The Rosenhan experiment (1973) sent eight mentally healthy volunteers to fake a single symptom and seek admission to psychiatric hospitals.
Every one was diagnosed with a mental disorder and hospitalized, and staff never detected the deception.
The study became a landmark critique of how reliably psychiatrists can tell the sane from the insane.
Key Takeaways
- Pseudopatient Study: Between 1969 and 1972, David Rosenhan, a Stanford professor of psychology and law, sent eight pseudopatients with no genuine psychiatric symptoms to 12 hospitals without telling staff.
- Every Pseudopatient Was Admitted: All 12 admissions resulted in a diagnosis of a mental disorder, and staff never detected the deception during hospitalization.
- Minimal Staff Contact: Staff gave a genuine verbal response to only about 2.94% of patients’ requests for information, and daily contact with psychiatrists and other clinicians averaged just 6.8 minutes.
- The Reversed Study: At a hospital warned to expect fake patients, staff rated 41 of 193 genuine patients (21.24%) as likely pseudopatients, even though Rosenhan sent none.
- Diagnosis Called Into Question: Together, the two studies provided strong evidence against the accuracy and validity of psychiatric diagnosis.
- Still Debated Today: Psychiatric diagnosis remains at odds with some neurological findings, and no single reform proposal has yet won widespread support.
Aim
David L. Rosenhan was a professor of law and psychology at Stanford University. In the years leading up to 1973, he set out to test whether psychiatrists could actually tell normal and abnormal psychological states apart. As he put it:
At its heart, the question of whether the sane can be distinguished from the insane (and whether degrees of insanity can be distinguished from each other) is a simple matter: do the salient characteristics that lead to diagnoses reside in the patients themselves or in the environments and contexts in which observers find them?
The APA’s DSM-II, published in 1968, reflected a widely held belief among mental health professionals. Psychiatric conditions, they thought, could be clearly distinguished from one another and from normal mental health, just as physical illnesses are distinguished in medicine.
During the 1960s, growing criticism challenged this view. Critics argued that psychiatric diagnoses lacked the objectivity and scientific rigor of physical diagnoses. Such labels, they claimed, were more like professional opinions, vulnerable to bias even when offered by skilled clinicians.
To test this claim, Prof. Rosenhan designed an experiment. He arranged for individuals with no history or symptoms of serious mental illness to attempt admission to psychiatric hospitals.
If these pseudopatients were consistently recognized as mentally healthy, that would support the idea that psychiatrists could reliably distinguish normal from abnormal mental states. The underlying assumption was that psychiatric normality is distinct enough for competent professionals to identify.
Sample
Nine participants, including Prof. Rosenhan, were recruited. All were deemed to have no present or past symptoms of serious psychiatric disorders. Each gained admission to one of nine distinct hospitals.
In eight cases, admittance was gained without the hospital’s staff’s foreknowledge.
In Prof. Rosenhan’s case, the hospital administrator and chief psychologist knew of their hospital’s inclusion in the study. Data from Prof. Rosenhan’s stay or stays were not excluded.
Data from one participant were excluded due to a protocol breach (falsification of personal history beyond that of name, occupation, and employment).
Between one and four of the remaining eight participants thereafter gained further admission to four other hospitals.
Data from 12 hospital stays, at 12 different hospitals, by eight participants were included in the study. Five of the included participants were male adults; three were female adults.
Five of the eight worked in psychology or psychiatry: three psychologists, a psychiatrist, and a psychology graduate student. The other three were a paediatrician, a painter, and a homemaker.
One of the 12 hospitals was privately funded; the rest received public funding. An undisclosed number of hospitals were “old and shabby” or “quite understaffed.”
The 12 hospitals were located in five states in the East and West coasts of the US.
Procedure
The admittance, stay, and discharge process was as follows:
- Participants set up an appointment at one of the hospitals under a false name, occupation, and employment.
- At the appointment, participants complained of hearing unfamiliar, often unclear voices, seemingly from someone of their own sex, saying “empty,” “hollow,” and “thud.”
- Participants gave truthful information on everything else, changing only the names, occupations, and employment of friends and family to match their own assumed details.
