Psychology 212: Abnormal Psychology: Theory and Research

First Project -- Go Crazy

• Purpose
• to study the effects of abnormal behavior on others. To develop your own measures and design of the study. To collect information, and organize, report, and interpret it. To experience the effects of being considered abnormal by others.
• What to do
• Develop some hypotheses about how people in general respond to abnormal behavior in public.
• Think of a (preferably countable) way to measure this. For example, number or duration of eye contacts or distance kept from you or latency in time to responding to a question.
• Think of an abnormal behavior that you can perform "in Public" (this could include doing something with your friends without notice).
• As a control condition, act normally in the sitution and collect "baseline" data.
• Then do something crazy. For example, one student walked through a shoping mall near her home holding an open umbrella above her head. Do not do anything that would cause others harm in any way or that would obstruct traffic or peoples' usual activities or commerce.
• Continue to collect data. Write a full report including both objective (comparing data between baseline and test) and subjective (how you felt) results.