Experiment to Test Influence on Behavior

Made by: Zoey

People nowadays are looking at their phones or do not pay attention when they are on the road which is dangerous. Taiwan's motorcycle and scooter drivers don’t respect traffic laws and will not take the initiative to give way to pedestrians, so the number of traffic accidents in Taiwan is also increasing year by year. Last year, 2,962 people lost their lives to traffic incidents in Taiwan, That’s approximately six times higher than in Japan (Wayne, 2022).

This semester we learn about the perception process. I am going to use the perception process to do my experiment. The perception process has 5 steps which are Sensory Input, Attention, Organization, Interpretation, and Response. In today’s society, people are always visually busy. For example, watching their phones, but sometimes it is very dangerous for a lot of people. Many people use their phones while they are walking. This experiment will focus on the input and attention steps of the perception process. For my experiment, I want to try to use aural input (hearing) to divert people’s attention away from the visual input (phones).

• Chang, W. (2022, December 6). Taiwan’s ‘living hell’ traffic is a tourism problem, say critics. CNN. https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/taiwan-traffic-war-tourism-intl-hnk/index.html

This experiment was performed near Yuanshan MRT station. For this experiment, the researcher used a speaker to play high-pitched music for about 10 seconds when people were walking past the experiment location. The reason why high-pitched music was used, is because research shows that higher-pitched music generally has higher frequencies so people will be more sensitive to these frequencies (Talukdar, 2019). Also, the loudness of the music is based on the average sound at the intersection to make sure that everybody can hear the music. The researcher will record what people do when they hear the music, the result of this experiment will tell us if we can push people to have some kind of behavior (pay attention to non-visually input) by using aural input (hearing). This experiment will be done at lunchtime because there are more people going to eat at that time.

Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVem8hpVwsw

• Human Ability of Music Perception Lies in Sensitivity of Brain. (2019, July 13). NewsClick. https://www.newsclick.in/perception-music-human-brain-sensitivity
• News, N. (2019, June 10). Our brains appear uniquely tuned for musical pitch. Neuroscience News. https://neurosciencenews.com/music-pitch-brain-14202/

This result was recorded on the morning of April 14th. This experiment was conducted at the Family Mart(convenience store) next to the intersection of Yuanshan MRT Station. Observing 60 people, 24 out of 60 looked around to find where is the music come from in confusion😂, and 36 out of 60 did not look around. From the data, it shows that more than half of the people do not have any response, even if the music is already loud. Comper to females and males, we can see that more females just ignore the music and more males look around to find where the music comes from. The recorded video shows that most of the elderly(about 50 years old) ignore the music, regardless of gender.

The results of this experiment are somewhat different from what the researchers thought, The researchers had expected more than half of the population to look around because of the music, but the results show it only Influence 40% of the people who looked around. The researchers think that might be because we can't be sure that everyone can hear the music, for example, the ears of the elderly are not good, Just like young people can hear it doesn't mean that old people can hear too. Also, the place where we experiment is in front of Family Mart, so some people might think the music is coming from Family Mart, which they don't have a big reaction.