- On admittance, participants stopped simulating any psychiatric symptoms, though there were a few cases of “brief[,] … mild nervousness and anxiety” which “abated rapidly.”
- In psychiatric wards, participants engaged with patients and staff as they would normally with colleagues in everyday life. When asked how they were feeling, they said they were fine and no longer heard the voice.
- Participants received but did not swallow their prescribed medication, except in one or two instances, and recorded their observations of the ward, staff, and patients.
- Participants were discharged when hospital staff saw fit. A writ of habeas corpus was kept on file for each participant in case any could not secure release.
- Between one and four participants repeated this process at four other hospitals.
Two further protocol breaches, which did not result in exclusion, were reported. One participant revealed their occupation in psychology to staff members.
Another “attempted a romance with a nurse,” revealed their occupation in psychology to staff members, and provided psychotherapy to fellow patients.
Nursing reports for an undisclosed (“most”) number of the 12 stays were obtained from the hospitals. Coding protocols and training were not reported.
Depersonalization Observations
At four of the 12 hospitals, staff responses to patient-initiated contact were also investigated.
During their stay, four participants approached staff members with a request of the form, “Pardon me, Mr. [or Dr. or Mrs.] X, could you tell me when I will be eligible for grounds privileges?” or “… when I will be presented at the staff meeting?” or “… when I am likely to be discharged?”
No staff member was approached more than once a day. Staff responses were recorded.
Criteria for response classification, recording protocols, and pre-study training were not disclosed.
At six of the 12 hospitals, patients’ daily contact with staff (in minutes), from the initial admission interview to the final discharge meeting, inclusive of both, was measured.
Measurement protocol and pre-study training were not disclosed.
Non-existent Imposter Study
A second study was arranged at a research and teaching hospital in an undisclosed location. Its staff were aware of the first study’s results.
They were informed that one or more persons, previously instructed to simulate at least one symptom of a psychiatric disorder, i.e., a pseudo-patient, would attempt to gain admission within the following three months.
Staff were asked to rate each patient seeking admission on a ten-point scale, from most likely to be a pseudo-patient (1 or 2 on the scale) to least likely. No participants were, in fact, sent to the hospital. Scores were obtained for 193 patients.
No patients were independently evaluated by Prof. Rosenhan or affiliated researchers. No scoring protocol nor pre-study training was reported.
Findings
In eleven instances, participants were admitted on a diagnosis of schizophrenia and discharged with a diagnosis of schizophrenia in remission.
In one instance, a participant was admitted on a diagnosis of manic-depressive psychosis; their discharge diagnosis was not reported. Stays ranged from 7 to 52 days, with a mean of 19 days. Standard deviation was not disclosed.
Nursing reports “uniformly indicate[d] that the [participants] were “friendly,” “cooperative,” and “exhibited no abnormal indications.” Coding results and statistical significance were not reported.
Participants’ visitors “could detect no serious behavioral consequences [of hospitalization in participants].” No information on data collection from said visitors, nor statistical analyses on these data, were reported.
The errant diagnosis on admission, Prof. Rosenhan noted, could simply be attributed to physicians’ strong bias towards type II errors. As he put it:
The reasons [for this strong bias] are not hard to find: it is clearly more dangerous to misdiagnose illness than health. Better to err on the side of caution, to suspect illness even among the healthy.
Errant diagnoses after admission troubled Prof. Rosenhan more than the initial ones. Once diagnosed, participants could not shake the label, even though they had dropped the pretense the moment they were admitted.
A competent practitioner should eventually have recognized the initial diagnosis as a type II error and corrected it. No such correction happened in any of the 12 stays.
The admission diagnosis became, in Prof. Rosenhan’s words, “so powerful that many of the [participants’] normal behaviors were overlooked entirely or profoundly misinterpreted.” Two examples illustrate this:
- Note-Taking Read as Symptom: Nursing staff recorded a pseudopatient’s open note-taking as “the patient engages in writing behaviour,” treating an ordinary habit as pathology.
- Queuing Read as “Oral-Acquisitive”: One psychiatrist read patients’ ordinary, boredom-driven queuing outside the cafeteria as evidence of the “oral-acquisitive” nature of the illness. Pacing from boredom was read the same way, as anxiety.
