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20 Social Experiment Videos You Should Watch

Social experiments are a great way to have a broader understanding of how humans think and act . What used to be a limited activity conducted mostly by researchers is now widely done by regular people like you and me, seeking for answers to what ifs and what will happen? Best of all, these social experiments are available to watch on YouTube.

From determining how kids and teenagers act when their parents aren’t looking, to discovering how the general public will react to racism, abuse or violence, these 20 social experiment video clips will surely give you an in-depth look into humanity.

The Hidden Dangers Of Social Media

How easy is it for pedophiles to pick up underage girls using social media? Coby Persin makes a fake profile to contact these girls, and got the parents in on the experiment as well.

A Homeless Child Freezes In The Cold. Who Will Help?

OckTv tries to find out who will take which sort of action when faced with the possibility of watching a “homeless child” freeze to death.

Would you steal from the homeless?

DmPranksProductions, a channel famous for its pranks also stages social experiments from time to time. In this video, they stage a situation to see if people are willing to steal money from a sleeping homeless man who was unaware of a big donation.

Taxi Drivers Drive Then Save “Suicidal” Men

fouseyTUBE stages a suicide attempt to raise awareness and to show that there are people in the world who do “care" though you might be surprised to find out who.

Man Asks How Generous Are We

DmPranksProductions, also made an alternate channel, this time focusing more on social experiments. Here we have someone who forgot their wallet, asking for generous people for a dollar to buy a drink.

Homeless Man Help Look for Missing Child

Johal, a channel that helps the homeless, experiences firsthand that even the homeless will put a missing child ahead of a hungry stomach.

Left in Hot Car: Baby vs Dog

TwinsTV stages a situation where they leave a “baby” and a “dog” inside a car with no open windows. The last part will shock you.

Deport the Illegals – The Public Speaks Up

In this video, UDY Pranks tries to see if Americans do agree with “Deporting” illegal immigrants. Things get heated up pretty quickly on the streets. Then they took it to a college campus which triggered an amazing reaction.

Do You Have The Time To Help The Blind?

In this experiment, xCodShots impersonate a blind man and asks members of the public if they are willing to help a blind man get to the library.

Do you Think you’re attractive?

Cordero Roman takes to the street to check if people love their self image enough to confidently say that they are attractive or at least that they like themselves.

All It Takes Is A Puppy To Abduct A Child

Joey Salads take to the park with a cute puppy to test how much it takes to get kids to follow a stranger out of the park. Watch in horror as he does this in full view of the mothers, who were sure their kids would not talk to him, let alone follow him home.

Would You Step In and Stop Child Abuse On The Street?

The team at NormelTV along with two child actors stage a situation to see if people are willing to take a step up and stop the abuse.

How Would People Act When No One Is Watching?

Josh gave people some money for an interview and setups a homeless man close to the venue, asking for change. See how people react when they think no one is watching.

Killing The Homeless VS Helping The Homeless

HoomanTV carried two different signs "No More Homeless" and "Help the Homeless" Which sign would catch more attention? The results will shock you.

12 Year Old Borrows A Light For A Smoke

PrankNation is a channel that makes pranks and social experiments in Australia. In this video, they make a 12 year old ask to borrow a lighter. How many will offer him one?

Can I Borrow Your Phone? (Rascism Experiment)

Key Fork TV is known for making Social Experiments about racism and this video is no exemption. Two people of two different races try to borrow a phone to make an important phone call.

Pregnant Girlfriend Abused By Boyfriend – What Would You Do?

What would you do if you see domestic violence in the streets? A pregnant girlfriend gets verbally abused on the streets of London. Who will step up to stop the abuse?

Does Changing the Clothes Change the Woman?

Harley Quinn conducts an experiment where she checks if how people treat her is based on what she is wearing.

10 Hours of Walking in NYC (Casual vs Hijab)

In this experiment, AreWeFamousNow tries to see if it makes a difference when one wears casual clothing versus wearing a Hijab (a veil worn by muslim women which covers the head and chest) on the streets of New York.

