The Milgram Experiment

The Milgram experiment was a seminal series of social psychology exterments conducted at Yale University by psychologist Stanley Milgram.  He measured the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts that conflicted with their personal conscience. Milgram first described his research in 1963 in an article published in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, and later discussed his findings in greater depth in his 1974 book, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. You need to have flashplayer enabled to watch this Google video

Stanford Prison Experiment 1971

The Stanford prison experiment was a study of the human response to imposed social roles on behavior. It was conducted in 1971 by a team of researchers led by Philip Zimbardo at Stanford University. Undergraduate volunteers played the roles of guards and prisoners living in a mock prison that was constructed in the basement of the Stanford psychology building.

Inattentional Blindness

Inattentional blindness is an observed phenomenon of the inability to perceive features in a visual scene when the observer is not attending to them. That is to say that humans have a limited capacity for attention which thus limits the amount of information processed at any particular time. Any otherwise salient feature within the visual field will not be observed if not processed by attention.