Group 22 - Simon Says What?

Day One: March 8, 2016

My partner and I choose a topic based on Conformity. Our plan is to play a game of Simon Says and make the commands weirder as the game progresses on. We are going to document how far people are willing to go in the game based on the people around them.

Day Two: March 9, 2016

My partner and I are researching experiments and psychologists who have studied the idea of Conformity. Two psychologists we're looking at are Solomon Asch and Stanley Milgram. We've searched things we already knew about the topic, things we need to learn about it, and things we want our audience to learn about it. So far all we're working on is research and prepping for the essay we will have to write.

Day Three: March 10, 2016

Today is all about research! We are focusing on learning as much as we can about Asch & Milgram's experiments. I will leave a brief summary of what we learned today below:

Milgram:

How people were asked to participate

Milgram is very well known for his experiment regarding how far people will go if they are obeying an authority figure. There are three participants, the Authority Figure, the Teacher, and the Learner. Two of them are in on it (one the Authority Figure and the other is the one that receives the shocks, the Learner) and the other one has no idea s/he is volunteering (the person giving the shocks a.k.a. the Teacher).

Visual of room setups

Two rooms are set up. The Learner is strapped into one of the rooms and mentions that they have a heart condition. The Authority Figure and the Teacher go into the other room. A box with switches on it is set up in front of the Teacher. This is the machine that distributes the shocks. The shocks start from 15 Volts and end at 450 Volts. The Teacher starts giving the Learner word pairs. The rules are pretty simple; if the Learner gets the answer wrong he gets shocked. The results of this experiments was pretty shocking (pun intended). 65% of the participants reached 450 Volts even after the Learner stopped responding. All of the participants reached the 300 Volt point.

Asch:

The lines displayed

Asch 's experiment is a true test of conformity. He collected a group of seven people and put them in a room saying his was going to conduct an "eye test". Four lines were displayed. One of the lines was considered the original and the other three were labeled A, B & C. Asch then went around the room and asked each person which line is the same as the original one. The catch here is six of the people participating were actors who knew about the experiment, the other wasn't. Because of that all the actors chose the wrong answer leaving the participant to choose an answer based on his own knowledge or if he was going to conform to their answer. Asch found that on average about one third of the participants conformed to the wrong answer.

Asch also had another interesting experiment to test conformity in another way. He called it The Elevator Experiment. It's a pretty simple test actually; two people would get into an elevator and face the wrong way. Asch's goal was to see how many people would conform even in an unusual situation like this one. In a more recent version of this experiment, six high school students took on the challenge at their local mall. Their found that the older the age group the less likely they are to conform and men were more likely to fully conform where as women only partially conformed.

Day 4: March 11, 2016

Today we related each of the experiments we have researched to our own. Our experiment will reflect Milgram’s because we will be letting people know that they could stop at anytime but also we will be portraying an authority figure as the role of  “Simon” and we will be causing them uneasiness due to our odd requests. This will result in a similar pressure that the participants in the Milgram Experiment felt. Regarding Asch’s studies on conformity we will be mimicking his set up with the elevator experiments by having a larger group of people play together. Because of this they might be pressured into doing something they normally wouldn’t. The only difference is none of our players are going to be informed of the experiment beforehand so our results will most likely differ from his. We also developed a hypothesis that we will be testing at the fair: People are more likely to conform when requested to do unusual actions in a group of people.

Day 5: March 14, 2016 (Happy Pi Day!)

We now have a rough draft of how we are going to execute our experiment. Since we are only two 
people we are trying to get as much done in as little time as possible. First, we calculated how long 
each run will take (about 5 minutes). Then we calculated how many trials we could fit into one class 
period (6 trials). Ideally, we would like to have at least five people participating each time we run the 
experiment. This will allow us to get through at least 150 people. We would like to get through more 
so the next step in the process is discovering the most efficient way to run through the experiment. 
Here is a rough outline of how we would like to preform the experiment: One experimenter will be standing outside of the covered area luring people into the experiment by promising them candy. While at least 5 people are being rounded up the other experimenter will have the participants fill out a survey of their age and gender. Then, the experiment will be explained to them. They will be told that they are allowed to stop at anytime but they will be asked not to leave until the experiment is over. One of the experimenters will run through all the commands while the other films the participants. After it is all done everyone will be thanked for participating and they will be rewarded with candy.