Have you picked up a lesson or two from these social experiments? If you’re looking for more social experiments to watch beyond these 20, you can subscribe to the channel but do take note that some of these social experiment channels also double as prank channels! Do share your favorite social experiment channel in the comments below!

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If YouTube turned us all into voyeurs, constantly consuming media that’s being shoved our direction, it also turned us into potential subjects, forever ready to be part of someone else’s video. A few different “social scientists” have put that to use by staging social experiments and filming the results. Some of them are hard to watch and a lot of them are easy to excuse, but all of them make for interesting viewing. After all, it’s easy to speculate about what you’d do in any given situation—but it’s hard to argue with some of the sobering data compiled below.

1. Would You Help a Victim of Domestic Abuse?

This couple staged a violent argument along a wooded jogging trail to see how passers-by would respond.

2. Would You Notice Your Own Family If They Were Homeless?

Here’s an intriguing premise. Subjects’ friends and family members dressed as if they were homeless and placed themselves along the subjects’ morning commute. Would you notice your own family if they were homeless?

3. Would You Stop a Man From Taking Advantage of an Intoxicated Woman?

This one is particularly interesting because of how the responses differ depending on people’s perceptions of the woman.

4. Would You React Differently to a Black Man Breaking Into a Car Than a White Man?

Please be warned, the local police use some very salty language when questioning one of these two men about just what he’s up to.

5. Would You Help a Homeless Person Who Fell?

This one is remarkably, sadly simple. A homeless man falls over. A well-dressed man falls over. Who are people more likely to help?

6. Is What Unites Us Stronger Than What Divides Us?

Not every experiment has an unhappy ending. This one is actually pretty affirming. As you probably know, the situation between India and Pakistan is a tense one, so Coca-Cola set out to see just how strong that division was. As it turns out, the gap between the two nations is nothing an innovative communications portal and an ice cold Coke can’t bridge.

7. Bonus: A Reverse Experiment

To end everything on an up-note, this man had a friend pose as a homeless person asking for cash at a gas station. Anyone who gave him a little extra cash ended up getting their entire tank of gas paid for.

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Viral video shows how easily predators lure kids on social media

A YouTube video of a "social experiment" exploring the vulnerability of underage kids to predators on social networks gets more than 17 million views in just two days.

Think your daughter would never get inside a car with a stranger or open the door of your home to someone she just met on Facebook? Think again.

YouTuber Coby Persin -- a self-described 21-year-old "prankster who looks like Zac Efron" -- decided to put those questions to the test with the help of three families, and record the results on video. He created a fake Facebook profile for one 15-year-old "Jason Biazzo" and then, with the parents' permission, contacted the three unsuspecting teenage girls to see how far they would go to meet their new online contact. Persin's video is far from a prank, he insists, and his findings are extremely scary.

The video, called The Dangers of Social Media (Child Predator Social Experiment) , is also attracting attention, garnering more than 17 million views since being uploaded on August 10.

CNET en Español reached out to Persin to talk about the project. He explained that the inspiration came from seeing a news story about a 27-year-old man who allegedly lured a 12-year-old girl to an in-person meeting via Instagram.

Persin seeks inspiration from real-life events to create videos of pranks for his YouTube channel, which has almost 1.2 million subscribers. He felt he needed to raise awareness of how easy it is to deceive a teen using social media as the bait. "The whole world should know this," Persin said.

Persin put out a call on Craigslist seeking parents with teens active on social media. Initially, he chose six families, but for the video, he used only the three girls, ages 12 to 14, who were the most responsive to the messages from Persin acting as young Jason Biazzo.

Persin explained that the fake profile showed the picture of a good-looking teen, which might have impacted the girls' reactions. The real picture is from a guy named Effy Levy, who allowed them to use his Instagram selfie for the experiment.