This attribution reinforced the diagnosis each time, fixing the type II error in place. Prof. Rosenhan argued that this pointed less to the incompetence of psychiatrists, psychologists, or nurses than to the “enormous overlap in behaviors of the sane and the insane.”
Depersonalization Observations
On initiating contact with staff members, participants were overwhelmingly ignored by psychiatrists, nurses, or attendants at four of the hospitals. Only about 2.94% of 1,468 pseudopatient-initiated approaches received a genuine verbal response.
Inter-hospital differences were not deemed significant and were not reported. Statistical differences and significance were not reported.
Six participants, totaling 129 days of hospitalization, measured their daily contact with staff.
Daily contact with psychiatrists, psychologists, residents, and physicians ranged from 3.9 to 25.1 minutes, with a mean of 6.8 minutes.
Disaggregated data, contact time with other staff, statistical differences, statistical significance, and standard deviation were not reported.
Contact, Prof. Rosenhan notes, indicates “concern and individuation,” its lack, “avoidance and depersonalization.” Staff’s overwhelming avoidance of patients, Prof.
Table 1. Self-initiated contact by participants with psychiatrists, nurses, and attendants. Adapted from Table 1 of the 1973 Rosenhan study, p. 255. Copyright (c) 1973 AAAS.
Rosenhan notes resulted in an “overwhelming sense of powerlessness which invades the individual as he is continually exposed to the depersonalization of the psychiatric hospital.”
The import of this practice, and the powerlessness it elicited, Prof. Rosenhan argued, could be readily inferred.
[H]ow many patients might be “sane” outside the psychiatric hospital but seem insane in it — not because craziness resides in them, as it were, but because they are responding to a bizarre setting … ?
Non-existent Imposter Study
Of the 193 scores obtained, 41 patients were judged highly likely to have been a pseudo-patient by at least one staff member, 23 by at least one psychiatrist, and 19 by one psychiatrist and at least one other staff member. No pseudo-patients were sent by Prof. Rosenhan or affiliated researchers.
Of the 41 patients judged highly likely to have been pseudo-patients:
- Either they did not, in fact, have any abnormal psychiatric symptoms and were correctly judged pseudo-patients by the staff;
- Or they did, in fact, have abnormal psychiatric symptoms (as presumed by the fact that they wished to be admitted), in which case the staff misdiagnosed them as pseudo-patients and thereby made a type I error in seeking to avoid type II errors.
In either case, Prof. Rosenhan pointed out the results indicated “that the tendency to designate sane people as insane can be reversed when the stakes (in this case, prestige and diagnostic acumen) are high.”
But it is notable that, in the second case, the price for avoiding type II errors might just be a higher type I error rate.
Conclusion
It is clear that we cannot distinguish the sane from the insane in psychiatric hospitals. The hospital itself imposes a special environment in which the meanings of behaviour can easily be misunderstood.
Both practitioners and patients, the study reveals, seem caught in Catch-22s. Out of an excess of caution, psychiatrists and psychologists strongly tend towards type II errors on admission.
But once said error is made, there’s a slim chance it will be caught during in-patient treatment.
On the other hand, should practitioners try to avoid type II errors from sticking to patients, they run the risk of equally damaging type I errors.
On the other hand, patients, once admitted, are likely to develop psychopathies, whether they truly had any on admission or not, given the bizarre setting they are thrust into on admittance.
But should they seek to avoid the setting (the psychiatric hospital), they run the risk of an untreated mental illness getting worse, if they truly suffered one to begin with.
A way out for practitioners and patients is not immediately clear to Prof. Rosenhan. Two promising directions he noted were:
- The avoidance of psychiatric diagnoses of the form encouraged by the DSM II in favor of diagnosing patients with “specific problems and behaviors” so as to provide treatment outside of psychiatric hospitals and to keep any diagnostic label from “sticking” to a patient;
- Increasing “the sensitivity of mental health workers and researchers to the Catch-22 position of psychiatric patients,” for e.g., by having them read pertinent literature.
Other Conclusions
A good number of the study’s shortcomings should give us pause when drawing conclusions.
Sampling, randomization, control, blinding, and statistical analysis methods were largely unreported and so likely not to have been up to present-day standards.
