The Dark Side of Science: The Horrors of the Facial Expression Experiment 1924 (Short Documentary)

#science #history #dark

In 1924 Carney Landis sought out to study human facial expressions, but in order to get authentic reactions he used some pretty horrific methods.

The experiments would involve men women and children alike, and get increasingly bizarre.

00:00 Intro
01:13 Background
05:34 The Experiment Before
11:59 The 1924 Study
28:18 Critisim

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[PlainlyDifficult]

Any suggestions for future dark side videos let me know 👇

[tokos]

"People are disturbed when forced to look at/do horrifying shit."

Hmm. Yes. This floor is made of floor.

[BadgerOfTheSea]

The fact he gave up on the joke section after only two people because the second person shrugged it off says everything you need to know about this guy.

[RisingRevengeance]

I think the worst part is that he already had the answer earlier, there are no universal emotions. That result is very interesting on its own but he really wanted a different answer.

[weaktoad]

The wild thing about these is they're almost always badly designed and yield no useful results. These universities would give these guys money to do anything. I get the feeling they didn't even have to submit a detailed proposal, they just had to say: I need money to do an experiment and they'd get it!

[L.K.]

I'd say the percentage of psychopathic personalities inside the field of psychology is greater than any other scientific field. Now that would be an interesting study.

[dannahbanana]

I love how today we talk about the psychology of the psychologists doing these experiments; bet they'd never expect that 😅

[macaylacayton]

12 human females, 12 human males, and 1 human male child-OK WHO THE FUCK AUTHORIZED THIS STUDY?!

[Pandidolod]

This experiment is so deeply flawed, right down to the fact that it kind of half-heartedly assumes that a single stimulus would produce the same emotional reaction in people with different backgrounds.

[ben-tyjo]

We learned about this in my research methods in psych class when discussing ethics in research. I couldn't believe it was a real thing

[congruentcrib]

I’ve always loved how humans often can tell so much just by how they perceive things.
My favorite example is talked about by Austin McConell in one of his videos, but the shot version is this;
The was an artist named Jean-François Millet, and during his time he was deemed a failed artist . Now we celebrate his amazing paintings. The most famous wound have to be The Angelus; it shows a man and a woman praying over food, in a box they’ve buried (religious thing). This painting was later bought by Salvador Dali; another famous painter. Dali always had a feeling something wasn’t right about the picture. He didn’t think they were praying over food, but something else. They ended up using X-rays to see what’s under the paint, and it shows a child sized casket. Originally the two people praying were actually just morning the loss of a child. It’s unknown why Millet didn’t keep the casket, and later changed it to something less morbid. He was known to draw pictures that he remembered as a kid; maybe this painting was too real for him, or maybe it was so it’d sell better. Either way, we won’t know; what we do know is The Angelus really is a true piece of art that tells two different stories.

[Dsdcain]

The responses to the rat execution would be very different today. Think about it for a minute. This was in the 1920s and it would be quite likely that a good number of the subjects would have grown up on a farm (rats would be considered vermin to be disposed of), where they would have at the least, watched or taken part in the butchering of animals for food. Also if they were from a rural area there could have been hunting as well. The point I'm making is that asking modern group of test subjects to behead a live rat would more than likely produce a major difference of outcome.
Just an admittedly, weird thought I had. Great video man. You always present well researched material in a way that is very educational without being boring, and in a non-sensationalist or dramatic way. Have a great week sir. Looking forward to the next video.

[MalloryHasCats]

I have a bachelors of science in psychology and it's freaking weird that we never learned about this. We learned about BF Skinner and Pavlov every 20 minutes but this? We definitely should've!

[somethingelse]

The first experiment made me think of every visit to the optometrist. "I'm going to shoot a blast of air into your eye, please try not to blink or move your eye". Well FFS, don't tell them that you're studying their facial expressions and then expect them to respond genuinely.

[oscillocelot]

You know, a study like this wouldn’t need to be done today, because we take so much authentic video of our lives, our reactions to things, etc. We could just study all of that.

[SwizzleDrizzl]

Faces are utterly fascinating. A fall onto a concrete floor i had when i was 4 made me unable to focus on the face as a whole for a while, until i got treatment, and looking back it was so disconnecting

[oracledba]

I think at least the main idea of the experiment was interesting; it would honestly be super neat to see something similar done (more ethically, and) with samples across different cultures, and perhaps different age groups as well

[NoComment]

The latter experiment was (not so?) inadvertently a model of 'how to induce trauma 101':

1. Place subject into submissive position, from which they physically or psychologically feel unable to escape;

2. Establish dominance over them - preferably convince them you hold the power of life & death;

3. Alternate unpredictably between provoking negative emotion (pain, disgust, guilt, shame, etc), in your subject, and positive emotion.

Ta-dah!! You've trauma-bonded your subject to you, & probably induced a post-traumatic condition too.

The fact that this guy inadvertently designed an experiment which 'accidentally' mirrored now-commonly-recognised interpersonal abuse patterns probably says much more about his personal life than it ever said about human facial expressions.

[driftdoge]

Individuals make individual expressions?! WHOA. I had no idea.

[modernotaku]

“He ended the joke portion after the second test subject was neutral to the joke”

So the guy clearly didn’t have a backup job in comedy