Stranger Observation Psychology

To begin, for an entire week, I was tasked with observing a stranger's behavior in my A.P. Psychology class. Our only instructs given to us were to observe the person in any way one could think, from how they dressed from day to day, to what their mood and facial expressions were. One of the major obstacles in this project, was making sure my stranger was not aware of being watched. This is called the Hawthorne effect, which is defined as if the subject knows that he or she is being observed, they would act differently than their normal behavior. With the Hawthorne effect in mind, I was extremely careful in making sure that my stranger did not know she was being observed by me. The choice of my stranger was completely at random. To get the most random stranger result as possible, I just closed my eyes and pointed across the room. A little unorthodox I know. Just like that Brianna Winters was randomly chosen as my stranger. On the first day of observing Brianna, I was surprised little by her behavior during the

Korek. He suggested more methods of observation to the class, suggesting that your stranger might have as different set of behaviors outside of class than they do inside. I decided to use this mode of observation in the most social area in all of Germantown High School, the lunch room. Brianna just so happened to sit at a table that was in the area within my table. Her behavior did indeed differ from that of her’s in the classroom. Too my surprise, she showed a plethora of emotions on her face. She was engaged in many conversations within the rank of her table laughing very often. While listen too one of her conversations for a brief moment, I heard that she and a couple of popke at her table planned to get together this weekend and hang out. This surprised me immensely because I had previously concluded that she probably did not have a social life outside of