedia: Zero-risk bias, Explanation section.

Present Bias In what year was the term present bias first introduced?

Open Present Bias

Why It Is Open The cited Wikipedia article states only that the term was not introduced until the 1950s and separately notes that Phelps and Pollak introduced the quasi-hyperbolic model in 1968, without giving a specific year or publication for when present bias itself was first named.

What Would Settle It A citable source naming the specific year and publication that first used the term present bias.

Question posed in Wikipedia: Present bias, Wikipedia: Present bias, History section.

Schools and Movements 8

Positive Psychology Does positive psychology's model of human flourishing generalize beyond individualistic Western societies, or does it primarily reflect a culturally specific view of well-being?

Open Positive Psychology

Why It Is Open Positive psychology has been criticized for underrepresenting non-Western perspectives and for accessibility limitations in its research base, raising doubt about whether its account of well-being and flourishing holds outside the individualistic Western societies where most of its research was conducted.

What Would Settle It Controlled cross-cultural studies testing whether positive psychology's well-being interventions and flourishing constructs replicate in collectivist and non-Western contexts.

Expertise Needed Cross-cultural psychology

Question posed in Wikipedia: Positive Psychology.

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