Amateur Chemistry= drugs and bombs

[rangegal]

Inspired by forumites talking about how the sheeple have been trained by the government to associate legitimate things like amateur chemistry (and related words) with "scary" things like "scary drugs" and "scary bombs and chemical weapons" and "terrorism" (which funny enough has a synonym for scary in its name), I will be conducting a correlational study testing how well these things well... correlate in free association when I say one of the legitimate words and ask a participant to say the first thing that comes to his/her mind.

No, this isn't just for fun, its for a Psychology project. I figure I'll just have the computer guy at our school use the random student name lister to whip up a list of random characters who I'll find and ask to participate. I don't have many words planned yet. So far I think I'll do: Hemp and Illegal Drugs, and the one I used in the title.
Any ideas for other ones? I will definitely be sure to share the results with you guys, although ya'll already know what the results are going to be. Any suggestions on how to conduct the experiment are welcome too. Thanks ahead of time!

[festergrump]

What a great idea.

If you're personable and have some charisma it'll definitely help, and a couple of light one liners might also lighten the mood a bit before you begin. Be sure to mix many really meaningless words and some similar to your study (but not too closely related) for them to associate with into your barrage, just to keep it from taking a noticeable direction.

As far as word associations that may be of interest to you, here are some I'd find interesting off the top of my head. Not sure if any of these align with your ultimate objective, but please be sure to report back to us when you have finished. This should prove to be a very interesting sheeple study!

Media
Fertilizer
Middle east
Handgun
Civil war
Depression
Israel
New World Order
Second Amendment
Hoarding
Welfare
Radiation
Infidel
Patriot
Oppression
Airplane
Gasoline
Union
Democrat
Republican
Religion
Hypocratic oath
Saucer
Hurricane
Police state
Global warming
Phosphorous
Virus
Ron Paul ("Who the fuck's that?" :rolleyes:) Be interesting to know how many have never heard of him, though.


Hey, if you survey 100 people, we can get an official RS game of Family Feud going on. Mods versus a few members, anyone? :)

[Alexires]

Army
Liberal
Science
Research
Economy
Money
United
Home Loan
Music
Rock
Mining
Martial Art
Metallica
Slayer
Beethoven
Mozart
Mao
Stalin
Russia
Communist
Soviet

[Lewis]

"chemicals"
"terrorist"
"drugs"

These are the big three I'm looking forward to hearing the responses from.

[rangegal]

Thanks for the ideas guys. Actualy Lewis, I hypothesize those sorts of things are going to be the in the responces to my "legitimate words" which I will correlate to the number of "scary words" said by people. Like when I say "homemade distiller" their first thought might be "moonshining" or when I say "ammonia fumes" they might think "meth lab" as the government has conditioned their sheeple minds to do.

Nobody in my school will think much of it. They'll just think I'm a conspiracy theorist or something, most already do. The results only really matter to me and you guys. I'll even put the forum in my conclusion as the part of the scientific community that this sort of stuff actually relates or applies to. "The people who actually give a shit" as my teacher put it. Not that it matters anyway. Its graded on how correctly you did your report anyway, not by how stupid or important your hypothesis and/or conclusion are.

[DarkWrath]

I'm pretty eager to see the results. I'm almost tempted to do a survey of my own when I have the time , but this has to wait until after my exams.

You should also ask those people a few questions about social status , income , political orientation and studies... It should yield some interesting results.

[Hirudinea]

This sounds like it would be an interesting project to conduct on a street corner, just ask Joe and Jane Blow (by the way Jane is a VERY Friendly girl :) ) their opinion of the words, or try a couple locations (Lower Class neighbourhood, Middle Class, Upper Class, etc.) combined with your school, and please tell us how cowed the general populace is when your done, should be good for a laugh.

[rangegal]

Well, I cant seem to find JACK SHIT for background research for this project. All I've got so far is the vague/loose hypothesis and procedure I told you guys, and without a little information about my topic (something it seems nobody but the fine people here have ever even thought about) I can't seem to refine it down very much. Aside from simply needing background research for my write up, I don't know how I'm going to define "bad" words and "good" words.

I've searched google and infotrac (a web based library of EVERYTHING) for things like snap judgment, free association, profiling, change in American society since 9/11 and many other things, and I still cant find anything related to my topic. Maybe I'm just to stupid to use the internet.

Basically if I don't get this shit together I'm going to scrap the idea and come up with a new experiment (with only 2 weeks left to complete my project). Sorry guys.

If anybody has any ideas to save my project (some background info), it's gladly welcome. Otherwise, I'm probably going to do some stupid behaviorism experiment to make myself stop procrastinating homework. Or something less lame. Once again, sorry for getting your hopes up or anything.

[rangegal]

My last post was quite negative, I was starting to believe I was really going to have to scrap the project. I came up with some stuff for background information, and I've got sort of a hypothesis and procedure now. I'll check them out with my psychology teacher and if she thinks I'm getting toward something write up worthy then I'll finish the project, if not then its like I said before. I'm using the words you guys posted, as well as some I'm coming up with myself. Now that we have a set of "negative target words" I need a set of "positive target words" to contrast them too. By positive target words I mean words I expect will create a positive response from participants like: Gasoline=Road Trips as opposed to negative responses like: Gasoline=Arson. Just for the record I'll put gasoline as a positive word, even though I expect the responses I receive for it will be mostly positive despite the fact a bottle of gasoline (if used properly) can cause just as much damage and is just as "scary" as say... a bottle of nitromethane.

I will also throw in some "neutral target words" that won't be included in my data, they will just be there to throw off the participants and keep them from skewing results by noticing a pattern in the words.

So if anybody feels like helping, start spitting out a list of "positive target words" you would like to see contrasted to my "negative target words". If you have more suggestions for "negative target words" also, please label them as such so I don't get the groups mixed up.

BTW before somebody attacks me for a spoon feeding request (even though its the water cooler), please try to recognize this is nothing of that sort, I'm simply trying to get input from my peers in this scientific community for an experiment we would all like to see happen. Right?

Attached is what I have so far for background, hypothesis, and procedure.

[Alexires]

Instead of judging their associations yourself get them to tell you how the word made them feel, after each word.

Eg.

You: Gasoline.
Them: Arson. Angry.

That way, you have less analysis to do and there is less error from you interpreting.

[rangegal]

Brilliant idea Alexires! I was previously faced with the problem of trying to come up with a spectrum of how negative and positive a word is. My teacher said it would be a good idea since it would make it a little more quantitative and a little less qualitative, but I figured it would be pretty hard to come up with specific definitions for positive and negative that would work for all my words. Plus I don't see what the difference is between me making a judgment about words and my classmates making qualitative observations about the participants in their experiments. But your idea removes that problem! Thanks dude.