Derren Brown: The Experiments

Tomorrow sees the conclusion of a recent series of Channel 4 programmes put together by the illusionist Derren Brown: The Eperiments. According to the Wikipedia entry, it is a series of "ambitious sociological experiments, in which the unwitting subject is a single person, a crowd, or even an entire town."

The first episode, entitled "The Assassin"... consists of Brown successfully hypnotising an unwitting member of the public to 'assassinate' a celebrity revealed to be Stephen Fry. This technique was used as a comparison to conspiracy theories regarding the assassination of Robert Kennedy by Sirhan Sirhan, who claims to have no memory of the event... In the second episode, "Remote Control"... Brown hosted a game show, asking a masked audience to vote for the escalating outcome of the fate of one contestant in an attempt to demonstrate the effect of deindividuation. The theory is that taking away individuality from someone turns them from themselves to just part of a crowd, and makes them act in a way that would sometimes go against their morals... In the third episode, "The Guilt Trip"... Brown attempted to find out if he could convince someone through association to admit to a crime they didn't commit. He worked through tricking a participant into distrusting their own memory and having excessive feelings of guilt, to the extent where he confessed to the murder of an actor whom he had interacted with and was later told had been murdered... In the fourth episode, "The Secret of Luck"... (due to air tomorrow)... Brown spreads a rumour of a lucky dog statue throughout an entire town and documents the consequences.

These experiments should be of interest to behavioural economists in the context of the Nudge theory (and the impact of Nudge on public policy; especially Thaler and Sunstein's discussion of libertarian paternalism). In particular, Brown's "Gameshow" experiment is evocative of the Stanford Prisoner Experiment. Brown's experiments can be investiagted further on YouTube or 4OD. Below is a trailer for the "Gameshow" episode.

EU Call for Proposals on Social Experiments

(Via Colm Harmon), it is interesting that the commission have put out this call. Text below from the document.

This call offers to applicants the possibility to develop social experimentation projects according to the following protocol/steps:

• Design of the policy intervention: a rigorous description of the logically structured set of actions envisaged as part of the policy reform should be provided. It should ensure that the different incentives, opportunities, or constraints to which the population will be confronted with are identified and described
• Design of the experimentation method: preference will be given to the random assignment method that randomly assigns the potential beneficiaries of the policy/interventions to either a treatment group or a comparison group. Other evaluation method such as the quasi-experimental design (non-randomized assignment) may be considered as long as the impact of the interventions being tested is credibly ascertained. The expected outcomes of the interventions should be stated in clear and measurable terms to serve as yardsticks for determining the extent of the
policy intervention's success.
• Lessons for policy design: a rigorous analysis and interpretation of the results should be put in place with a view to arriving at shared conclusions about the up-scaling potential of the tested policies taking into account elements such as the context, in which the policy has to be implemented, the feasibility, the acceptability and the timeliness of the proposed solutions.

Please note that a guide on the social experimentation protocol will be provided on the following website:

http://ec.europa.eu/social/main.jsp?catId=630&langId=en.

This call for proposals focuses on public policy interventions and is therefore addressed to policy-makers at national, regional or local levels. However, social experimentations cannot be conducted without the involvement of other stakeholders such as public authorities, civil society organisations, private business enterprises, scientists and practitioners in the design, the implementation and the evaluation of the project.

Given the considerable investment required to conduct a social experimentation or a rigorous quasi-experimental project, this call is intended to support no more than 3-5 major social experimentations. The Commission will ensure the dissemination of evidence gathered across the PROGRESS participating countries.

At the final stage of the project the promoter has to organise a peer review involving all project partner(s) including partner(s) from at least one other PROGRESS participating country. The European Commission may organise thematic workshops in order to publicise and disseminate the lessons learnt.

Apart from assessing the specific impact of the social experimentation on the target group and conducting peer reviews, the overall effectiveness, including cost-effectiveness, of the project should be assessed at the end of the activities.

