Experimental research is the topic of this week's class. We learn to conduct an experiment there must be a control group and an experimental group. The survey we took in class was used as a pretest and a posttest to an experiment on students ease in mathematics. I thought I was taking a survey about investor relations. The experiment was successful because everyone in the class didn't know they were placed into two different groups. No one knew the posttest surveys were different. The instructor didn't know who was in the control group or who was in the experimental group either. This is called a double blind study. Students gave truthful answers without knowledge of the true need for the experiment. The experiment successfully retrieved students' insight.
There are many experiments conducted within public relations. PR News blogs about The White Shirts Experiment conducted by Harvard University. Diane Schwartz from PR News blogs about this project that was shared with attendees of the Specialized Information Publishers Association at a conference she recently attended. Her enthusiasm about the experiment encourage others to watch the video.
The developers of the experiment are Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris. The study uses social media to involve the audience in a fun experiment. The experiment involves the audience to watch a YouTube video in which six people pass a basketball around. There are three people in white shirts and three people in black shirts. While the audience watches, they are to count the number of passes made by the people in the white shirts. I encourage everyone to watch this video! Our class watched this video during an in-class presentation but if you haven't see it--watch it! Don't read on until you do!
Most people do not see the gorilla jumping around the middle of the people passing the basketball around. The experiment revels a couple qualities about people. People don't realize what is going on around them. Most people don't know how much they are missing until they watch this video. The gorilla is so obvious after you watch the video a second time. People are so caught up in the common responsibilities of everyday life that they fail to pay attention to surroundings.
Walking around the QU campus, I see many student robots texting on their cell phones failing to look up to see where they are going. It has come to my attention that people are so reliant on technology that it is making our culture like robots or zombies. This experiment proves that people are overlooking everyday experiences. I think this change in behavior has a lot to do with the increase of technology. People rely on smart phones to occupy and computers to network, research, and email. Most people are caught up in the many forms of technology and neglect the real world. Their concentration is on what is due immediately. In this competitive world today everything is immediate--one click of a mouse and the whole world is informed. It's no wonder most people in this experiment didn't see the gorilla!
Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris create a successful experiment yielding useful results. "This experiment has become one of the best known experiments in psychology," said Chabris and Simons. "It is described in most introductory textbooks and is featured in more than a dozen science museums. It has been used by everyone from preachers and teachers to corporate trainers and terrorist hunters, not to mention characters on the TV show C.S.I., to help explain what we see and what we don't see," explain Chabris and Simons. They came up with this experiment to explore the limits of human intuition. Successfully executed, The White Shirts Experiment points out people's reactions.
This experiment is useful to public relations practitioners. PR professionals use this information to grab attention of consumers. It is important to know changes in human behavior to bring awareness about companies or products. The enlightening experiment sets in reality. Schwartz blogs about the experiment, "So next time you’re at that cocktail party or in a meeting with key influencers, be on the lookout for the big, hairy, sometimes invisible 800-pound gorilla."
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