Rosenhan's Study Evaluation

Aim: To see if psychiatric diagnosis is vald, reliable or affected by bias.

Procedure: Field experiment. 8 pseudo patients (who were researchers) rang up one of 12 hospitals in 5 US states. They complained about hearing "empty, hollow and thud", given a fake name and job but details about their lives were real. All admitted to hosital with diagnosis of Schizophrenia except one, who was issued diagnosis of manic depressive with psychosis. Once in hospital, they acted normally, anwsered questions honestly and took notes of their surroundings/experiences.

Results: All patients were discharged after an average of 19 days. Real patients detected the pseudo patients, with one even asking "are you a journalist". Note taking was seen as 'writing behaviour' and queuing early for lunch was labelled as 'oral acquisitive syndrome'. Pseudo patients reported being ignored 71% of the time and eye contact was only given 23%

Follow up: Some institutions believed they could not be fooled. They rated patients on a 10-point scale on probability of being a pseudo patient. 41 were judged to be pseudo patients by 1 staff member.…