Casual Fridays
dmunger | March 17, 2006Last week's Casual Friday study attracted the most e-mails and questions we've ever received. It also attracted the largest number of responses ever: we cut it off at 400, before our Surveymonkey bill got too large (this is probably thanks mostly to our mention in the Seed Daily Zeitgeist on Monday).
What was all the fuss about? First of all, the experience of taking the survey seemed awfully random: first, you were asked your birthday. Then you were asked to think of something sad, happy, or anger-inspiring. Or you were asked about the last time you had something to eat. Finally you were…
dmunger | March 10, 2006This week's Casual Friday study requires participants to be unaware of its purpose. It's nothing insiduous, just a quick survey that should, as usual, take no more than a minute of your time. We do think it's a clever little experiment, so we hope you'll participate, even knowing nothing of its purpose.
Click here to participate.
As usual, you'll have until 11:59 p.m. U.S. Eastern time on Wednesday, March 15 or until we have 250 responses to participate. Look for the results next Casual Friday.
For now, I'm going to close comments on this post, but feel free to e-mail me with any questions.…
dmunger | March 10, 2006Does being a movie expert make you a better predictor of the Oscar winners? Comedy Central pundit parodist Stephen Colbert claims that he made his oscar predictions without having seen any of the movies, but then went 5 for 5, even predicting the upset of the year, Crash, to win best picture. If you take Colbert's case as an example, it appears that no expertise is necessary to predict the Oscar winners. Of course, since Colbert's TV character is a parody of conservative political commentators, we can never be quite sure if he's being on the level about his level of movie expertise.
At…
dmunger | March 3, 2006Every year, millions of people around the world make a game out of predicting the winners of the Academy Awards. Sometimes, there's even an office pool, with hundreds of dollars going to the winner.
Of course, many fewer of us have actually seen all the nominated films. Do you ever wonder if seeing the films gives Oscar-predictors an advantage? Now's your chance to find out. This week, we're collecting Oscar predictions, and also asking predictors to indicate how many of the movies they've seen. Next week, we'll let you know if seeing the movies actually helps people more accurately predict…
gmunger | March 3, 2006Last week we asked our readers to identify the agents and actions in some point light displays. These displays show the motion of the joints of the actor (say, a human walker) and we are remarkably good at identifying various actors, actions, and even emotions.
Our three movies showed some kind of quadripedal action, and we provided a long list of possible anwers. Two of our three movies depicted very typical actions for the actor--a dog walking, and a human baby crawling. The third movie showed something slightly unusual--a human adult crawling. Did the unusualness of the action matter…
dmunger | February 24, 2006This week's survey was inspired by our efforts to get our middle-school-aged kids to behave appropriately when greeting adults. Both Jim and Nora tend to mumble, look away, hunch over, and give other anti-social cues when, say, an adult compliments them after a school band concert or a play. When we tell them to stand up straight and speak clearly, they often give us a look that suggests we are not only clueless to the social norms of respectable society, but also just plain stupid.
Now we have hard (though nonscientific) data to back up our claims: we asked Cognitive Daily readers what…
gmunger | February 24, 2006Dave hasn't finished analyzing the data from last week's survey, but since this week's survey is ready to go, we thought we'd go ahead and post it now.
Click here to participate.
As always, you'll have until 11:59 p.m. U.S. Eastern time on Wednesday, March 1 to complete the survey, which should only take a minute of your time. But don't wait too long, because the survey will close when we receive 250 responses.
Dave should have last week's results up within a few hours.
dmunger | February 17, 2006This week's Casual Fridays survey studies the cues you use to decide if a new acquaintance is friendly or confident. Greta and I have a couple of ideas about how the responses might break down in America, but we're especially interested in how customs differ in different parts of the world.
Click here to participate in the survey.
As always, you'll have until 11:59 p.m. U.S. Eastern time on Wednesday, February 22 to complete the survey, which should only take a minute of your time. But don't wait too long, because the survey will close when we receive 250 responses.
dmunger | February 17, 2006Last week's Casual Friday study was all about illusion. For example, you may have thought our goal was to see how well you could recognize an illusion. However, we really just wanted to know what kind of computers our readers use:
Amazingly, Cognitive Daily readers use Macs at a rate (22.8 percent) about seven times higher than the U.S. market share of Apple Computers (roughly 3 percent).