Persin explained how easily he ingratiated himself with his targets:

"All I said was, 'Hey' and they said, 'Who are you? Do I know you?' They all said something like that and then I was like, 'Oh no. I just moved to the area,' or I would be like 'my mom just let me get Facebook, I'm 15 years old.' You know? Stuff like that to lure these kids so quick."

With very simple conversations Persin was able establish communication with the girls for a period that lasted between three and five days. In this short time, the three girls agreed to meet him in person in different scenarios: at a park during the day, at their house at night and getting into a car, also at night.

The parents were part of the whole process, and most of the time they remained skeptical that their daughters would meet a complete stranger from Facebook in person. The teens were also confronted by the parents after the fact and got harshly lectured, after being literally caught in the act, according to Persin.

But this isn't the end of the experiment. Next week Persin says his channel will release the second part of this project, but this time he will pretend to be a girl to lure teenage boys. "They [boys] just see a cute girl and they're like oh I wanna meet. They don't understand that it could be an old man," Persin said.

"We are just here spreading awareness and showing the world how it is," he concluded.

Organizations like Child Lure Prevention offer assistance and guidance to help parents protect their kids from predators. A few tips on the site are:

• Emphasizing every child's right to live free of abuse
• Promoting healthy social relationships
• Nurturing mutual kindness and respect
• Setting personal and digital boundaries
• Identifying trusted adults
• Upholding a zero-tolerance environment in which harassment and abuse are openly discussed and disclosed

What do you think of this experiment? Share your thoughts in our comments section.

YouTube: Where you can experiment on humans as much as you like

Alan Martin Alan has been writing about science, tech, games and politics for a decade, with a period in game production in the middle. He has a special soft spot for the Internet of Things, healthcare, psychology and fitness trackers – despite most of them offering the same critique: he’s not fit enough. Alan is also the only person you’ll find in the Venn diagram of “people who’ve written for Nuts ” and “people who’ve written for the New Statesman ”. Read more December 11, 2015

Over the course of human history, some of the most memorable experiments are those that we wouldn’t be allowed to conduct nowadays. As with most things, regulation eventually catches up with dubious real-world practices, and loopholes are closed. The experiments undertaken before the door closed tend to become the stuff of infamy, though: Milgram’s experiment in obedience and the Stanford Prison Experiment are both taught in mainstream psychology courses. Part of their appeal is that they’re now forbidden.

As a quick recap, Milgram’s experiment showed that participants were prepared to deliver painful electric shocks to others when someone in authority told them to do so (although those seemingly in pain were actually actors). As you can see in the video below, despite their best instincts, some of the participants continued administering shocks to what would have been lethal levels.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=vXn2SZfwuSc

The Stanford Prison Experiment, on the other hand, involved a group of participants being randomly divided into guards and prisoners. Within days, the guards were going well beyond their remit in punishment of the dehumanised prisoners, and the experiment had to be cancelled early.

Of course, there are problems with these. In the former, participants are put through emotional stress without knowing the facts of the situation, and in the latter they were placed in actual danger. The catch-22 is that with the facts supplied or the danger removed, there would be no experiment.

But like science, television is regulated, and in any case, television’s influence has been shrinking for years. In its place: the unregulated Wild West of YouTube.

The trouble with YouTube

“It’s no coincidence that the majority of popular social experiment videos resemble candid camera pranks more than serious scientific study.”

YouTube has no regulation. How could it? More than 300 hours of footage is uploaded to the site every minute , and that means a lot of questionable content is posted – although most vanishes into obscurity. Recently, however, the blurring of “science” (the inverted commas are essential here) and entertainment that was first kicked off by television has been mimicked by YouTube’s prolific stars – with none of the original’s safeguards in place.

Interesting? Sure. Scientific? No. Ethical? Definitely not. Ethical regulations can effectively jettison a social experiment in the serious science world, because should researchers ignore the regulations, then a paper simply won’t be published. No such disincentive exists on YouTube, where ad revenue and fame are the drivers of innovation and progress. It’s the Wild West, and it’s no coincidence that the majority of popular social experiment videos resemble candid camera pranks more than serious scientific study.

