A psychological experiment

Discussion in 'Community Discussion' started by warlockmii, Jun 16, 2015.

  1. From looking at the logs I have to disagree with your statement. You were provoking members that weren't interested in being involved and either ignored you or replied with 'okay'. When you didn't get a reaction from them, you'd try something more instead of just moving on.

    Intentionally starting the interactions in the manner that you did skewed whatever results you have from this experiment.
  2. This is exactly why he set out to do this in the first place...
  3. The way that the members of the EMC community reacted is about the same as me attacking you because of your forum signature, which I would never do.
  4. I didn't provoke any members that hadn't already criticized people who are Islamic. Unless one of the other four members of the people who were doing the testing did, as I was having dinner and returned to find a religious argument on the res that I had teleported to.
  5. Disagreements are going to be paramount. I'm not going to get into the rationality behind this but a cursory study of the doctrine of the 5 major religions will tell you that there is simply no way they're going to fundamentally agree on core tenants. This is even before you get into non-religious viewpoints - which is an issue in of itself that you can write books on.

    That being said, there is a huge difference between disagreeing with a viewpoint and bigotry. We have a tendency in today's society to consider disagreement of any form to be bigotry, despite the fact that both terms are on two different playing fields linguistically and in a definitional framework.

    While I do agree with user y that Arabic shouldn't be permitted in the town chat (no mods to my knowledge understand Arabic and it would show up as ??? on the logs, making it impossible for anyone to moderate - which is why it's English only on here), it disturbs me that the user in question used ISIS as the justification - essentially implying that one of the most spoken languages in the world, with almost half a billion speakers, is used only by terrorists. Not only is this factually wrong but woefully ignorant of the situation at hand.

    I could ramble about this for days as I had spent a significant amount of time studying the Greater Middle East, politics, history and religion. However, I'll just leave it at this. If you're interested in continuing over private messaging, you're more than welcomed to drop me a line at any time.
    Gawadrolt and warlockmii like this.
  6. You claimed that you asked a user for a camel. That one action nullified your experiment on multiple levels.

    This experiment contains voluntary response bias, leading questions bias, social acceptance bias, non-response bias, undercoverage bias, researcher bias, non-random and non-confidential bias, sample size bias, and countless other forms of bias.

    Your experiment would not be considered ethical, purely based on how it was done.
  7. I don't get what you expect? A major crime will immediately make people think that all people who are Muslim are evil. People only see the 1 thing. A Muslim has done this and all Muslim people are evil. Christianity has hardly been in the news for 1 reason: people aren't trying to 'destroy' Western culture using the Christianity name.

    Muslim extremists have caused a lot of controversy. I do not believe it is right to stereotype every Muslim person as evil and hostile, as I am not like that. However many people will do it. Videos like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgKMI1wV0ps show the Muslim extremeists within the UK. Another hot topic in the UK is immigrant and how the British people are being expected to intergrate into a Muslim culture, shown in this photo:

    (NB: The "ban the burqa" thing is uncalled for. It's from a Facebook page called Britain First which is basically overly racist anyway).

    I honestly have nothing against people being Muslim. I am against the fact that Muslim people are moving into the UK and expecting us to change for them.


    How so? My point was that the media reports what is there. Some outlets will overdo it, but there are many unbiased outlets that say in black and white that a crime was committed for religious purposes.
    SoulPunisher and Deadmaster98 like this.
  8. Another member of the group. It wasn't me, but I had to go along with it because it was all that we had. As well as the fact that what we were testing was social acceptance, so social acceptance bias is designed to be part of the testing.
    This was very random. On all servers tested, we went and spoke to the first person who required someone to talk to.
    We had a large sample overall. We tested the reactions of several things across 20 different servers. I'm posting my data here from just EMC here, and a very minor conclusion.

    I very well understand that the experiment was nowhere near perfect.
  9. I'm from the UK, and a large amount of my friends are Muslim, both male and female. I am willing to accept their traditions as long as it doesn't interfere with their ability to play a useful part in society in a major way. I know what Britain First is, and most of the content they post is there just to anger those of other cultures.
  10. I too am willing. But I am not willing to have Sharia law, Halal meat and having Muslim traditions forced upon British people (such as women must be clothed in a specific way). And yeah; Britain First is just an anger group. Even other British people comment on their posts saying how stupid, racist and ignorant they actually are.
  11. Sorry to say that I would have to agree with jkjk here. Reading through the first instance again, it did seem like you were baiting something there. Since we don't have a camel on MC and you weren't trying to attain services to have one built for you (or offering to build for others), there really isn't a reason to be asking to get a camel unless other motives were running around.

    Glancing through the OP again, in spite of the fact some reactions are a bit disturbing, I concur with jk that several of these biases are in place. I'm currently in the middle of writing up a research proposal that will have a general sample size of over 10,000 items split into two different groups to evaluate outcomes to a dependent variable based on over two dozen independent variables. If I handled it the way it was handled in the OP, the organization I would be doing the study for would have my head in a sling somewhere and I'd be setting myself up for a lawsuit.

    If the experiment was handled in a nonleading manner then it may have been fine. For example, if you posted a thread on EMC that left a bunch of arabic script and a poll asking for people's reaction to the script with options from "This is awesome" to "who cares" and down the other extremes (rules aside for sake of argument - the thread would be closed if you tried it), it would probably be a more ethical experiment.
    Deadmaster98 and warlockmii like this.
  12. Completely agree
    nfell2009 likes this.
  13. I understand. I myself was trying to generate some kind of reasonable experiment, but I performed it with my friends, and, being 15, they just wanted to get a reaction from people. The original experiment was "ask people what the first thing that comes into your head when they hear the word Muslim.". I let people get involved, which ruined the validity of my results. People only said they'd care about results if it was on minecraft and some of my friends were doing the testing with me and obviously just wanted to anger people.
  14. Wait let me get this straight. You instigated an arguement about religion and then didn't like people's opinions on it? You broke the rules of chat to conduct a social experiment... to me that shows a lot about yourself instead of the players you are testing.

    It's best to keep topics like this out of town chat / any public chat channel, as it almost always causes arguements and hurting someone's feelings. Not everyone has the same opinion on matters like these and it isn't your job to go around finding out what people think.
  15. As stated, I let my friends get involved too much. I was in a skype call with the other three people I was doing the testing with and they wouldn't move on from one person, even if I tp'd away and said "guys just leave it".
  16. So basically, you're acknowledging that this entire thread has failed its original purpose. Might be time to request a lock, since your "experiment" is obviously invalid in a number of ways (JK pointed them out quite handily), and serves only to instigate further trouble.
  17. Try telling that to the NSA.
  18. The original post contains only data. It was what happened, and that can't be changed.
  19. It contains data that isn't useful in drawing any kind of conclusion from because of all shorts of problems as you have said. If the data is useless, then why leave the thread here for people to keep posting mini-rants based on bad data. If you don't want it locked, at least put a big disclaimer at the top of the OP which quotes JK's post and states that this experiment has not met the purpose it was meant to make.
  20. At the start of this post, the data was valid. People made anti-islamic comments, and that's all I care. There were no attacks on anyone made by us. People made attacks against us in the EMC community because of religion.