I'm teaching an undergraduate "research methods" course this summer and wanted to get some "crowd wisdom" from the fellow teachers/researchers on one issue. The course is a requirement and a lot of students enroll just to fulfill the requirement, rather than because they are interested in research. I'm hoping to make the course as interesting and even fun for them as possible...
To do so, I want to introduce my students to various famous/infamous social science research studies that are "cool." By cool I simply mean studies that have used a unique and interesting method, or studies that have put conventional wisdom on its head, or studies that were particularly elaborate (or perhaps very elegant) in their design, or studies that had profound impact in some practical or theoretical area, and (most importantly) these studies should be understandable and interesting to the undergraduate students who are not very familiar with the social scientific research. Hopefully, these studies will also be memorable.
So far, I have the following 3:
- Tetlock's "expert political judgment" study
What other "cool" studies are out there? Please leave a comment with your nominations/suggestions. Thanks!
Update: Thank you all for your help!! Below is a non-exhaustive list of suggestions I've received by email or in comments:
- Milgram "small-world" or "six-degrees of seperation" experiment (thank you, Nick)
- LaMarre et al study on the Colbert Report (thank you, Nick)
- Zimbardo et al prison experiment (thank you, Laurel and Dr. Slater; thank you, Kristen, for the link; here's a slideshow)
- Darley & Batson "helping behavior" study (thank you, Dr. Rios Morrison)
- Pennebaker et al study on "bars and attractiveness" (thank you, Nori)
- Sherif et al Robbers cave experiment (thank you, Dr. Roberto)
- Bickerton language formation study (thank you, Jason)
- Glindemann et al study on celebratory drinking (thank you, Lindsay)
- Glindemann et al study on celebratory drinking (thank you, Lindsay)
If you know of a link to a video or pictures illustrating the studies, please leave a comment and I'll update this post.
11 comments:
Since you already have the Milgram experiments you might not need another 'authority' experiment, but the Stanford Prison Experiment is always an eye opener (even if Zimbardo's methods were a bit - ahem - unorthodox). Plus, there's probably a good bit of video on them.
Also, you could have your students do the IAT (https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/). Again, not roundly accepted but still thought provoking.
I'm not sure what kind of methods you're teaching, but you might also want to look at some ethnographic type research. There have been lots of case studies on work environments, urban neighborhoods - even sororities (this is a small bit of the stuff in the U.S.).
also . . . if you wanna go 'old school', how about Merton's Mass Persuasion or Lazarsfelds' Erie County study, or Kris and Speier's work on German Radio Propaganda from WWII.
just testing...
Another classic is the bystander intervention study (Darley & Batson, 1973 JPSP). If you're looking for a recent experiment, I would highly recommend the "culture of honor" studies examining Northern and Southern men's reactions to insults (Cohen, Nisbett, Bowdle, & Schwarz, 1996 JPSP)!
I second Laurel's nomination about the Stanford Prison Experiment. Here's a link: http://www.prisonexp.org/
Hi Ivan - Great question. How about hooking them w/ studies about alcohol and college sports?
For alcohol, do you remember the "beer goggles" study we read in Andrew's class by James Pennebaker et al.? Showed that people got more attractive as the evening wore on at a bar. Even the name is catchy: "Don't the Girls Get Prettier at Closing Time..."
http://journals.ohiolink.edu.proxy.lib.ohio-state.edu/ejc/article.cgi?issn=01461672&issue=v05i0001&article=122_dtggpacawatp&search_term=%28pennebaker+AND+dyer+AND+caulkins%29
For college sports, how about Cialdini's studies on Basking in Reflected Glory (BIRGing). The gist is that when your school team wins, people are more likely to wear school logo apparel, and they're much less likely to do so if the team loses.
http://journals.ohiolink.edu.proxy.lib.ohio-state.edu/ejc/article.cgi?issn=00223514&issue=v34i0003&article=366_birgtfs&search_term=%28refkey%3D%28Cialdini%231976%23366%23*%29volkey%3D%2800223514%2334%23366%233%29%29
Sorry the links are so huge, but they should get you the actual PDFs.
Good luck!
Nori
Does anyone remember about the election study commissioned by the Readers Digest (??) close to the end of WWII (??), where they've surveyed millions of their readers and came up with the election outcome prediction. Due to their ginormous sample size the pollsters thought they figured out the sure winner, but in fact they were wrong by a huge margin because they've sampled an unrepresentative high SES group... Does anyone have more info on this, or a link to some source?
Great suggestions so far... Keep 'em coming...
You are thinking of the Literary Digest and the 1936 presidential election. There are a number of studies of that which are cautionary tales of relying on large, nonrandom samples to make population inferences. It's a highly relevant issue given the ubiquity of poor quality Internet polls. Other issues include nonresponse. There are many articles that treat this issue, but here is one:
Squire, P. 1988. Why the 1936 Literary Digest poll failed. Public Opinion Quarterly 52: 125-33.
My own suggestion to you is to try to identify some interesting communication/mass comm examples -- not just routine psych and social psych stuff.
There's some pretty out-there, one-off and never-was stuff in linguistics and language formation. Probably the most famous and controversial in linguistics never made it off the ground due to human subjects research ethics concerns -- the Creole language formation "desert island" study. It's designer is still trying to get it done, see a handy summary in the Chronicle here: http://chronicle.com/free/v54/i37/37b00701.htm The basic idea is that the researcher would take families from different parts of the world (with their permission of course), including young children, who don't speak the same languages, or even languages with the same roots, and place them on a desert island (an atoll, actually) to observe how they form vocabulary, syntax, etc. It's a big idea that could stimulate a lot of discussion in a research methods class (it certainly has in the field of linguistics!).
There's also the truly tragic story of a girl referred to in the literature by the pseudonym "Genie" who was isolated from the world in a single room by her (obviously) incredibly abusive father for the first 12 years of her life. When she was rescued a team of psychologists etc. couldn't balance treating her with studying her to understand language acquisition and other phenomena as a proxy for "the forbidden experiment" (splitting nature and nurture by placing a human child in isolation from birth). Following the team's failure, Genie was bounced around in the foster care system and eventually ended up institutionalized. A (somewhat sensationalized) account can be found here: http://abcnews.go.com/Health/story?id=4804490&page=1 Transcript of an episode of the PBS series NOVA on the subject here: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/2112gchild.html There's nothing very "cool" about this story, but it is incredibly dramatic (as tragedy often is), and raises a lot of ethical issues.
And, though I hate to state the obvious by bringing up something everybody covers anyway, most students get a kick out of the "Hawthorne effect" / Hawthorne Studies...
It's not famous/infamous, but this is a fun way to demonstrate main and interaction effects -- it's a field study of college students and drinking, and whether reason to celebrate / day of week / year of study influence BAC. (It reminded me of Andrew's hypothetical "what if we put some subjects in a room with a keg..." example):
Glindemann, K., Wiegand, D., & Geller, E. (2007). Celebratory drinking and intoxication - A contextual influence on alcohol consumption. ENVIRONMENT AND BEHAVIOR, 39(3), 352-366.
another interesting study:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-20013268-71.html
i think it's perfect for discussion on spurious causation
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