• Question: What's the weirdest thing you have done.

    Asked by anon-361749 on 29 Mar 2023.
    • Photo: Birsu Kandemirci

      Birsu Kandemirci answered on 29 Mar 2023:

      I will answer this as “the weirdest thing I did for research” as your key words include research too. One of my experiments was about a concept called Source Monitoring where I showed children colourful bags with interesting things in them. The experiment is a bit complicated to fully explain, but one of the ideas with the task is that children can’t always look inside the bag, sometimes the experimenter tells them what is inside the bag, and sometimes the experimenter gives them a clue, then they need to remember how they know what’s inside the bag. The clue needs to be accessible to all the children, so one of the clues we thought of was egg boxes (most children will recognise an egg box and know that there are eggs inside them). Now, for the task to work, each bag actually needed to have the item inside, in case the child wanted to check. But carrying a raw egg in my bag with many other materials would be very dangerous, so I ended up boiling the egg and carrying it around from school to school. As you might have guessed, after a while I forgot that I had a boiled egg in my bag and carried it around for days -the smell when I noticed it was not nice to say the least 🙂 All these things we do in the name of science!

    • Photo: Hannah Fawcett

      Hannah Fawcett answered on 30 Mar 2023:

      The weirdest thing I have done is to purchase a life size human mannekin and dress it up in wig and clothes! We used this as the ‘victim’ in our staged murder scenes. This allowed our forensic psychology students to roleplay detectives to investigate the crime. It was a weird experience carrying this ‘body’ across the campus and I definitely got a few strange looks! It gave our students a valuable hands-on experience of the cognitive bias and stereotypes that police (and all members of the public!) have, and helped us to consider how psychology can help us minimise the effects of these biases on police practice.

    • Photo: Emily McDougal

      Emily McDougal answered on 31 Mar 2023:

      Probably getting children to watch videos of a person delivering a lesson whilst I tracked their eye movements with a piece of technology equipment (called an eye-tracker!). Although this task itself isn’t weird, you first have to calibrate the eye tracker so that it knows where the participants eyes are looking. This involves asking them to look at dots in different places on the screen! It’s a bit of an odd thing to ask someone to do, but it’s a really important part of the process.

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