Psychology Class Experiment

By: Ivanna Palacios, Melissa Blish

On February 14, 2024, Regis’s Psychology Class performed a social experiment on students. Students from this class were divided into three groups, each with their own experiment. There were two groups with three members and one group with only two members. One group’s experiment consisted of seeing if people who don’t know each other well enough would behave differently if there was and wasn’t candy involved. The second group’s experiment consisted of seeing if payment affected the productivity between individuals when a task was assigned. The third group’s experiment consisted of seeing the difference in reactions between winners and losers in a competition. 

The 7th-period psychology class experimented on some members of each class to see how they would react in different circumstances. For example, they asked a group of students to put away as many basketballs as they could in under one minute, and one group was offered twenty dollars while the other was only offered five. They tested whether students would be more motivated if offered more money or if it didn’t matter.  After the multiple trials, what really gave them results was the final step they mentioned in an interview, “we needed to go over and over our experiment to get to the conclusion,” said Diego Lopez-Palacios. 

For another experiment, there were two groups of four students, and they were asked to play Candy Land. They told one group that first and second place would get half a bag of Jolly Ranchers, but the other group didn’t. They were trying to find the same thing as the basketball experiment: would they be more likely to want to do something if offered something in return? Like the other experiment, this group faced hardships, but they persevered through them, which was mentioned in an interview where they said, “There is a lot of trial and error in experiments and some errors you just have to fight through them,” remarked Alexa Gough. The third group had set up cameras in the gym and watched people play spike ball. They would watch their reactions and see the difference between people who won the game and people who lost. According to what they said in an interview, “It didn’t go according to plan, but it went,” reported Emmett Wagenaar, as the participants explained how much willpower they had to get through the difficulties of this experiment to reach their answers.

All in all, these experiments succeeded in different ways, giving the group members a good view of the point they were trying to reach. Each group was able to test thoroughly and gathered enough information for their conclusions. In conclusion, these experiments were riveting and vividly described their purpose, supporting their claims with sufficient details.