10 Most Shocking Social Experiments On YouTube

Over the past few years an increasing number of €œSocial Experiment€ videos have started appearing on YouTube. Whilst the €œscience€ involved in a lot of these experiments is at times very questionable they nonetheless deserve praise for the fascinating insights they offer into a number of society€™s biggest issues and also for the fact that they do an excellent job of raising awareness for the issues themselves. Issues that have been tackled by these experiments are wide ranging with topics such as domestic abuse, child abductions, drink spiking, racism and homelessness all having been examined using a number of interesting and often unique methods. It is worth noting that it is highly unlikely that you would get ethical approval to conduct any of these social experiments in the name of science. For instance, I once had an ethics committee bring up concerns over the fact that one of my PhD experiments required my participants to complete an experiment on a computer screen whilst sitting in an otherwise dark room. In order to be allowed to carry out the experiment I had to agree to give my participants regular breaks with the lights on. Given this fact, just imagine trying to convince an ethics panel to let you run an experiment where you simulate abducting a child... However this is perhaps one of the great things about these social experiments. The fact that the filmmaker doesn€™t need ethical approval to make these videos allows them to use methods beyond the realms of scientific experimentation and thus provide insights that science perhaps isn€™t able to. As well as providing a brief overview of each experiment, this article will seek to examine what meaningful messages we can take away from each of these experiments, whilst also attempting to outline some of the potential flaws and biases in the experiments which may have influenced their outcomes.