Project by: Florence and Sarah (11th Grade)

Faculty Advisor: Alexis Kahan

In our honors project, we have been documenting and recording people’s opinions of themselves along with others. Our inspiration for this honors project came from our shared interest in psychology as well as a BuzzFeed video we found very impactful. In the video, a diverse group of people were asked questions about their thoughts about their own appearances. The people picked at themselves and pointed out insecurities. Little did they know that while they were talking about all of their insecurities, there was a stranger behind a two-sided mirror who was expressing their own thoughts on them. We found the video very interesting and heart-warming, as many of the compliments given aligned with the stranger’s insecurity. For example, someone expressed their dislike for their body, while the person across from them was saying how lucky they were to have such a nice body. The video taken of the strangers on the other side of the mirror were shown to those who were talking about their insecurities. It is clear that what the people were saying made them feel good and boosted their confidence. We decided we wanted to create something similar to help people feel good about themselves as well as expand our knowledge about the way people think of themselves vs. others.

Taking this video as inspiration, we decided to conduct our own experiment where we interviewed our peers about their thoughts on themselves. After this was completed, we showed the videos on mute to others and asked questions about their body language and appearance. After analyzing the outcomes of the two interviews we drew parallels between people’s insecurities and what people thought about them. We also discovered interesting findings correlated to gender. We found that the boys we talked to were less open about expressing thing they would change about themselves, whereas girls were much more willing. A source of error that we discovered was that since we are in such a tight-knit community, people had preconceived opinions about each other. If we were to conduct this experiment again, doing this with strangers may have been more effective. Since this is a year-long project, we are wrapping up an analysis of this experiment and beginning to design a new one with similar objectives.

In the second trimester we had the initial thought to take the peer videos in a new direction. Although our experiment was well set up, we found that there were many unanswered questions, bias, and not enough variety to really gain any true answers. We spent many class periods brainstorming directions that we could take this project in. One option that was on the table was to continue taking videos of people in the LREI community to add to our data. This would provide more variety, make patterns stand out more, and maybe give us more material to better answer our questions that we stated in the beginning. Another option was to take into account what went well, what went wrong, and what we could’ve done better and started a new project under the similar umbrella topic/questions. Option two seemed like a better and more reliable route since it seemed difficult or unrealistic that the first project was really going to go anywhere based on the many sources of error. We concluded one place where we went wrong was in the similarity of the people we interviewed. We initially only chose juniors because we wanted to eliminate as many variables as possible other than the ones that we were adjusting to our questions. This was a poor idea because there was little to no variety, making the answers somewhat onesided and not representative of the whole student body. Through this, we learned that age has an impact on how one sees one’s self and how they see one another.

The new direction in which we are in the process of transitioning our project into is a slightly more studied but unfamiliar topic. We wanted to look at the “Halo Effect”. This is the idea that physical judgments about a person, like beauty, bleed over into judgments about their specific traits like intelligence. This is often found in Hollywood where we tend assume positive personality traits based on one’s physical appearance. This directly relates to some of the questions we were trying to answer in the previous experiment based on how we see ourselves and how we see others. This specific conspiracy really intrigued us because of how true it seems to be. We started to ask questions like: Why does beauty connote to positive traits? Where did this originate? etc.

Overall, since this is a yearlong honors project, we hope to explore experiments that have already been done on this topic as well as conduct our own.

Throughout the third trimester we researched what the “Halo Effect” is, how it works, and the benefits and disadvantages of it. We have read articles and watched many videos of research and experiment done on the topic. The Halo effect is the subconscious phenomenon that attractive people are rated favorably for their personality over those who are considered unattractive. This judgment is sometimes made without even meeting the person. For example, we watched an experiment where people were asked to guess the occupations of two men, one who was considered very attractive and tall and one who was considered more plain and short. Overall, people thought that the attractive man was a businessman or a successful doctor. On the other hand, the short man was thought to be maybe a cook or in a “difficult financial situation”. When they were asked to guess the men’s income, the average of guesses for the tall, attractive man was 220,000 dollars a year. While the other man’s average was only 20,000 dollars a year. We were very surprised about how drastic the judgements were from strangers by only looking at the men. We learned that this may be due to how children are taught to look at people. For example, in fairy tales the heroes and princesses are often beautiful and the villains are attractive. This causes children to associate attractiveness with good and unattractive with bad. Another experiment we watched asked people to guess who played a hero and who played a villain in a movie. Just as the halo effect suggests, people guessed that the hero was the attractive person and the villain was the stereotypically unattractive person. Although we were aware that the Halo Effect did affect people’s views and judgement, we were surprised by the extent of it. Our research left us with a many questions. One specific question we had is if there is anything that could change this “Halo Effect,” or is it just human instinct?

PROPOSAL

Please write a description of the project you are proposing. Why do you want to take this on, and what do you hope to learn?

In this Honors Project, we will explore Social Psychology as a whole as well as hone in on subtopics. Some of these topics include social influence and behavior in an effort to gain a better understanding of how body language and persuasion techniques influence decision making in our daily lives.

What is your proposed outcome? How will you be able to demonstrate successful completion of this Project?

The outcome of this Honors Project would be to ultimately learn about these interesting Psychology subtopics and come to some sort of conclusion through a series of experiments and tests. We will create a written combination of the results of our tests and studies as the final result.