"Cut down on inner friction; heal yourself."
—Yang Tianzhen (renowned talent agent; founder of Yixin Entertainment)

"Grounded in brain-science and psychological experimentation, it explains the professional knowledge of psychology that is deeply relevant to the public."
—Zhou Xiaolin (Honorary Dean, School of Psychology and Cognitive Science, East China Normal University)

"It vividly brings to life abstruse psychological theories and jargon, using classic experiments to lead readers into the world of psychology."
—Fang Xiaoyi (Chair, Marriage and Family Psychology and Counseling Committee, Chinese Psychological Society)

"As a mother, what I care about most is the parenting part. The rhesus monkey experiment made me reflect on myself—when my child cried as a baby, I sometimes gave a perfunctory hug. After reading, the thought of this experiment makes me put down my phone and hug my child back."
—Reader

★ This is the inaugural title in the Don't Challenge Human Nature series. The experiments it covers have reached over ten million people online, with a 9.1 rating on Zhihu's column and nearly 40,000 reviews on Dangdang. The Milgram shock experiment, the Stanford Prison Experiment, the Hawthorne Experiment, the rhesus monkey experiment, and others collected here are classic studies widely cited throughout the history of psychology.

★ The Milgram shock experiment—65% of ordinary people, under authoritative command, delivered a "fatal" shock to a stranger; the Stanford Prison Experiment—ordinary college students turned into abusers within six days. The book reconstructs the scenes of 20 experiments that changed the history of psychology, analyzing the laws of human nature behind obedience, fear, conscience, and love.

★ The book's core rests on two lines: "A place without response is a place of despair" (drawn from a psychoanalytic adage and extended through the Hawthorne and rhesus monkey experiments), and "Human nature cannot withstand deliberate testing." It also offers a practical method—"Call for help loudly, tell those around you exactly what is happening, pick out one specific person from the crowd to help you, and tell them that helping you costs nothing and carries no risk."

20 experiments that rewrote psychology—and revealed the unsettling truth about who we are.

This is a popular-science work that uses classic psychology experiments as its entry point to interpret human nature and everyday behavior. It centers on milestone studies in psychology such as the Milgram shock experiment, the Stanford Prison Experiment, the Hawthorne Experiment, and the rhesus monkey experiment. In 1961, Stanley Milgram, a professor at Yale, designed an experiment in which participants played the "teacher" and, whenever the "student" answered wrongly, pressed a button to deliver an escalating voltage. Despite the "student's" screams and pleas, 65% of participants, under the authority's instruction, raised the voltage to a lethal 450 volts. Inspired by Nazi followers at the Nuremberg trials who defended themselves with "obedience to orders," the experiment reveals an unsettling truth: when an individual enters a power structure of "diffusion of responsibility," moral judgment yields to "role obligation," and rational people can become executors of systemic violence. In 1971, psychologist Philip Zimbardo built a mock prison in the Stanford basement and randomly assigned 24 mentally and physically healthy, crime-free college students to "guard" and "prisoner" groups. Within just six days, the "guards" began to take pleasure in punishing and humiliating the "prisoners," inflicting systematic abuse; the "prisoners" showed stress-induced breakdowns, hysteria, and even total submission. The experiment was forcibly terminated early. The book's analysis points out that absolute power, deindividuation (uniforms and numbers), conformity, and role identity are the key mechanisms by which ordinary people slide into the "banality of evil." Combining the Hawthorne Experiment and the rhesus monkey experiment, the book extends the proposition that "a place without response is a place of despair." The rhesus monkey experiment shows that baby monkeys prioritize the need for warm contact over food; the Hawthorne Experiment reveals the power of being noticed itself to change behavior. Together these experiments point to a core: humans need not only material satisfaction, but also to be seen and responded to. Told as stories with observations and reflections on daily life, and including actionable methods such as meditation and relaxation, the book works as both an introduction to psychology and a read for anyone with a sustained interest in human-nature issues.

Pan Kaiwen
A psychology researcher and popular-science author. A former full-time psychology instructor at the National Defense University and a retired military officer. He has long been committed to popularizing and writing about psychology, skilled at combining classic experiments with everyday-life topics and explaining professional theory in plain language. He is currently a partner, vice president, and head of product development at the Smile-ism psychology service platform, an invited researcher at the Shanghai Women's Physical and Mental Health Development Research Center, a master's supervisor in applied psychology at the School of Psychology, Shanghai University of Sport, and a contracted author for Zhihu's Yanxuan column. His works have a broad readership across Zhihu, WeRead, and Douban, with a 9.1 rating on his Zhihu column.

01 Harlow's Rhesus Monkey Experiment: Survival Requires the Existence of Relationships
02 Strange Situation Experiment: Emotion Requires Finding Loving Attachment
03 Twin Climbing-Stairs Experiment: Growth Needs the Right Timing
04 Bobo Doll Experiment: Development Needs a Learning Model
05 Car-Crash Eyewitness Experiment: Rumors, the Terrifying Tampering and Implanting of Memory
06 Shock Experiment: Obedience, the Charge Against the Good Child
07 Hawthorne Experiment: Efficiency Comes from Respect and Recognition
08 Cognitive Dissonance Experiment: Do You Think You Control Your Destiny?
09 Rosenthal Experiment: Labels, the Force That Shapes Destiny
10 Stanford Prison Experiment: A Demon in Everyone's Heart
11 Learned Helplessness Experiment: Loss of Control, Why We Become Pessimistic and Lose Confidence
12 Little Albert Experiment: Fear, You Need to Express It Boldly
13 Marshmallow Experiment: Family, Our Stress Buffer
14 Bystander Effect Experiment: Good and Evil, Your Choice in an Instant
15 Capilano Suspension Bridge Experiment: Love, the Secret You Didn't Know
16 Sensory Deprivation Experiment: The Body, Our Measure of the World
17 Procrastination Experiment: Procrastination, an Innate Self-Protection Mechanism
18 Rosenhan Experiment: Who Exactly Is the Mentally Ill
19 Trolley Problem Experiment: Conscience, the Brightest Star in the Night Sky of Human Nature
20 Attentional Blink Experiment: Mindfulness, Opening the Door to Awareness