On paper these may appear to be interesting pop-science studies, but at best they’re cheerful distractions – and at worst they’re worryingly unethical and misleading. Nothing illustrates this better than the recent case of Adrian Gee, an Australian YouTuber with almost 215,000 subscribers. A viral video of his was labelled as a social experiment, and what it seemed to show was shocking. In the film, Gee poses as a blind man asking for change from a $5 note, but proffering a $50. The film seems to catch several unscrupulous types not telling Gee and pocketing the money themselves.

But then Australia’s Today Tonight show exposed that Gee had hired actors for his “experiment” . In an extra layer of unethical behaviour, one of the actors involved alleges he wasn’t informed of the film’s usage, and has faced harsh judgements from friends and family who recognised his unique scars. To date, the original video has notched up more than two million views.

Ironically, Gee’s reaction to being called up on his fake experiments on Today Tonight provides exactly the kind of car-crash watching these “social experiments” do. He then went on to reveal that four further videos were also “partly staged”, after claiming that he’d had no problem doing media interviews about the staged video because “ most of the stuff they put out to air [is] all lies” anyway.

It was hardly a sensical excuse, but then he didn’t need to have one. Old media may have caught new media out, but so what? There can be no fines, and no bans: just the usual outrage, additional exposure and YouTube ad revenue that keeps the world spinning.

The internet takes the law into its own hands

Amazingly, though, it does seem that you can cross a line – even on the internet. Sam Pepper is a British YouTuber and former Big Brother star with, at the time of writing, 2,326,844 followers. To be fair, his videos don’t claim to be social experiments as such, and are more on the prank end of the spectrum. Last month, he released a video so harrowing that the internet fought back.

“It’s genuinely distressing, but has managed to rack up nearly eight million views – so that’s alright then, eh?”

But it seems Pepper managed to make a powerful enemy in the process: @TheAnonMessage (account since suspended) claimed to speak for hacking group Anonymous and threatened Pepper in a series of tweets to its 170,000 or so followers. The New Statesman records the tweets as reading: “ We’ve been notified of a sick, disturbing video uploaded by @sampepper. Yet again, he uses violent abuse to garner subscribers. This is something that we cannot stand for. This so-called prank should bring shame to the YouTube community for supporting this imbecile. This video must be taken down. @SamPepper you have been warned. You have 24 hours or we will unleash fucking hell on you.”

Could Anonymous be the guardians of regulation in the Wild West of YouTube? Don’t hold your breath:

The video is still live, and “fucking hell” has not been unleashed on Sam Pepper, as far as I can tell.

“Old media’s coverage of science created this monster. How and even if it can be tackled is anybody’s guess.”

You could argue that what a bunch of internet celebrities do on YouTube is pretty much a cultural irrelevance, and that nobody should believe what they watch online. There’s definitely some truth in that, but with a growing audience of impressionable (mostly) teenagers as the target audience, future world views could be distorted over time. Turns out most people won’t rob a blind man asking for change, no matter what the video told you.

Vote with your feet and don’t watch? That’s also wishful thinking: people love being outraged, as certain well-paid newspaper columnists know, and as long as the ad impressions roll in, you’re not going to disincentivise bad practice.

Maybe the best hope is that enough shadiness will be exposed to toss the reputation of social experiments down the drain, but in the case of most of these, the ethical pitfalls are obvious already and people still watch.

This brings me back to the genuine experiments of old. Very few people claim we should relax the ethical standards of science, but we still glorify the experiments undertaken before we saw sense. Old media’s coverage of science created this monster. How and even if it can be tackled is anybody’s guess.

READ THIS NEXT: When did science give up on studying ghosts?

Images: Daderot ,  Fred the Oyster ,  Karl Jonsson , Anthony Ryan .

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