Participant training was not reported and so likely not undertaken before the study. No data on participants’ visitors and their evaluations were reported.
Study flaws aside, the observed effects were large enough to likely be both clinically and statistically significant:
- All 12 hospitalizations resulted in type II errors both on admission and discharge;
- 2.94% of the 1,468 recorded participant-initiated interactions with psychiatric staff resulted in verbal engagement with the participant;
- 9.84% of the 193 patients scored at a research and teaching hospital were deemed very likely to have had no psychopathic traits on admission by both a psychiatrist and at least one other staff member.
The findings pointed to an unacceptable preponderance and persistence of type II errors by competent psychiatric staff and to the danger of psychiatric harm to patients posed by then-current psychiatric practices.
Critical Evaluation
Was the Study High in Ecological Validity?
Field experiments have the major advantage of being conducted in a real environment and this gives the research high ecological validity.
However, it is not possible to have as many controls in place as would be possible in a laboratory experiment.
Participant observation allows the collection of highly detailed data without the problem of demand characteristics.
As the hospitals did not know of the existence of the pseudopatients, there is no possibility that the staff could have changed their behavior because they knew they were being observed.
However, this does raise serious ethical issues (see below) and there is also the possibility that the presence of the pseudopatient would change the environment in which they are observing.
Was the sample representative?
Strictly speaking, the sample is the twelve hospitals that were studied. Rosenhan ensured that this included a range of old and new institutions as well as those with different sources of funding.
The results revealed little differences between the hospitals. This suggests that it is probably reasonable to generalize from this sample and suggest that the same results would be found in other hospitals.
Prof. Rosenhan’s 1973 paper does not detail:
- How his sample size was determined, nor how his sample was selected;
- The study’s inclusion/exclusion criteria;
- How past or present serious psychiatric symptoms were diagnosed, nor by whom;
- Whether past or present mild to moderate psychiatric symptoms were diagnosed, nor by whom;
- How hospitals were selected;
- How participants were matched with false names, occupations, and employment information;
- How participants were matched with hospitals.
What type of data was collected in this study?
There is a huge variety of data reported in this study, ranging from quantitative data detailing how many days each pseudopatient spent in the hospital and how many times pseudopatients were ignored by staff to qualitative descriptions of the experiences of the pseudopatients.
One of the strengths of this study could be seen as the wealth of data that is reported and there is no doubt that the conclusions reached by Rosenhan are well illustrated by the qualitative data that he has included.
Was the study ethical?
Strictly speaking, no.
The staff were deceived as they did not know that they were being observed and
you need to consider how they might have felt when they discovered the research had taken place.
Genuine hospital resources, including beds, medication, and clinicians’ time, were used up by healthy volunteers, potentially at the expense of real patients.
The pseudopatients themselves faced real risk too. They were exposed to the distress and powerlessness of involuntary confinement, protected only by a habeas corpus writ on file in case they could not secure release.
Was the study justified?
This is more difficult as there is certainly no other way that the study could have been conducted and you need to consider whether the results justified the deception. This is discussed later under the heading of usefulness.
What does the study tell us about individual/situational explanations of behavior?
The study suggests that once the patients were labeled, the label stuck. Everything they did or said was interpreted as typical of a schizophrenic (or manic-depressive) patient.
This means that the situation that the pseudopatients were in had a powerful impact on the way that they were judged.
The hospital staff was not able to perceive the pseudopatients in isolation from their label and the fact that they were in a psychiatric hospital, and this raises serious doubts about the reliability and validity of the psychiatric diagnosis.
What does the study tell us about reinforcement and social control?
The implications of the study are that patients in psychiatric hospitals are ‘conditioned’ to behave in certain ways by the environments that they find themselves in.
Their behavior is shaped by the environment (nurses assume that signs of boredom are signs of anxiety, for example) and if the environment does not allow them to display ‘normal’ behavior, it will be difficult for them to be seen as normal.
Labeling is a powerful form of social control. Once a label has been applied to an individual, everything they do or say will be interpreted in the light of this label.
Across the 12 stays, staff gave pseudopatients a total of 2,100 pills, including drugs such as Elavil, Stelazine, Compazine, and Thorazine. Almost none were actually swallowed.
