During my psych discussion section yesterday, we designed a quick experiment to test people’s curiousity and/or conformity to a group.

We basically had an ‘actor’ stare up at the sky and we were trying to see how many people would also look up. We were scattered about so it wasn’t obvious how many observers there were.

After a while, we added people, so there were 4 people looking up at the sky.

The range of reactions we got was great. For one thing, the amount of people who glanced at the sky increased as soon as we added more undercover agents. So If one person is doing something weird, its ignorable, but if more than one do it, the compulsion to look up is stronger? A few of the first couple of people glanced quickly like they wern’t interested.

It was also funny the people who walked by saying “Don’t look up, its a trick!”

After we had four agents sky staring, we had a lot of people start to ask what they were looking at. Our actors were instructed to just point at the sky.  So we had a lot of hidden people looking up, shading their eyes to try to spot whatever was in the sky. One girl kept coming back, trying to figure it out. “It’s a RAINBOW!” she says, vainly trying to spot it and not thinking about when it had last rained…

One guy actually started filming the situation, saying stuff like “These students are doing something, not quite sure what, they’re just staring at the sky!” I believe he pointed the camera at the sky once as well.

All in all, a very very interesting brief experiment. It was more like an observational study, and maybe it just boils down to messing with people in the name of psychology!