The bitter sweet smell of success

THE EFFECTS OF OLFACTORY STIMULI ON SCHOLASTIC PERFORMANCE

Burhan Akpinar

The research described in this paper was carried out to determine the effects of olfactory stimuli (provided by natural essence oils of lemon) on achievement in English of fourth grade pupils in a school in Turkey. Pupils were randomly assigned to an experimental group (n:29) or a control group (n:29). Both groups were taught English lessons twice a week for a period of four weeks as part of the normal curriculum. In the experimental group, lessons were provided in an aromatic atmosphere. In the control group, lessons were provided in a normal classroom environment. Following treatment, the experimental group outperformed the control group on an achievement test in English. A month after the termination of treatment, the performance of both groups on the achievement test had deteriorated, but the experimental group still outperformed the control group.

Irish Journal of Education , vol 36, 2005

The Weirdest People in the World?

Aside from its catchy title, this paper seems pretty relevant for those do experimental psychology and behavioural economics:

The Weirdest People in the World?
Joseph Henrich, Steve J. Heine, Ara Norenzayan
Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world’s top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers—often implicitly—assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these “standard subjects” are as representative of the species as any other population. Are these assumptions justified? Here, our review of the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests both that there is substantial variability in experimental results across populations and that WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species—frequent outliers. The domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning, reasoning styles, selfconcepts and related motivation and the heritability of IQ.

Experiments in psychology and economics

Experiments are very common in psychology and increasingly so in economics particularly in areas like behavioural economics and neuroeconomics which would hardly exist without them. The abstracts of papers in such fields often make quite grand claims for the implications of their results. Leaving aside the question of ecological validity - whether you are going to behave the same in the real world as when lying prostrate in an MRI scanner - there is an important question of how culturally general one's results are.
A favourite task in experiments is the Ultimatum Game. It turns out that a characteristic finding in experiments conducted in the US (that the first movers irrationally offer too much and the second movers irrationally reject what they regard as too little) is not replicated in one study in the Peruvian Amazon. The Machiguenga tribe behave much more like economists would predict which is somewhat ironic since they have probably managed to avoid any exposure to the dismal science.

Experiments

Experiments play an important role in behavioural economics but they are often criticized for a variety of reasons. This paper defneds their role.
Lab Experiments Are a Major Source of Knowledge in the Social Sciences
Armin Falk, James Heckman

Laboratory experiments are a widely used methodology for advancing causal knowledge in the physical and life sciences. With the exception of psychology, the adoption of laboratory experiments has been much slower in the social sciences, although during the last two decades, the use of lab experiments has accelerated. Nonetheless, there remains considerable resistance among social scientists who argue that lab experiments lack "realism" and "generalizability". In this article we discuss the advantages and limitations of laboratory social science experiments by comparing them to research based on non-experimental data and to field experiments. We argue that many recent objections against lab experiments are misguided and that even more lab experiments should be conducted.

Are academics messy?

In the light of the conclusive research reported below, I will be carrying out random spot-checks of the Geary Institute common room. Violaters of established social norms will be summarily punished, forced to read a paper by myself or Liam Delaney.

Are Academics Messy? Testing the Broken Windows Theory with a Field Experiment in the Work Environment João Ramos, Benno Torgler
We study the broken windows theory with a field experiment in a shared area of a workplace in academia (department common room). We explore academics' and postgraduate students' behaviour under an order condition (clean environment) and a disorder condition (messy environment). We find strong support that signs of disorderly behaviour triggers littering. In the disorder treatment 59% of the subjects litter compared to 18% in the order condition. The results remain robust when controlling compared to previous studies for a large set of factors in a multivariate analysis. When academic staff members and postgraduate students observe that others violated the social norm of keeping the common room clean the probability of littering increases ceteris paribus by around 40 percent.
http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cra:wpaper:2009-21&r=cbe

Scaling Up Policy Experiments

One of the conclusions from our research meeting today is that scaling up of research-driven policy experiments represents one of the key potential ways that health and economic research can have direct benefits.

Below is William Easterly talking about scaling up in development

link here