Take me down alleys where the murders are done

158. Mar. 28: I performed a Psychology experiment.

Mari and I did an experiment on our friends testing confidence levels. We gave them a crossword puzzle labeled either easy, or difficult, and let them work on it while we "set up the experiment." What we didn't tell them was that both the puzzles were the same level, and what they thought was easy was really difficult. So our point was to shatter, or boost, their confidence level, depending on the puzzle they chose. Then we'd give them the Pepsi Challenge, but they didn't pick their favorite, they had to tell us which one was Pepsi. Then they'd take a survey afterwards rating how confident they were that they chose correctly. We hypothesized that the easy puzzlers would have lower confidence, and difficult puzzlers would have regular, to high confidence. And we were right. Very interesting experiment, I thought.