Did you ever do social experiments?

Post Reply New Topic

I just finished the complete aspergers guide by Tony Attwood. Towards the end he mentioned that some people with aspergers do malicious social experiments. To see what emotion the person would make and see if they were right in guessing the response. An example he gave in the book was telling an aunt that her cat had gotten run over without provocation.

I remember doing some of those. Like in 10th grade I teased some people to see their response. And another thing that I would rather not say. I remember and still think that it can be fascinating how people react.

Well, given that social experiments are based on the psychological reactions of the test subjects from social stimuli (or absence thereof), then would not all experiences of a person be "social experiments?"

Why are you being pedantic? I pulled the term from a book, so if you want to complain about it contact Tony Attwood, the author.

Once when I was a kid I got a red pen and drew a line under my nail to make it look like I was bleeding. Then I ran to find m,y mum while screaming 'I'm bleeding!" When she went to console me I burst out laughing.

I still don't know why I did it.

I don't do stuff like that any more. When actual bleeding I just say 'hey look, I'm bleeding' as though I just noticed it, which I probably did.

Sounds like something I did all the time as a kid. I used to say things and do things just to see how others react. My parents called it teasing. Let's also say that did not help me with friends and getting accepted by my peers and that was a way for me to ask to be bullied.

Redacted

Last edited by nat4200 on 21 Apr 2012, 1:47 am, edited 1 time in total.

Why the heck would you do that? I mean, the malicious part. Why would you deliberately try to make someone sad? There's enough sadness for you to observe in the world as it is, without creating more. I can see the logic of asking the same question over and over, for the predictability of getting the same answer. But you would have to be a huge brat to deliberately cause someone pain just to see the reaction.

That said, I have done a lot of observation. You don't need to create a situation in order to get data from it, and created situations aren't particularly good for learning about how people behave in naturalistic settings anyway. Better to sit back and observe, rather than try to create controlled experiments.

Yeah, I did that a lot growing up. Nothing that I would call malicious.

I think it has more to do with growing up then Aspergers.

yes i did. A week ago, I just deleted ALL my FB friends. i think social experiments are done by some Aspies because of our nature of wanting to study things they are interested in and that could include human behaviour, that's why we do it.

I start threads to measure the sociopathic depth of some members. When posters admit of acts of guile or malevolence, I create a mental database of naughty tricksters as risks to society, or playful monkeys with a bad attitude

I pretend to be deaf.

I draw by black marker word Yes on left hand and No on right.
And write questations and answers in notepad.

I play this over 3 years and it's very interesting experiment, try it!

^^This.^^

That would be interesting! I'd like to try that but I know I'd react to a sound or something and give it away. I should try pretending to not speak English. I could make up a language and pretend to speak that one, and not understand a word at all of English, then listen to what people say about me when they think I can't understand them.

Ever heard of ODD? I've got that mildly, so I can tell when it triggers. I remember when I used to just go nuts on the forum, get into little flame wars but now I just sit back and enjoy members ripping each other apart. Then get bored and decide I'll leave the forum for awhile. It's like a switch that goes off that makes me think everyone is fair game.

But I'm not always like that. Most times I'm like that is when I'm not on medication or it wears off, or it's an inattentive day...or hyper day. OK so I'm like that a lot but not always and I do know how to pick up on it and stay away from people so it doesn't make people think I'm a b*****d. But it's never been a choice of my own to act that way, so we're not all brats. Some of us just have a personality disorder that has a neurological origin.

Sometimes it's good to see those suffer that have made you suffer. Again, another form of ODD.

I don't like doing social experiments any more, especially on my mum. She reacts harshly before you've even finished, and sometimes she get's cross if it could of been something serious (she's not one for teasing).

I do sometimes do social experiment, but not teasing ones. I do serious ones. For example, I find it hard to ask questions about the other person, so I tried doing it the other day on somebody, and it didn't go very well (which is why I hate asking questions). I was walking with my friend, and she was late for work, and I wasn't sure where she had parked her car, so while she was panicking and trying to cross a busy road, I asked her, ''where did you park your car?'' but as I was half way through the sentence, she ran off yelling, ''see you later!'' but didn't cross the road, she just ran further down the road to some traffic lights. I hadn't asked her many questions about herself through the whole duration I was with her, then when I finally did give it a try, it was completely at the wrong time. As usual.

I've tried certain experiments with behaviour on certain internet fora, but that was limited and only for online behaviour.
In real life I did some stupid things, but that was also part of growing up I think. Nowadays I am really careful.

And malice, no not really. Okay, one time, it was on a internet forum with a lot of socially inclined people with high moral values that were really full of themselves. I just took a position a bit opposite and attacked them on their own inconsistencies. There I learned that that kind of people do not think rationally and are no fun to be with. But just out of malice I attacked a few more times. The reactions were interesting, but not that nice as being closer to myself.