Behaviour Activity - Week 17

In your blog, write a reflection about how the experience felt - indicate which group you were part of. Reflect on how you think these feelings might influence the knowledge gained by a human scientist also studying our in-class simulation.


I was in the group of observers during our class activity today. The role that I was given was to watch and note down the various stages, or process of the activity. Such as how the interaction changed during the course of their task. It was really fascinating because I began to notice quite a clear pattern that repeated.


From what I remember the main pattern that I noticed was:
1. Quite calm and moments of individual input (putting forward ideas and agreeing)
2. Disagreement leading to raised voices as each person tried to prove their argument
3. Laughter and humour...seemingly to lighten the atmosphere after disagreeing
4. Taking on a leadership role and putting people back on task
...this cycle continued quite a few times


This in-class simulation was quite interesting as we were able to piece together a study of the way that the group interacted. As my group (the observers) were all noting different behavioural aspects we were able to put these all together to form an idea of the way this specific group acted. Therefore we could possibly continue the investigation with other groups to see if they created the same patterns or reacted the same way.


What we would have to be careful for though would be not to be biased in any way. As we have done the experiment and gained some fairly good results, we would be biased in the sense that we would be searching for similar results in the next experiment. We would be looking for the same patterns, the same reactions. Instead of seeing it all fresh and new we would have already made some assumptions as to what were going to see. Thus we could possibly create inaccurate data by forcing the results to mould into what were were expecting.


Another one of the rather large errors or limitations of this experiment though was the fact that the "observees" knew that they were being watched. Some admitted to this having possibly affected the way that they acted as they were aware that their actions were being noted. This could have affected our data somewhat, due to the discomfort the subjects of our experiment felt and the awareness they had to being watched.


All in all it was quite a fun and interesting sort of experiment that also allowed us to study human interaction and behaviour. It also allowed us to see the limitations in the knowledge gained from these types of experiments.