Shadowing Practice: Creepy Psychology Experiments That Actually Happened - Learn English Speaking with Video
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Do you think we all experience emotions in the same way?
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In 1924, Connie Landis designed a sick little experiment to find out just that.
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He wanted to see if emotions triggered the same facial expressions in people.
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So he sat the participants in front of a camera and subjected them to various stimuli, looking for similarities in their reactions.
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He started off mellow, playing some jazz music and making them smell ammonia.
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But the results weren't exciting enough for Landis.
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So he raised the stakes.
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He began showing them gruesome photos of horrendous skin conditions, and even unexpectedly lit a firecracker under their chair.
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But still, Landis was looking for something more.
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They weren't extreme enough.
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And that's when things took a dark turn.
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He ordered the participants to close their eyes and dip their hand into a mysterious bucket.
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Only for them to realize it was filled with live, slimy, frogs.
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He coaxed them into rummaging all the way to the bottom until he had rigged it to deliver a painful electric shock.
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But the worst was yet to come.
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He handed the participant a live mouse in one hand
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and a razor -sharp knife in the other and calmly asked them to behead the mouse.
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If they them.
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The participants had mixed reactions.
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Some burst into tears, others were frozen in fear, and a few even started laughing.
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One was a 13 year old boy who was ruthlessly photographed distressed and on the verge of a mental breakdown.
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Embarrassingly, after all this depravity, he found that there was no typical facial expressions for any of the emotions aroused during this experiment.
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Everyone reacted differently.
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However, he was not a bad person.
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He was not a bad person.
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He was not a bad person.
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He was a bad person.
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He was a bad person.
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He was a bad person.
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He was a bad person.
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He was a bad person.
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He was a bad person.
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He was a bad person.
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He was a bad person.
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He was a bad person.
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He was a bad person.
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He was a bad person.
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He was a bad person.
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He was a bad person.
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He was a bad person.
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He was a bad person.
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He was a bad person.
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He was a bad person.
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He was a bad person.
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He was a bad person.
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He was a bad person.
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He was a bad person.
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He was a bad person.
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He was a bad person.
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He was a bad person.
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He was a bad person.
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He was a bad person.
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He was a bad person.
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He was a bad person.
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He was a bad person.
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He was a bad person.
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He was a bad person.
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He was a bad person.
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He was a bad person.
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He was a bad person.
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He was a bad person.
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He was a bad person.
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He was a bad person.
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He was However, one of the most common reactions to these unpleasant experiences was smiling.
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Although this experiment was a total failure at face value, future researchers did find something unsettling.
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Despite their protests, after being ordered to behead the mouse, two -thirds of the participants actually went through with it.
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How could a person be so easily convinced to commit such a horrible action against their moral and ethical judgments?
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That's actually a grim theme we'll see more of later on in this video.
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But first, you are probably in a creepy psychology experiment right now.
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Just like Facebook's emotion manipulation experiment in 2014,
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where they secretly manipulated the moods of almost 700 ,000 people without their consent.
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They did this by tampering with people's feeds, showing mainly, uh, negative content to one group, and mainly positive content to the other.
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in users' posts were analyzed, and the results were pretty obvious.
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The negative content group posted more negative thoughts, and the positive content group more positive thoughts.
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Basically, Facebook purposely made people depressed, without them knowing, for science.
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Imagine if someone was already dealing with mental health problems, and then this non -consensual experiment pushed them over the edge.
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Technically, this study was also completely legal as well.
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Facebook's data policy But I didn't realize I signed up for that.
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Well, they could probably write "Your life now belongs to Zuck" and we would still tick the box anyway.
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To this day Facebook still has major issues with hateful content and fear -inducing misinformation.
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And from this unethical experiment, the Zuck scientists are clearly aware of the harmful effects these posts have on their users.
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And yet they still allow negativity to spread without strict regulations.
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Negative posts garnering more engagement.
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And more engagement means more money.
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What, you think the green in his eyes is cause he's a lizard?
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Maybe even this video you're watching right now is part of YouTube's experiment.
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You've been selected for the positive content group.
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Now, since you're such a positive person, would you help someone if they collapsed next to you?
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How about if you were in a group of five people? of 30.
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In 1964 New York, Kitty Genovese was murdered in broad daylight, a couple steps away from her house.
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Newspapers reported that 37 people witnessed the attack, and yet no one bothered to help her.
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Why?
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This event coined the term "The Bystander Effect", where it was hypothesized that people were less likely to provide assistance if they were one among a crowd.
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To test this theory, the "Smokey Room Experiment" was devised.
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A participant was sat in a room alone and given a fake survey to fill, during which the room would then be pumped with harmless smoke.
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The results?
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When alone, 75 % of the participants reported the smoke.
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When three participants were together, 38 % reported it.
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And when there was one participant and two actors, only a shocking 10 % of participants reported it.
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Circling back to the Kitty Genovese case, could this explain why none of the witnesses did anything to help?
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Well, actually, not really.
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Multiple people did in fact call for help.
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But in a twist, the New York Police Department tried to cover up their slow
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response time to the scene by giving the media a fake news story, blaming the bystanders for the incident instead.
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But there is still some element of truth for the bystander effect, which has been proven over multiple other studies as well.
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People seem to be more concerned with fitting in instead of their own safety or the safety of others.
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So, the next time you're in trouble in a public place...
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Help me.
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Please.
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Good luck.
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Speaking of murder, if I asked you to kill someone, would you do it?
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How about now?
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Well, that's kind of like an experiment that was conducted at Yale University by Stanley Milgram in 1961.
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He'd always wondered how people could commit such atrocities during the Holocaust.
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Did they have no conscience?
