Publication Date: Wednesday, May 25, 2005
Junior Freuds at work
Junior Freuds at work
(May 25, 2005) Gunn High School teens conduct experiments on their peers
by Alexandria Rocha
Their big exam is over, but seniors in Alice McCraley's advanced placement psychology class at Gunn High School are busy this week conducting live, hands-on experiments on their peers to measure teenage conformity and other social phenomena.
"None of (the tests) will be emotionally traumatizing, they're all pretty mild," McCraley said Monday. "But there will be little tricks and deceptions."
The experiments range from testing how individuality changes with age to whether attending Harvard University makes a person more physically attractive to the opposite sex. Most students designed the experiments around social perceptions and how they influence the decisions teens make.
It's the first time Gunn's student body will undergo such a large-scale psychology experiment project. The students, who started their tests Tuesday and will wrap up Friday, have turned the school's activities center into a makeshift lab.
Each nook and cranny of the center will be transformed into a station for a different experiment. Each day at lunch and prep periods, student volunteers will test various beverages, look at flashcards of colors and shapes, listen to classical music and eat candy. The week is meant to help AP psychology students understand their generation a little bit better.
"It's peers who influence each other the most," said Molly Crystal, 17. "People say it's the media, but your friends pick out what TV you watch."
As McCraley's students began selecting their projects, a common interest emerged. They all wanted to conduct tests that would measure how their peers are influenced, whether it's by other teens, society or materials they read.
For example, one group of psychologists-in-training will have their subjects eat chocolate, read facts about how the sweet treat affects mental performance and then take a quick math test. The testers will then see if the information their subjects read influenced how they did on the test.
"A lot of times what you expect to happen will happen," said Elissa Brown, 17. "It shows the power of mind over matter."
Another experiment, conducted Tuesday only, tested whether girls were attracted to a guy more after learning he went to Harvard. The four boys who ran "Dropping the H-bomb" -- Koji Frahm, Alex Gitlin, Vincent Lee and Jeff Mendelman -- got the idea because Gitlin will be attending Harvard this fall.
"There's a lot of focus on where you're going to college senior year," said Mendelman. "It does have some affect on how people treat you. You're given different respect if you're going to a top university, but we don't know if that affects your attractiveness."
The group used a magazine picture of an "average-looking guy," Gitlin said, and attached two different descriptions to it -- one with the Harvard information and one without. The girls were then asked to rate the man on a one to 10 scale.
"Our hypothesis is that there will be a higher rating for the Harvard description," said Mendelman, adding that they won't have the results compiled until later this week.
Since AP psychology is a year-long class, the students said they feel prepared to conduct their own experiments. Over the last few months, they've studied various professional tests and have incorporated elements into their own projects.
Kelvin Zhu, 17, recalled an experiment where a company's employees were brought into a room and asked to point out the tallest bar on a graph. Although the first bar was obviously the largest, most of the employees said the second bar was the tallest just to agree with others in the group, who happened to be in on the experiment.
"It shows the power of social situations," Zhu said. "People with opposing ideas won't voice them because they don't want to cause dissent."
This week's experiments will test how Gunn students react in similar environments. Another group's test will analyze how conformity changes from middle school to high school. The students -- Nicole Adams, Rachel Mitchell, Eric Nguyen and Crystal -- hope their test will reveal less conformity among high schoolers.
"In middle school, I remember you go along with people a lot. Like when my sister started to wear Uggs all the time and I was like, 'What are you doing?'" said Mitchell, referring to a trendy brand of shoe.
As McCraley pointed out, some of the projects will use trickery, such as someone in the know participating with the unassuming volunteers. This process is used in the professional world of psychology, and all subjects are debriefed on the details of the experiments afterward, which will happen at Gunn later this week.
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