Sink or swim time. (human research content)

[Ben Harmless]

I am currerntly sitting in the control room of the Group Processes Research Office at the University at Albany. I'm running the first participant through a study of group interaction that I've been preparing for for a year. He's watching a videotaped interaction between two other people at the moment.

They say you never get over stage fright, but I say you do. I did years ago.

This is another thing entirely. I'm nervous like the first time I got on stage. Well, actually, in that particular case it was the floor.

It's kind of cool really. In the last half hour I've turned from a consumer of knowledge into one who generates it. That feels good. It's like the first time you hear yourself on vinyl.

We'll hopefully be publishing within a couple of years.

Sociology and rocknroll make the world go 'round.

[TheGoodTexan]

So what are the people doing in the video?
And what type of reaction did he have?

Were you checking his heart rate and such?

[Ben Harmless]

The people in the video were simply working on a hypothetical group task. In this case, they were picking items from a list to help them survive on the moon.

We weren't monitoring any physiological factors. We are mostly concerned with whether or not certian impressions are formed on the basis of the observed interaction. It's a sort of status game where we try to figure out what triggers an attribution of high status in some and low status in others.

The participant did very nicely, but there are apparently still some bugs that need to be worked out with the study. Still, we're actually running now, which is more than we've done in several years, and more than I've done in my year of involvement with the project.

I'll hopefully be away at grad school by the time the writeup is done, but it's a great thing to have been involved in, and now I can add "experienced and certified researcher of human subjects" to my resume.

This is probably mostly exciting to me, but I figured I'd share my little personal joy.

Also, as an interesting note, I am now posting from the FOH mix position above the bar at the Bayou Cafe in downtown Albany. I just can't seem to find a normal place to post from. It's been a looooong day...

[eryque]

Ben, that's pretty danged cool. Putting theory into practice makes you feel like you haven't been twiddling your thumbs all along, don't it?

I remember doing that survival on the moon exercise at space day camp in chicago when i was about 12. my best friend and i had rated the gun over something else because we thought we could use it for propulsion (hop up in the air and shoot the gun the other way and WHEEEE! or so we thought), and a russian exchange student working with us kept asking we'd want to shoot someone.

Who was playing at the Bayou? I didn't realize they had music during the middle of the week now.

[Ben Harmless]

Nobody in particular was playing. Every Wednesday is open mic. It's really a toss up as to who will come, but all are welcome. We actually had a sort of neo-lounge act last week.

The house band is called Joey Pots & Pans and the Buttcheeks Band. The owner of the club plays guitar, and finally got tired of running back and forth between the stage and the upstairs mix position when something would start feeding back (which with the level he likes in the monitors is inevitable) so he called me up.

I'm there every Wednesday from about 8:30 on. Come on by if you're free.

[eryque]

I've got class until almost ten on wednesdays, but I might still have some steam left to stop by. What's the crowd like, what's the music like on open mic night? I always hesitate to bring a guitar to these things because I only know 3 chords except sometimes I throw a VI II V turnaround in there.

[Mickey]

there have been some incredibly important experiments like yours (as you know). This one comes to mind ...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment

good luck in the career. Grad skool's a great place to follow your ideas to the end of the mind.

[Ben Harmless]

Hehe. Yeah. I keep joking about putting a sign on the door of our confrence room that says:

"Office of Dr. Milgram - Research funding provided by General Electric"

...But they won't let me.

The funny thing is, the professor in charge of the study was getting his PhD at Stanford at the same time the Stanford Prison Experiment was happening. We all (and anyone who doesn human research with government funding) had to go through a training/screening process to make sure that sort of thing never, ever, happens again.

Eryque - there are all sorts of people who show up, and the house band is pretty cool overall, playing a mixture of classic rock and old school New Orleans cajun-type-stuff. There aren't a whole lot of people who show up just to sit in, it's mostly full acts, but some people do solo stuff that can get pretty cool. You're more than welcome to drop by.