The most interesting studies in psychology occurred around fifty years ago. It's not that we haven't found out anything interesting since then, it's that academic psychology is now required to have all human experiments approved by ethics boards.
Famous studies such as the Milgram Experiment - which measured the likelihood people would cause pain to others if ordered to do so by an authority figure - or the Stanford Prison Experiment which took ordinary people and randomly assigned them to be prisoners or prison guards and had such shocking results the experiment was abandoned - would never have happened if they had to pass through ethics committees.
So while psychology has had to find novel ways to understand human responses in different situations, at the same time not causing them undue or lasting harm, reality TV faces no such inconvenient restrictions.
We've now become so accustomed to the genre of reality TV, of ordinary people putting themselves through some trial or series of competitions for our entertainment, that we rarely question it.
This week an article outlined that in the recent local version of Married at First Site (MAFS) out of 11 couples on the show, none of them have stayed together subsequent to the show: A zero per cent success rate.
