okay, just as a disclaimer: this blog is going to be entirely about the psych 199 i'm doing and i happen to find it really interesting and really fun but i realize not everyone will be wowed by my academic story so just stop reading right here if that's you and when i see you in person later, i'm just going to bore you with this story then. [okay, really though, i honestly find this very cool and funny, and i apologize if i tell all of this really badly, but humor me and read it anyway!]

i LOVE the psych 199 experiment i'm doing! i get to eat cookies and lie to people. ;D

so it's a social psychology experiment to see how people influence the behavior of other people. here's the basic background: people have a tendency to do what other people do. there was this famous experiment a few decades ago by milgram (or ash, i forget) where they basically asked the subjects a really simple question (which of these three lines is the same length as this other line?) and then they had confederates (research assistants pretending to be subjects) give the wrong answer every single time. eventually, the subject would doubt themselves and give the wrong answer - the same answer the confederates gave. so it was basically an imitation study. and there's like a bunch of other studies like it. debra - remember what we used to do in high school? look up at the sky at nothing and wait for people to look up in curiosity as well? there was an actual experiment that did that too.

so you get the point, right? so what we're going to do is expand on that a bit. here's the premise: a subject comes in and is interviewed along with one or two other "subjects" (confederates, really). now based on which condition the subject is put in, he/she may discover that one of the subjects is surprisingly a lot like them. the other subject is basically their long lost twin sister. the other subject, they will discover, is completely unlike them. total opposite. the subject may have both confederates, either confederate, or no confederate in their condition, depending. what happens next is that the experimenter makes an excuse to leave the room. but, in one condition, before he leaves, he tells the subjects that they can help themselves to a bowl of cookies on the table. and, naturally, the subjects go ahead and eat some cookies. but in the OTHER condition, the experimenter leaves the room and says nothing about the bowl of cookies on the table. in fact...the cookies are placed right next to a sack lunch that looks suspiciously like it belongs to the experimenter. now the trick is to have the similar confederate go ahead and take some of the cookies and wait to see how many cookies the subject will eat or even if the subject will take the cookies which, really, they probably will.

see, the guy who's heading this experiment did a few different versions of it before this one. one version is where he asked people to rate a particularly nasty piece of music. he found that subjects rated the music positively if the similar confederate rated it high and negatively if the dissimilar confederate rated it high. here's the funny thing: i was actually a subject in that experiment last year. i got TOTALLY duped. now that i think about it, it was really funny. i had a similar and dissimilar confederate in my test. it was pretty funny because the similar confederate was incredibly similar to me. she was vietnamese, had practically the same name as me (my vietnamese name!), had the same major, came from fremont as well, even went to mission!! yeah, i know, i know, how could i be so stupid? but well, clearly, i am not the only person to have fallen for this! i just remember going home to sanaz that day and saying, "you will never believe what happened in this experiment i went to today!! this girl i met was like EXACTLY like me!! it was so weird!" yeah...i feel stupid now.

but now i can't WAIT to do the same thing to other people!! *rubs hands evilly* they're even going to train us to lie really well and how to not get caught. the grad student running the experiment was like, "by the end of this quarter, all of you are going to be EXPERT liars!!" aaahahahahahahahahahaha <-- evil maniacal laughter. i can't wait!! and the best part is that i'm getting credit for all of this!! (not to mention loads of free cookies which, truthfully, i'll probably get really sick of, but whatever).

i'm so excited about this! i feel like such a nerd, i've never been so excited about anything school-related before. but i can't help it! i am!!