What is a Social Experiment and What Isn’t a Social Experiment?
YouTube features lots of social experiment videos that are not social experiment videos. What I mean is that the “social experiments” aren’t realistic or helpful. As part of my effort to help readers distinguish actual research from garbage, I want to explain what social experiments are and why they rarely appear online.
If you aren’t a regular YouTube user or a regular consumer of social media, you might only have a vague notion of what these fake social experiments are like. In some videos, you can see a child left on a park bench in the winder, without a coat. Or, the child is at a bus stop and pretends to have been left there by his or parents. In other social experiments, the “experimenter” leaves a purse or a wallet where people can easily see it.
Experiments, Quasi-Experiments, and Entertainment
First, you need a couple of definitions. According to Encylopedia.com, a real social experiment has nothing to with fake homeless or homeless children or pretend fistfights.
The key part of social experiment is supposed to be the ‘experiment’ part. In a real experiment, every test subject would be randomly assigned to a group. An experimenter would take all reasonable steps to control outside factors that could affect the results. Scientists conduct experiments to test the relationship between two variables. (That is something of an oversimplification, but never mind.)
Let’s say I want to test ways to make groups of people more creative. I have 24 people I could use in my little experiment. I selected these people from my community and tried to get subjects from diverse backgrounds, different races and ages, and so on. I have three methods of teaching creativity that I’d like to test. Method A involves using a written brainstorming guide to effective creativity in groups. Method B assigns people to simply brainstorm solutions to a problem in their little group. Method C assigns the group a facilitator trained in using lateral thinking techniques.
My research question is this: Will Method A work better than Method B and C in terms of the number of ideas the group produces? That’s a super simple example of how you would set up a social science experiment. All real experiments and quasi-experiments need a research question; you don’t just try something to see what happens.
A quasi-experiment is kind of like that, but you don’t randomly assign people to groups. If you want a thorough briefing on this common social science research method, check out this article:
In a quasi-experiment, I might take three groups in a company and assign them to Methods A, B, and C. Or, I might divide up a research methods class into three groups of five people.
These things rarely make the news and rarely make for quality entertainment. Nor do experiments and quasi-experiments produce “stunning” or “revolutionary” discoveries. Those hyperbolic terms only come from con artists, propagandists, and cynical politicians.
Social Pollution and Fake Social Experiments
Sometimes people don’t know any better and they see a fake social experiment on television or elsewhere. After watching this social experiment, they think they’ve learned something. Often, all they did was reinforce a false belief. You may have seen comedic bits where someone asks random people about world history, geography, or the United States Constitution.
Invariably, you will see people say ignorant things and laugh about their ignorance. Someone who sees a dozen young people embarrass themselves in one of these little stories will think their impression of the stupid, clueless Millennials is accurate. After all, time after time those youngsters displayed shocking ignorance. I won’t insult your intelligence by explaining this foolishness at length. I’ll just say that you aren’t getting an accurate picture of anything from these clips.
These fake research clips and pseudoscience stories work though. If you want clicks or shares, fake social experiments work. The results reinforce prejudices and help viewers feel superior to others. When the social experiments distort reality, making young people more ignorant than they really are for example, the “experiment” pollutes society. Like air pollution that obscures the details of a distant landscape, fake social experiments obscure the public’s understanding of the social world.