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Or were they just following the orders of an authority figure?
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as the teacher and the other as a student, who was strapped to an electric chair.
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They were split into separate rooms so they couldn't see each other.
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The teacher would then begin to quiz the student, and if the student made a mistake, the teacher was told to activate the electric chair.
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Sounds pretty extreme already, doesn't it?
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What's 1 +1?
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3?
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Every time the student answered wrong, the teacher would increase the shock intensity, and the researchers would reassure that the shocks 4,
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3, Eventually, the shock intensity would get so high
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that the student would start banging on the wall and crying out in pain.
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Even if the teacher wanted to stop, the researcher would insist that they continue.
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The teacher would eventually reach the highest setting, which had a clear warning sign.
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But after delivering the maximum shock, there was no response from the student.
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The participant had delivered a voltage high enough to kill.
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Can you imagine signing up to what you thought would be a fun, interesting study, and walking out thinking that you just murdered someone?
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But that's the catch.
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The student who was being shocked was actually a paid actor, faking their sounds of distress using a recording.
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in harming someone under the influence of an authority figure.
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And disturbingly, 65 % of the participants delivered the maximum voltage of 450 volts,
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with the others delivering at least 300 volts.
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More than enough to kill in this case.
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The results proved something quite dark about humans.
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Despite hearing the cries of pain, the participants continued to torture the students, following orders.
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So who's the real monster in this scenario?
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The authority figure or the participant?
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Well, it's actually this next guy.
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Dr. Wendell Johnson was a speech pathologist who wanted to find out why some children develop stutters.
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He himself had developed a stutter at an early age, with no cure found.
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He hypothesized that stuttering was a learned behavior.
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That is, if a child was told that they were stuttering, they would continue to do so.
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He devised an experiment to prove this: the Monster Study.
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He took 22 children and split them into two groups, randomly labeling them as normal speakers and stutterers.
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The normal speakers would receive praise for their ability to speak well.
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But those in the stutterers group were gaslit into thinking they were stuttering, even if they could speak well normally.
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This continued for six months.
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So what happened?
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At the end of the experiment, there was no significant change seen in the normal speakers group.
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But what happened to the stutterer group was much darker.
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A majority of the children became withdrawn and self -conscious, with many even ending close friendships out of fear of speaking.
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In his pursuit to find the cure to stuttering, Johnson ended up creating more speech problems for the children,
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and many retained these issues for the rest of their lives.
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because the kids were orphans and were as young as five years old at the time.
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Johnson had ruthlessly used them as lab rats and destroyed their ability to speak.
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It was only a whole 60 years later
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that the victims were made aware that their speech trauma was the result of this study.
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None of them had provided consent.
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Imagine having your whole life ruined before it had really even started.
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Well, little Albert has some experience with that.
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How far would you go in the pursuit of scientific knowledge?
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Would you.. traumatize a baby?
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I know you would.
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In 1920, popular behavioral scientist John Watson conducted research into the development of phobias.
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And wanted to prove that emotional reactions could be conditioned in people.
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So he decided to start with a blank slate.
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Boom, and into the guinea pig cage.
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Meet little Albert.
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So here's how the study was conducted.
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Albie was first exposed to a bunch of stimuli, ranging from a monkey, to a burning newspaper, to a white rat.
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And he initially showed no fear to any of these.
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However, the next time Albie was exposed to the white rat, Watson took a hammer out and smacked it against a metal pipe.
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Right into the baby's ears.
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After sadistically repeating this multiple times, Albert eventually began to cry just by seeing the rat.
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In Watson's own words, he began to crawl away so rapidly
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that he was caught with difficulty before reaching the edge of the table.
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Albie was ready to end it all after seeing that rat.
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Watson was probably happy about the result though, seeing as it provided evidence for his hypothesis.
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But as it turns out, Albie wasn't just scared of white rats now.
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He began to generalize his phobia, so that he developed a fear of anything white and fluffy.
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I'm just a dumb doggo.
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Come back.
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See you next time!
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About This Lesson
Ready to level up your English speaking practice? This lesson uses a fascinating video about a creepy psychology experiment to help you improve pronunciation, fluency, and listening skills. You’ll practice shadowing the dialogue—repeating lines right after the speaker—to mimic natural speed and tone. It’s a fun way to learn English with YouTube while mastering real-world vocabulary. Let’s dive in!
Key Vocabulary & Phrases
- Stimuli: Things that cause a reaction (e.g., "The experiment used various stimuli to trigger emotions").
- Gruesome: Extremely unpleasant or shocking (e.g., "She looked away from the gruesome photos").
- Coaxed: Persuaded gently (e.g., "He coaxed them into touching the frogs").
- Rummaging: Searching by moving things around (e.g., "She was rummaging through the bucket").
- Depravity: Moral corruption (e.g., "The experiment’s depravity shocked viewers").
- Verge of a mental breakdown: On the edge of losing emotional control (e.g., "The boy was on the verge of a mental breakdown").
Practice Tips
The video’s tone is conversational but with moments of intensity—perfect for practicing shadowing! Here’s how: Start by watching the video once to understand the story. Then, play short clips (5-10 seconds) and repeat immediately, focusing on matching the speaker’s pace and stress. The dialogue has pauses between key actions, so use those to catch up. For tricky words like "gruesome" or "depravity," slow down the video (most platforms let you adjust speed) to master pronunciation. This shadowing technique works—you’ll notice better fluency in just a few days! Use a shadowing site to record yourself and compare to the original. Remember, every repeat brings you closer to sounding natural. Let’s get practicing!
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | was filled · were frozen · being ordered |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | You've been selected · has been proven |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | effect, which has · student who was |
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.