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A social experiment is a method of psychological or sociological research that observes people's reactions to certain situations or events. The experiment depends on a particular social approach where the main source of information is the participants' point of view and knowledge.
In the fields of sociology and social psychology, a breaching experiment is an experiment that seeks to examine people's reactions to violations of commonly accepted social rules or norms. Breaching experiments are most commonly associated with ethnomethodology , and in particular the work of Harold Garfinkel .
The small-world experiment comprised several experiments conducted by Stanley Milgram and other researchers examining the average path length for social networks of people in the United States. [1] The research was groundbreaking in that it suggested that human society is a small-world -type network characterized by short path-lengths.
The term and concept derive from a series of over-population experiments Calhoun conducted on Norway rats between 1958 and 1962. [1] In the experiments, Calhoun and his researchers created a series of "rat utopias" [ 2 ] – enclosed spaces where rats were given unlimited access to food and water, enabling unfettered population growth.
For example, in Experiment 2, where participants received telephonic instructions from the experimenter, compliance decreased to 21 percent. Some participants deceived the experimenter by pretending to continue the experiment. In Experiment 8, an all-female contingent was used; previously, all participants had been men.
The Middletown study is often quoted as an example of the adage "nothing really changes". Despite being conducted in 1925, the description of American culture and attitudes has remained largely unchanged. For example, even today, many news agencies, when trying to figure out what the "average American" believes, visit Muncie, Indiana.
The most famous study of social proof is Muzafer Sherif's 1935 experiment. [6] In this experiment subjects were placed in a dark room and asked to look at a dot of light about 15 feet away. They were then asked how much, in inches, the dot of light was moving. In reality it was not moving at all, but due to the autokinetic effect it appeared to ...
Gregor Mendel's experiments with the garden pea led him to surmise many of the fundamental laws of genetics (dominant vs recessive genes, the 1–2–1 ratio, see Mendelian inheritance) (1856–1863). Charles Darwin demonstrates evolution by natural selection using many examples (1859).