behavior experiments online

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This is a product of the American Psychological Association

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Getting started with OPL

• Log into OPL using your APA account login information. If you don't have an APA account, you can create one from the login page.
• Students: You can participate in experiments, view demonstrations, and access experiment data from your class or other institutions.

Psychological Experiments Online

Psychological Experiments Online is a multimedia collection that synthesizes the most important psychological experiments of the 20th and 21st centuries, fostering deeper levels of understanding for students and scholars alike. These experiments have far-reaching impacts on fields as diverse as sociology, business, advertising, economics, political science, law, ethics, and the arts.

Featured Experiments

Behavioral Study of Obedience

Milgram is most famous for his controversial Obedience Study, performed at Yale University in 1961. He was inspired to perform this study by the defense commonly used at the WWII Nuremburg War Criminals Trials, that the Nazi officers and guards implementing the Holocaust had just been “following orders.” Milgram’s Behavioral Study of Obedience tested the extent to which random American civilians could be convinced to inflict pain upon their fellow citizens when ordered to do so by a perceived authority figure. The results of this study horrified the psychological community, the general public, and the study participants themselves once the true nature of the study was explained. This study was one of the driving forces behind the creation of Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) to review proposed scientific experiments using human subjects, and approve or veto their implementation.

Robbers Cave Experiment

The Robbers Cave Experiment was named after its location, as it took place at a boys summer camp in Robbers Cave State Park, Oklahoma. Sherif identified 22 psychologically-normal, white, middle-class, eleven- and twelve-year-old boys from Connecticut to take part in the experiment. The boys were divided into two groups and Sherif studied how conflict and prejudice were first fostered and then reduced. Sherif concluded that groups have their own biases, prejudices, and culture. The Robbers Cave experiment was most helpful in showing that superordinate goals for both groups can help resolve issues and create peace.

Visual Cliff Experiment

In 1960, following their work with sensory-perception in rats, Gibson and Walk hypothesized that depth perception is inherent knowledge as opposed to a learned process. Their experiment consisted of placing an infant on the visual-cliff apparatus: simply described as a table whose edge has been extended by a piece of solidly fixed Plexiglas. The parent or caregiver would call out to the child from across the Plexiglas. If the child was reluctant to cross the Plexiglas, or “cliff”, to go to its parents, the experimenters assumed that the child was able to perceive depth. The study was published that same year in Scientific American and has come to be one of psychology’s most well-known experiments.

Stanford Prison Experiment

The Stanford Prison Experiment was scheduled to run for two weeks, with the intent of studying situational influences on human behavior. The experiment was shut down after just six days due to how extreme those influences turned out to be. The experiment was conducted from August 14 to August 20, 1971, funded by the US Office of Naval Research, and showed that the random assignment of “prisoner” and “guard” to 24 male college students made a major impact on their psychology and behavior, fostering depression among the prisoners and sadism among the guards.

PsyToolkit’s experiment library

Introduction

What you can do, using the code, list of experiments (alphabetical), list of experiments without keyboard use (touch-screen friendly).

One of the main features of PsyToolkit is that you can create and run cognitive psychological experiments in your browser. Here are a number of ready-to-use demos using this technology.

This library has now more than 40 experiments that you can try yourself in your browser (no plugins or other software needed). Each experiment can be used and modified and even embedded in your own online data-collection project.

Try them all!

You can do two types of things with each experiment in this library.

Simply just learn a about an experiment

Short explanation provided

Internet links provided to useful sites

References provided at bottom of each page

Run the demo experiment in your browser

Just experience and see what happens

Understand how it works by doing it (an illustration is often more useful than a long text!)

At the end, see your own scores (you typically will get builtin-feedback)

At the end, you can copy your own response time/error data for your own offline analysis

Use the experiments for your own research project

You can copy+paste the experiment code to your own PsyToolkit and use as is ( Watch a video on how to do that ).

You can use the code and change it

You can learn from looking at the code (learning from examples is best)

You can adjust experiments to run on mobile devices ( examples )

There are two different ways of getting the example code into your PsyToolkit account:

Within your online PsyToolkit account, simply go to the library and find the relevant experiment. The official library experiments in the online account are exactly the same as those in the library.

Download the zip file from the library (each experiment has a runnable demo and a downloadable zip file of the experiment). Go to your PsyToolkit account, and create a new experiment (select "From a PsyToolkit experiment file (zip format)").