Rosenhan describes pseudopatients going to flush their medication down the toilet and finding other patients’ pills already there. This suggests that so long as patients caused no trouble, very few checks were made.
Was the study useful?
The study was certainly useful in highlighting how hospital staff interact with patients, and it suggests many ways that hospital care and staff training could be improved.
However, it is possible to question some of Rosenhan’s conclusions. If you went to a doctor falsely complaining of severe abdominal pain and the doctor admitted you to hospital, you could hardly blame the doctor for the resulting diagnosis.
Isn’t it better for psychiatrists to err on the side of caution and admit someone who is not really mentally ill than to send away someone who might be genuinely suffering?
This does not excuse how long some pseudopatients spent in hospital acting perfectly normally. But it does support the actions of the staff who made the initial diagnosis.
Spitzer’s Rebuttal: Is This Really “Pseudoscience”?
Psychiatrist Robert Spitzer (1975) published the most famous response to Rosenhan, called “On pseudoscience in science, logic in remission, and psychiatric diagnosis.” It made three main points.
First, the pseudopatients reported a genuine symptom. Auditory hallucinations are a serious complaint, so admitting someone who reports hearing voices and diagnosing schizophrenia was reasonable, not evidence of incompetence. The staff were deceived, and a diagnostic system cannot be blamed for failing to catch a determined liar.
Second, Spitzer argued the “in remission” discharge actually showed the system working. This label is rare in ordinary practice, and it is the correct judgment for someone who genuinely shows no symptoms. Recording it shows staff were responding to normal behavior, not ignoring it.
Third, Spitzer accused Rosenhan of drawing sweeping conclusions about psychiatric diagnosis from a single study of determined liars fooling clinicians. He called this the “logic of pseudoscience.”
Outlook of Diagnostic Accuracy
Psychiatric diagnoses continue to be made much as they were in Prof. Rosenhan’s day. Clinicians still rely largely on inferences drawn from patient self-reports and their own observations of behavior, judged against criteria set by the APA’s DSM.
This points to two sources of diagnostic problems in psychiatry:
- the evidence used to reach a diagnosis, and
- the criteria by which said evidence is evaluated in reaching a diagnosis.
The evidence available to psychiatrists and psychologists in diagnosing mental disorders has long been much sparser than that available to other physicians.
There have been advances in understanding the biological basis of mental disorders in the decades since.
This growing corpus has yet to yield diagnostic tests, though.
In 2012, a group of three psychiatrists, led by Prof. Shitij Kapur of King’s College London, argued that a number of reasons were responsible for this lag, including widespread methodological shortcomings and the DSM’s classification itself.
On that note, the DSM has left much to desire. As Thomas Insel, former director of the NIMH, put it:
Unlike our definitions of ischemic heart disease, lymphoma, or AIDS, the DSM diagnoses are based on a consensus about clusters of clinical symptoms, not any objective laboratory measure.
Since its first publication in 1958, the DSM has reached a classification of mental disorders without data on their biological underpinnings.
Its nosology is increasingly at odds with aetiological research, which increasingly suggests that mental disorders are rather gradual deviations from typical brain functions.
This, in turn, suggests that mental disorders should be classified as points or areas on spectra rather than the neat categories propounded by the DSM. One effort at building such a nosology was begun by the NIMH in 2010.
The project, dubbed the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC), is still confined to research and is not ready for clinical application.
The myriad problems in psychiatric research and practice preclude any consensus on the accuracy of psychiatric diagnoses and are likely to do so until they are resolved.
The field has not converged on a corrective program, though there exist a number of such programs competing for widespread support.
The Modern Reappraisal: The Great Pretender
The most serious recent challenge to Rosenhan’s study targets not his interpretation, but his data. In The Great Pretender (2019), journalist Susannah Cahalan, herself a survivor of a misdiagnosed organic brain disease, spent years trying to trace the eight pseudopatients using Rosenhan’s own papers.
What Cahalan Found
Cahalan could reliably identify only two of the eight pseudopatients: Rosenhan himself and a graduate student named Bill Underwood. Several of the other six could not be confirmed to have existed at all, raising the possibility that some of the data were exaggerated or invented.
