Testing a Theory

My experience of testing a theory came to me in a store while shopping. I was watching an adult male, about 25 years old, and he was obnoxiously loud and people where just staring and pointing at him. So I theorized how people would react to someone who was being bad-mannered and offensively loud in a public place. So I went off to another place of business, Wal-Mart, and started to be on my phone real loud. I had to hypothesize what different reactions my misbehavior would bring. I predicted that at least 40% of those who saw me would ignore me, 20% would be noticeable annoyed but still advance on, 30% would come up to me and question my childishness of my actions and 10% would be a combination of all.

For this I used the conventional informal research method because that it is difficult to find credible information on the reactions of people. The best place I could find the reactions of people, because of unsocial public behavior, was on America’s Funniest Home Videos and Youtube.com. These methods would probably be overlooked by psychologists although there are cases in which observing a surveillance tape would be an acceptable technique.

If I were presented the opportunity to repeat this experiment and apply a different technique, I would not change what I did in this process. Testing this theory may have been unconventional, but it did yield results. This way I could witness the certain reactions that people had to someone being bad-mannered and offensively loud in a public place.