ABBA task (reversed compatibility)

Attentional blink paradigm

Corsi backward block test (short term memory measure)

Cueing, Posner Task

Deary-Liewald Task

Dot probe task

Corsi and Digit span memory tasks

Corsi block test (short term memory measure)

A slightly different implementation of the same Corsi Test

Digit span test

Endogenous vs exogenous cueing

Fitts’s Law

Eriksen Flanker Task

Go/No-go task

Implicit Association Task (IAT)

Inhibition Of Return (IOR)

Iowa Gambling Task

Lexical Decision Task

Mackworth Clock Task to measure sustained vigilance

Mackworth Clock Task (basic)

Mackworth Clock Task (fancier)

Mental rotation

Multitasking (also a form of task switching)

N-back task (2 back)

Negative Priming

Psychological Refractory Period paradigm

Visual search

Stimulus-Response Compatibility, Simon Task

Stroop Task

Stroop Task (German, easy translatable)

Sustained Attention to Response Task (SART)

SART with feedback (SART 2)

Self paced reading

Self-paced reading (one word at the time)

Self-paced reading (incremental)

Self-paced reading (incremental with masking)

Stop signal task

Task switching

Task-switching paradigm (alternating runs version)

Task-switching paradigm (cued version)

Tower of Hanoi

Visual Approach/Avoicdance by the Self Task (VAAST)

VAAST with words

VAAST with with images

Dimensional Change Card Sort

Wisconsin Card Sorting Task

N-back task (2-back)

Fancier mackworth test

Psychology Headlines

From around the world.

• Canada to Hold Antisemitism Forum Following Recent Incidents
• Large Study Finds No Link Between Antibiotics and Dementia
• Unraveling the Power and Influence of Language
• Biases in AI Can Amplify Our Own Biases, Research Suggests
• Rights Group Says Israel's Deprivation of Water in Gaza Is Act of Genocide
• Adopting an Anti-Inflammatory Diet to Improve Mental Health
• Could Tariffs Help Fight Climate Change?
• Teens With Reduced Response to Rewards at Higher Risk of Depression

Source: Psychology News Center

Welcome to Open Psychology Labs!

This site is currently under development..

Open Psychology Labs is a collection of online psychology experiments and demonstrations. It allows anyone to learn about and participate in classic and modern psychology studies, much like traditional hands-on laboratories in other sciences.

As an open educational resource, our aim is to provide free access to a wide range of experiments and demonstrations, promoting equity in psychology education.

The development of this site is led by Dr. Nick Brosowsky , supported by funding from the University of Manitoba's Advance Open Ed initiative.

Build your online experiments Without the stress of coding

• Collect cognitive and behavioural data with validated reaction times
• Easy-to-use graphical interface - no coding necessary
• Build for free. Pay for data collection

Making good science easy for 30,000+ researchers at 1,000+ Universities

Collect validated millisecond-level data: Read the paper

We're freed up to teach critical thinking

"Each year is collecting data from around 1,500 participants . And we're freed up to spend more time on data analysis"

Dr Daniel Richardson Senior Lecturer, UCL

We recruited 17,000 participants

"The experiment was picked up by BBC Radio 4 and spread through social media - at one point we had 17,000 participants "

Dr Kirsty Graham Research Associate, St Andrews

Students save 30-40 hours

"Instead of spending 30-40 hours sitting in a cubicle testing participants, students can recruit subjects rapidly via social media "

Prof Fred Dick Professor of Auditory Cognitive Neuroscience, UCL

Collect your data in four easy steps

Create surveys and tasks to measure how people think and behave

Drag your tasks and surveys into your experiment design

Collect validated data from participants anywhere

Download your data in the format you need

Intuitive Interface

Build your experiment visually - no coding skills required

• Drag and drop to design your experiment
• Add text, images, videos, audio and more
• Over 2,000 tasks and experiments ready to use

Visual Design

Configure your protocol

• Visualise your randomisation, counterbalancing and branching
• Create between-subject, within-subject, RCTs and longitudinal designs
• CONSORT diagram to show your attrition automatically

Participant Recruitment

Collect data from large diverse samples - in hours, not months

• Integrates with Prolific, CloudResearch, Sona Systems and other recruitment platforms
• Create a link to share via email or social media
• Collect data easily from participants in the lab

Data Output

Get beautifully structured data that's easy to work with

• Easily load your data into Excel, SPSS, R or your stats package of choice
• Well-structured CSV data output
• Download your data in long form or short form

We're transitioning our in-lab studies to Gorilla too

"I love Gorilla as experiment builder software so much that we're transitioning our in-lab studies to this too (leaving behind E-Prime, SuperLab and PsychoPy)"

Dr Rachel Theodore

Associate Professor, University of Connecticut

Open Science

Over 1,000 classic tasks ready for you to use

Clone ready-made samples to get started in seconds

Flanker Task

The classic Flanker Task (or Erikson Flanker Task) is a response inhibition test used to assess participants' ability to suppress responses

Stroop Task

The classic Stroop task - colour names match and mismatch text colour. Desktop version uses keyboard input, mobile version uses touch buttons

Audio Naming Task

Participants hear a series of audio clips. You can increase difficulty using more complex audio clips, distortion or longer sentence recall

Random Number Recall

A series of random numbers are generated and presented to participants. Participants recall these by typing them into a text box

Thatcher Task

Participants are shown a series of faces, some with features or the whole face inverted. Participants have to detect if the face is natural or not

Visual Search Task

Easy for humans, hard for bots. One of many tasks you can add to your experiment to ensure data quality. Can you find the cat among the dogs?

