Source: Laboratories of Gary Lewandowski, Dave Strohmetz, and Natalie Ciarocco—Monmouth University

When orchestrating an experiment, it is important that the experience elicits the most natural reactions from the participants as possible. Researchers accomplish much of this through their creation of the experimental settings.

Many research projects focus on interactions between two or more people.  In these situations the environment or setting must often be less natural; often only one person can be a true participant and others in the study need to be “confederates,” that is, allegedly unbiased participants whom, in actuality, act according to the researcher’s directions.

This video uses a two-group experiment to see if participants are more likely to imitate a person with more power versus similar power compared to the participant.  The video also highlights the use of research confederates.

Psychological studies often use higher sample sizes than studies in other sciences.  A large number of participants helps to better ensure that the population under study is better represented, i.e. the margin of error accompanied by studying human behavior is sufficiently accounted for.  Further, human participants for research like this are often readily available and the experiment is quick and inexpensive to replicate so we want to use as many participants as possible.  In this video we demonstrate this experiment using just one participant.  However, as represented in the results, we used a total of 156 participants to reach the experiment’s conclusions.