More damaging still, Cahalan found that Rosenhan’s own hospital admission record contradicts the published paper. The study insists he reported only a single, mild symptom, a voice saying “thud.”
His actual medical notes, filed under a pseudonym, describe far more severe symptoms: distressing voices, suicidal thoughts, and copper placed over his ears to block the signals.
If accurate, this would mean Rosenhan himself genuinely warranted admission, undercutting the study’s central claim that a trivial complaint led to needless confinement.
Cahalan also uncovered a ninth pseudopatient, Harry Lando, whose data Rosenhan left out of the paper entirely. Lando had found his hospital stay positive and humane, a result that did not fit Rosenhan’s thesis, and its omission further undermines confidence in how the data were curated.
An earlier note of caution came from psychologist Lauren Slater (2004). In her book Opening Skinner’s Box, she described her own attempt to repeat the study by reporting a single hallucinated word at emergency rooms.
Her account was itself contested, but it foreshadowed the later doubts about how easily Rosenhan’s design could be reproduced or trusted.
What This Means for Citing Rosenhan Today
Cahalan’s challenge is to the data itself, not just to Rosenhan’s interpretation of it. Trying to trace the eight pseudopatients from his own papers, she could reliably confirm only two: Rosenhan himself and a graduate student, Bill Underwood. Several others could not be verified as real.
More damaging still, Rosenhan’s own hospital admission record appears to contradict his published account. Where the paper insists he reported only a single, benign symptom, his actual medical notes describe more severe complaints, including suicidal ideation — undercutting the claim that one trivial complaint alone led to needless confinement.
Cahalan also identified a ninth pseudopatient, Harry Lando, whose data Rosenhan left out of the published paper. Lando’s own hospital stay had been positive and humane, a result that did not fit the argument Rosenhan was building.
For citing the study today, the practical lesson is to treat it as historically pivotal but evidentially fragile. Its influence on psychiatric diagnosis and on the sociology of labelling remains a matter of record.
Its specific findings, though, can no longer be repeated as secure empirical fact. Any responsible account should flag Cahalan’s reappraisal alongside the classic narrative, rather than presenting the original data as settled.
FAQs
What did the Rosenhan study suggest in 1973?
The Rosenhan study in 1973 suggested that psychiatric diagnoses are often subjective and unreliable. Rosenhan and his associates feigned hallucinations to get admitted to mental hospitals but acted normally afterward.
Despite this, they were held for significant periods and treated as if they were genuinely mentally ill. The study highlighted issues with the validity of psychiatric diagnosis and the stigma attached to mental illness.
What did the classic study by Rosenhan reveal about the power of labels that are applied to individuals?
The classic study by Rosenhan showed the influential effect of labels on individuals, specifically psychiatric labels. By pretending to have hallucinations, mentally healthy participants gained admission to psychiatric hospitals.
The study demonstrated that once labeled as mentally ill, their behaviors were consistently interpreted in that context, even when they stopped simulating symptoms.
References
Adam, D. (2013). On the spectrum. Nature, 496(7446), 416.
Cahalan, S. (2019). The great pretender: The undercover mission that changed our understanding of madness. Grand Central Publishing.
Insel, T. R. (2013, April 29). Transforming diagnosis [Blog post]. National Institute of Mental Health. https://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/directors/thomas-insel/blog/2013/transforming-diagnosis.shtml
Kapur, S., Phillips, A. G., & Insel, T. R. (2012). Why has it taken so long for biological psychiatry to develop clinical tests and what to do about it? Molecular Psychiatry, 17(12), 1174–1179.
Rosenhan, D. L. (1973). On being sane in insane places. Science, 179(4070), 250–258. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.179.4070.250
Sharp, C., Fowler, J. C., Salas, R., Nielsen, D., Allen, J., Oldham, J., Kosten, T., Mathew, S., Madan, A., Frueh, B. C., & Fonagy, P. (2016). Operationalizing NIMH Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) in naturalistic clinical settings. Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic, 80(3), 187–212.
Spitzer, R. L. (1975). On pseudoscience in science, logic in remission, and psychiatric diagnosis: A critique of Rosenhan’s “On being sane in insane places.” Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 84(5), 442–452. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0077124
