The Experiment: Find a Penny, Pick it Up?

In my Social Psychology Lab we had a group assignment to develop an experiment, collect data, and perform data analysis for our final.  Or if you’re really bad, you do it on your own because you got kicked out of a group.  Luckily nobody got kicked out of a group though a few people were close to being “fired”.  My group wanted to examine how social norms of luck and superstition can play a role in behaviors.  More specifically, if people are more likely to pick up heads-up “lucky” pennies than tails-up pennies.  We predicted that a significantly significant difference in the number of lucky pennies picked up compared to unlucky pennies.

To try to manipulate the situation and to bring luck and superstition to a salient state in our subjects’ minds we handed out fliers that read “Good Luck on Your Finals" half the time and a non-luck related flier the rest of the time.  We had two experimenters handing out fliers and one to record any data and to replace any pennies that had been picked up.  The two of us handing out fliers stood on either end of a section of pathway on campus and in between us was the “penny drop zone”.  Within this drop zone two pennies were placed about three feet away from each other, one heads up and the other tails up.  The pennies were placed close enough that people would see both but far enough away from each other that they could easily pick up one and exert themselves to grab both.

After three hours, nobody had picked up a penny.  Not one person.  Nothing.  Nill.  Nada.  Zip.

We felt there were a few factors working against us that day and came up with a second experiment to try to get some data.  For the second experiment we would set up at the main vending machine location on campus.  We placed the pennies in front of the vending machines in locations that would be visible by subjects collecting their purchase and change.  Rather than hand out fliers this time we had the fliers taped to the machine at eye-level.  As observers we were sitting at a table nearby but not so close that it was obvious that we were watching if the pennies were collected.  Again we stayed for three hours and only one group of people picked up the pennies.  One guy stopped and stared at it for a while, considering the penny, but did not end up picking it up.

Here’s what happened with the only penny collection from the two days: a group of three girls came to the vending machines to buy a water and one of the girls saw the tails penny and picked it up.  “Scha-weet, a penny!”  (Most likely not a direct quote.)  But her friend noticed that it was not heads-up and urgently prompted her to put it  back because heads-up is for good luck.  So she puts the penny back as a heads-up penny.  Her friend then picks up the newly lucky penny and the first girl spots our heads-up penny and grabs that.  Follow?  Grab tails, put tails down as heads, grab new heads, collect original heads.  Excellent.  That’s the way to make your own luck!

I’m sure that you’ve assumed that we found no statistical significance in our data.  Hard to when you have basically no data!  Oh well, it was fun either way and we even came up with more ideas of how we could continue to improve our experiment.  Such psychology nerds.

Loves.