We did also want to know something about how you see illusions, so we designed a simple experiment based on a brilliant illusion by Akiyoshi Kitaoka. If you haven't visited his web site full of…
dmunger | February 10, 2006This week's Casual Friday study is the most complicated design we've done yet. However, in the spirit of Casual Fridays, it should still take only a minute or two of your time. It involves an incredibly clever visual illusion, and should be quite fun as well.
As usual, you have until 11:59 Eastern time on Wednesday, February 15, to reply. However, the study will close after 250 responses, so make sure you get your response in as soon as possible!
Click here to participate in the study!
dmunger | February 10, 2006Last week's survey asked readers how their drinking habits changed when they were at work-related social events compared to with friends. Due to my own very casual Friday, I posted the survey rather late, after 10:00 p.m., so we received fewer responses than usual: just 137. Nonetheless, even with a relatively small sample, we were able to achieve significant results.
First off, what kind of jobs do Cognitive Daily readers have? Our nonscientific sample of readers who happened to check the site late Friday night or sometime over the weekend revealed the following:
The first thing I'd like…
dmunger | February 3, 2006Sorry I'm posting this so late this week -- I was having problems connecting to the Internet earlier today, and hey, it's Friday, so I had plans for the evening. But it is still Friday, so you can't complain too much.
This week's study is on a topic of particular interest on Fridays: drinking. Specifically, what you drink, and where. Do people have different drinking habits when they're at job-related events compared to social events, and are these patterns generalizable?
Greta thinks she's noticed a pattern in the way people drink at work-related functions compared to other times, and this…
dmunger | February 3, 2006Last week's Casual Friday survey asked readers to describe how they expect other drivers to behave when merging onto the freeway. Now that the survey has been completed, I can let you in on a bit more of the observations that motivated the survey. I live in North Carolina, and I like to visit the big cities on the East coast, especially Washington and New York. This means I've done a lot of driving through Virginia, and I thought I'd noticed a peculiarity about Virginia drivers. In Virginia, it seemed to me, like no place else, the other drivers always expect you to get out of the way when…
dmunger | January 27, 2006This week's Casual Friday survey was inspired by what I observe as I drive in different parts of the country. It seems that nearly everywhere I go, there's a slightly different expectation for how drivers will respond to others.
Given that Cognitive Daily has an amazingly diverse global audience, I thought it would be fun to see if driving behaviors vary systematically worldwide.
As always, today's survey is very short -- it should take less than a minute of your time. Why not give it a try? As always, you'll have until 11:59 p.m. Eastern Time next Wednesday to respond -- or until we get 250…
dmunger | January 27, 2006Last Friday, we asked readers to identify changes in a painting by Eugène Delacroix, Christopher Columbus and His Son at La Rábida. For the test, the picture flashed maddeningly between its original state and a doctored version Greta made in Photoshop. Here's the original:
We admit it -- we were being a little sneaky. We asked you to "identify the change" in the picture, subtly hinting that only one part of the picture would change. You can click on the picture to see the movie again and convince yourself that two things are changing in the picture: the arch in the center transforms to a…
dmunger | January 20, 2006This week's study is a simple test. You'll first be directed to a Quicktime movie of a painting. The painting will flash repeatedly, changing slighly between flashes. You have 9 seconds to identify the change; then your browser will automatically redirect to a survey, with (as usual) 5 questions to answer (most important, of course: what changes in the picture?). The whole thing should take less than a minute to do, so why not give it a whirl?
Make sure you're ready to look closely at a flashing picture before you click on the link to start!
UPDATE: We've received 250 responses, in record…
dmunger | January 20, 2006The results of the first Casual Friday survey are in, and I have to say, I'm impressed at the level of response. Greta mentioned to one of her colleagues that we had collected 213 responses in five days, and his eyes lit up with excitement. Just to give you an idea of how large this sample is, Davidson College's psychology department has around 200 participant slots for an entire semester.
Granted, we wouldn't have achieved the level of response we got if our survey had been a 200 question monster, but even with just five questions, we were able to get significant results.
Now, about those…
dmunger | January 13, 2006Now that we're settling in to our new home, we'd like to introduce a fun new feature to Cognitive Daily: Casual Fridays. Every Friday, we'll post a quick, nonscientific survey or experiment for you to participate in.
These "studies" will be very, very short -- fewer than five questions for surveys, and for experiments, the stimuli will require no more than a moment or two of your attention. But with the power of thousands of Cognitive Daily visitors, we may be able to obtain some results that approach statistical significance.
The goal is not to duplicate a laboratory experiment or a…