AKRON, Ohio - Just 45 minutes from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland, half an hour from the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton and two blocks from the Inventors Hall of Fame in this city's downtown is an attraction like no other.
Where else but at the Archives of the History of American Psychology can visitors see the uniforms and billy clubs used in the Stanford Prison Experiment, in which students ended up acting the role of guards all too realistically; watch a home movie of Freud batting fruit out of a tree with his cane; or have the bumps on their heads measured to calculate their personalities and career prospects with a 1933 psychograph?
But all is not sweetness and light either:
Among the more than 1,000 instruments in the collection, a crown jewel is the simulated shock generator designed by Dr. Stanley Milgram. It was used in experiments in the early 1960's to investigate how far people would go to obey instructions from an authority figure. The participants were told that they were in a study on using electric shocks to penalize participants who failed a simple learning test. They were instructed to flick switches that would deliver steadily more intense shocks, from mild to dangerously severe. In fact, despite the convincing labels and knobs, the shocks were imaginary, and volunteers pretended to react in pain to the nonexistent shocks. Dr. Milgram found that nearly half of the real subjects followed orders to inflict pain that they were convinced was real. "It's probably one of the most important psychological experiments of the 20th century," Dr. Baker said. "It deals with a very fundamental question about the nature of good and evil. We like to believe that it would only be a very sick and evil person who would inflict torture on others. He showed us otherwise."
But let's go out on a positive note, shall we?:
...where the papers of Dr. Abraham Maslow, the humanistic psychologist, are in numbered boxes. Box M437, picked at random, had a folder marked "expression, spontaneity." Inside was a column of an undated article from The New Yorker torn from its surrounding page. The article, apparently addressing the question of why writers write, offered this dour answer, "All work and creative action is a way to snatch ourselves from the meaninglessness of transience."
Dr. Maslow would have none of it. In his angular, easily legible script, the psychologist famed for extolling the search for peak experiences had scribbled this typically Maslovian answer: "To objectify our subjective thought so as to be able to look at it and improve it toward perfection. To seek peak experiences."
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