Day 6: March 15, 2016

We named our experiment today! We called it Simon Says Whaaaaaattt???? (With 6 A's 3 T's & 4 question marks precisely). We also started a list of items we are going to need for our experiment. We are going to buy a poster board today.

Day 7: March 16, 2016

Today was very relaxed and were pretty caught up on all our work so we just wrapped up our supplies list.

Day 8: March 17, 2016

There's less than a week left until Psych Fair and we're pumped! All that's left to do is come up with the questions and design our poster and poster board.

Day 9: March 18, 2016

Poster Design

Since we have a moving wall up to run our experiment behind, we want to staple a poster to the walls to attract people to us. The poster is going to be bold and bright and its going to follow the design in our blueprint poster. I will post pictures of it as soon as we finish it!

Blueprint design for our poster board 

Unlike the poster we're required to have a poster board as part of our experiment. We need to have our experiment's name, hypothesis, background research, and interesting visuals on the poster board. We're going to match our poster and poster board's designs so the title on here will reflect the way it looks on the poster. We're going to have summaries of Asch's and Milgram's experiments on the side flaps and some visuals along the bottom. We still have to decide what put on it. If anyone has any suggestions don't hesitate to leave a comment below! I will be posting a picture of the poster board when its completed as well.


March 21, 2016

Today and tomorrow are mainly just working days for us in preparation for Psych Fair. We made a collection of pictures we would like to print out. We also wrote down our hypothesis, how we are going to conduct the experience, and all our background research. We have everything ready all we need to do it put it on the poster board! We also came up with our list of commands (we are just hoping they're crazy enough).

March 22, 2016

This is the face of relieved psych student

The finished poster board

We spent all of today just constructing our poster and poster board. We had original plans for our poster that didn't work out the way we wanted them too but we're still very happy with our results! We tried to make it look scrapbook-y and also tried keep it all in uniform. On the right panel is all our background research on both Milgram and Asch. In the middle we have our title, hypothesis, and our experiment's process. On the left panel we have a little bit of humor! And who doesn't love emojis? We also made a poster to staple to our moving wall to attract more attention to our booth.

The finished poster

                                         
March 23, 2016 (Psych Fair Eve)

Today was the day that we put everything to the test! After running through the experiment several times we came up with a script to stay consistent, we cut down our commands list, and we decided that instead of filming the experiment we are going to just ask at which command they stopped at on our google form. This should save us a lot of time with collecting our data in the future. Also we came up with an efficient way to conduct the experiment. Hopefully we'll be able to meet our numbers now! Tonight was actually very exciting and my partner and I had a very good time. We're so excited for tomorrow and we hope to see you all there.

March 24, 2016 (Psych Fair Day!!!)

8:00 AM:  We set up our booth and we're ready to start the day!

The face of our booth

It was a party back here

We had taped the poster to the moving wall and had our poster board on the far left side of the table. We also decorated with balloons. The booth to our left was the Box (Bet you can't keep your balance... Can you?). Since we were both cramped in a corner and people kept thinking we were the same booth, we made a deal that we'd refer our participants to each others booths.









This was a very last minute idea, but we added lights and it really pulled our booth together. It was a really pleasant surprise that greeted our participants! We also had four chrome books set up on desks for the surveys.







The day actually went by super smoothly and we ended up seeing 373 people! It was very fun to engage with everyone and play Simon Says with them. Our hypothesis proved to be true and we found conformity to be a really big part of this game. We noticed most people would look around at their peers to see if they were doing something and then do it. We also heard a lot of "I'll do it if you do it" or "I'm not going to do it if you're not". It was very interesting and fun to watch! We'd just like to thank everyone who came out. I'd say it was a very successful Psychology Fair. :)