Psychology Experiment

[Serioli]

Depending on how much money you have, get a bunch of cheap, say strawberry, sweets (candies).

Split into thirds and have one set with no label, one called strawberry candy, one with an 'OTT' name (strawberry ultra, burst, xtreme or whatever). Get different groups to rate the flavours of the sweets. (i.e. does an 'ultra' name mean people will think the same things taste better?)

EDIT: Semi-ninjad with Pepsi/coke

 

[Miffmoff]

Ask them questions, punish them when they get the answer right and reward them when they get the answer wrong.

 

[asmidir]

Build a mock prison, divide up your class into two groups: guards and prisoners. And get a camera.

Zimbardo for the win!!!!!!!!!!

 

[CouchCommando]

the old glass half full adage would be a good one to start with. To see if some one was of a particularly pessimistic or optimistic bent.

 

[Moonmover]

Question: Why are you asking on a gaming forum? Seems a bit arbitrary.

 

[Quaxar]

Prove that this study is true (or false)
http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/2007/02/is_17_the_most_random_number.php

 

[asmidir]

Question: Why are you asking on a gaming forum? Seems a bit arbitrary.

This is the off topic. duh

 

[Bloodeye]

Start your own cult. Mormontology has a nice ring to it.

 

[C_Topher]

Here's one I've always wanted to do. You take a video of someone experiencing a slight misfortune, like dropping a plate of food, and show it to two groups of subjects. In one group, you just tell them to watch the video. This is the control group. For the other group, you tell them to watch the video, but instruct them not to laugh. After they watch the video, do a quick interview: what did they see, did they think it was funny, and did they laugh? The hypothesise for this experiment is the group instructed not to laugh will have a higher number of subjects claiming they video was funny and they laughed somewhat.
I designed this experiment noticing that people will often laugh at something after someone says something like "Don't laugh, it's not funny" even if they were not laughing before. This lead me to wonder if a person's emotional response to a situation could be influenced in a similar manner as behaviour, ei. when told not to do something, you may be more tempted to do it. In this case, you would be observing the emotion schadenfreude, or pleasure derived from another's misfortune.

 

[Tharwen]

Stop and hold the door for someone right behind you. Then try it again with someone slightly further behind you. Keep doing this until you find the distance from which people won't run to catch a door that's being held open.

make someone cover themselves completely in a sack. Insert an angry raccoon into the sac and watch the fun fly.

So... what exactly are you testing in this experiment?

 

[Xanadu84]

You could redo the experiment I did, but sadly didn't have enough participants to get a decently significant finding.

Take a fighting game, and briefly let participants practice the fundamentals of the game. Then, have them compete in a best out of 3 match against a confederate. In one group, have the confederate be silent. In the other, have the confederate portray confidence, saying how skilled he is at the game, and trash talking (Within parameters established in your proposal to the IRB). To control for experimenter bias, have the confederate merely pretend to be playing the game, and have the participant actually be playing against a CPU. 2 things to worry about: 1) You need to do a pre test. A lot of things can go wrong, often times simply making the game format fit into your experiments format. Nothing is more embarrassing here then realizing that the deception is being ruined because your confederate wasn't sure about the proper place to pause or something. I ran into a lot of kinks in my pretest 2) Demographic data is a must. It's difficult to get the number of participants needed, and this is made even more difficult by the possibility of having a disproportionate number of non gamers in one group. If you get a lot of participants, then you can also find out more nuanced data, like if the effect of trash talking changes between demographics.

 

[Riobux]

We are about to start our personal investigations in my psychology class. Basically we have the whole term to conduct our own experiment that is based on something psychological. I need some ideas for an experiment and I thought what better then the brilliant minds of the escapist forums.

Recreate Asche's study, see if it's still relevant to today. The alternative is to examine how being anonymous reflects behaviour. Examine how aggressive people act if they're playing poker on a computer game against others in relation to playing poker in real life.

 

[USSR]

So... what exactly are you testing in this experiment?

I'm thinking natural selection, but that's not very psychological =o

 

[Marter]

Ask a math question to a couple of friends, have one of them shout out the right answer repeatedly, while the other shouts out the wrong answer.

See how many join in for both sides.

(I don't know if this actually works, but it was on Corner Gas.)
(Didn't work on Corner Gas either.)

 

[Anthropaphagi]

Ahhhh, ethics. My PhD took five months to clear ethics due to the naughty questions I'm asking, but I digress...


There are no easy answers to this one, as I can think of lots of suggestions but don't know if any would be appropriate as I don't know what your level of knowledge, training and experience is or your interests. If you can provide a bit more detail, that'd help.

 

[GiantSpiderGoat]

make someone cover themselves completely in a sack. Insert an angry raccoon into the sac and watch the fun fly.

So... what exactly are you testing in this experiment?

How funny it would be to see a raccoon atack a man who can't escape, oh and to see who will try to help him, yet fail.