Gorilla has been my second home for three years.

"Gorilla has been my second home for three years, saving me time, effort, and money. I trust it for its high-quality data, excellent support, and intuitive interface. Our student projects have flourished, nurturing a new generation of researchers. Grateful for Gorilla’s role in advancing science!"

Katharina Kühne

Social Robotics and Language, Potsdam University

Mixed Methods Research

Explore Gorilla's full range of academic research tools

Questionnaire builder.

Quickly create surveys and self-report measures for your experiments.

Task Builder

Build classic and novel reaction-time tasks with ease.

Experiment Builder

Design your experiment structure intuitively. Launch with confidence.

Game Builder

Gamify your tasks to increase motivation and sustain attention.

Shop Builder

Build a realistic experimental shop to study consumer decision-making.

Multiplayer

Make your tasks playable by multiple participants to study group behaviour.

Academic Support

Our team of Gorilla experts are academics just like you

On-demand support.

Our friendly, qualified support team respond rapidly - usually the same day!

Live and on-demand webinars

Watch on-demand or join us live for expert coaching to get you started

See what's coming up

Weekly office hours

Troubleshoot your experiment and get your questions answered live

Learn more about office hours

Access a library of webinars and step-by-step documentation

Designed for the way your work unfolds

Gorilla gives labs, departments and research teams the power to address their research questions at scale

Easy Collaboration

Move your work forward quickly - with tools that make it easy to share your work for review, delegate experiment admin, and create shared libraries of pre-approved resources

Version Control

Explore new ideas with confidence, knowing your work saves automatically. You can't break it or lose your work. And you can make changes quickly - even after you've lanched your study

Code Editor

Want to add your own code without managing a whole server? Gorilla is a no-code experiment builder, but those who prefer the option can easily add scripts to extend the tools

I launched a study, went to lunch and came back to 400 participant responses

"Gorilla opens up a wide range of behavioural tasks including randomised trials and reaction time behaviour. It is easy to set up a task for participants to complete at home over the internet, so I can use it to collect useful behavioural data from participants across the UK. I launched a study recently, went to lunch and came back to 400 participant responses."

Dr Suzanna Forwood

Senior Lecturer, Anglia Ruskin University

Your All In One Platform For Academic Research

Tools to make good science easy for students, researchers and supervisors

One Tool For All Your Teaching

• Help your students collect publishable data independently - without getting bogged down in code
• Teach all your research methods with one intuitive platform - with tools designed for teaching
• Make experimental psychology fun and accessible

A Much Richer Learning Experience

"What we've managed to do with Gorilla is give students the tools and templates to make their own experiments, with minimal supervision. Students can go out and test a hypothesis via social media. Results flood in from all over the world, and they're creating this incredible range of studies. It's a much richer learning experience."

Dr Daniel Richardson

Senior Lecturer, UCL

Researchers

Take The Stress Out Of Your Science

• Deploy your research fast - without code
• Go beyond surveys with validated reaction time data
• Collaborate with students, co-authors and contributors
• Collect publishable data from diverse participant samples - from anywhere in the world

Our paper wouldn't have been feasible without Gorilla

"We have our first paper currently under review, which just wouldn’t have been feasible without Gorilla. Thanks for everything you do!"

Head of School, Keele University

Do More Research. Study More People. Graduate On Time.

• Go beyond surveys with a mixed-methods approach
• Develop well-designed research questions and improve your critical thinking skills
• Spend more time designing the best possible research - and less time figuring out how to implement it

Gorilla has saved my PhD!

"Gorilla has quite literally saved my PhD! Everyone I’ve shown it to has been astonished by how easy it is to set up an experiment."

Emily Breese

Open University

No compromises on ethics, privacy, security or compliance

Gorilla is approved by 300+ universities worldwide

Hosted in the EU

Penetration Tested

Two-factor Authentication (2FA)

Conformant with WCAG 2.1 Level AA. VPAT available.

Fully GDPR and BPS (The British Psychological Society) compliant

Easy application to your Internal Review Board (IRB) or Ethics Committee

Get Started For Free

Shortcut the weeks and months to collect high-quality data. Get on-demand support to build, preview and pre-test your experiment with our free plan.

Choose from dozens of sample tasks to clone and customise for replication. Access free, 5-minute tutorials and a library of bite-size resources.

When you’re satisfied you can measure what you want to measure, choose from academia-friendly pricing tiers, to host and start collecting data.

With group savings - great for labs and departments.

Making Good Science Easy For 30,000+ Academic Researchers

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Psychological Experiments Online

Psychological Experiments Online is a multimedia collection that synthesizes the most important psychological experiments of the 20th and 21st centuries, fostering deeper levels of understanding for students and scholars alike. These experiments have far-reaching impacts on fields as diverse as sociology, business, advertising, economics, political science, law, ethics, and the arts.

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