GT5 Sociological Experiement, need help

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biscuit07238

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Greetings all. This post will be a bit different then the others on here but please read through. I'm a sociology major with an emphasis on the study of group dynamics and social interaction. I'm at the University of South Carolina and I'm currently working on some research regarding how the advent of social networking and modern computer connectivity is impacting how humans interact socially and as a group. I wanted to include social interaction via modern day video gaming as one of the my areas of research and how humans respond and interact via new technology such as through the PSN and Xbox Live as well as other modern methods such as Twitter, Facebook, etc. I'm currently running a little social behavior/response experiment and would like any help you all could offer. I will lay out the ground rules below and if you wish to participate on any level please do. Please understand that once I lay out the rules I will be unable to comment or reply to any questions or given further information as the purpose of the experiment would be compromised if I did.

My PSN name is biscuit07238. I have established a hypothesis already about the results based upon both my own experiences with social interactions I have had of other sorts in the gaming community and on message boards as well as similar experiments already completed but a few of my colleagues. I can not share with anyone my hypothesis until after the experiment is completed however or else it could skew the results. I would like to put out a request to see if anyone will gift me a car. The following are the stipulations:

-There is a set deadline to respond to this inquiry but it will not be released until the end due to the experimental process.

-You can not participate if we have raced against one another or if you have had any social interaction with me on either PSN or Xbox Live (this experiment revolves around stranger interactions so if you know me, please do not reply)

-There is no request for any specific car, nor specific level, color, type, etc. It is whatever car or cars you wish to gift

-This is not an exchange, not a trade for cars. There is a possibility you will not get the car back, so only gift a car if you are willing to part with it permanently in exchange for nothing in return.

-If you do not wish to gift a car but do have a desire to reply to this post about your thoughts on the experiment by all means reply away. I welcome any and all comments, positive or negative. All I ask is that you keep this clean and cordial. Any comments may be used in my dissertation, but your names/screen names or any personal info will not be included. Just possibly your quotes of your comments. There is no guarantee your quotes will be used. I can not respond to any quotations or comments until the experiment is concluded.

-If you choose to participate and you do send me something if you could please post to my profile the date you gifted the car, the type of car and the color so that we have a record of it. Please do that to my profile and not to this thread for scientific purposes

-If you participate by gifting me a car please also make a comment to the thread itself with the just simple word "participated" in the message.

-If you participate by simply responding to the thread, then you can post any and all comment directly into the thread, no need to put anything on my profile.

-I do ask if anyone participates either by gifting or simply giving me your opinions/feedback's on the thread that you please pass the word to others. This is as much about the social interaction to the task as well as a "word of mouth" experiment. If you participate please make sure you mention how you came across the experiment, be it just browsing the forum or hearing about it from someone else.

Thank you all for your time and I look forward to seeing how this pans out. I will post again once the timeframe I have set up has expired.
 
While I will never claim to even begin to understand the human psyche, I think there is a fatal flaw in the way you are going about this. That being that since people know it's for an experiment, they will no doubt be more inclined to donate than they would have otherwise.

That said, a new member showing up out of the blue asking for free vehicles presumably wouldn't get you very far. Your two options, as I see it are tell us what you're up to and skew the number towards generous or give us next to no information and show us all as selfish.

Quite the conundrum...

As for your last request asking about how we came across this thread, I'll be the odd man out and say I saw it in the Moderation Queue. :p

I wish you the best of luck with your experiment, biscuit07238, however flawed it might, or might not, be. 👍
 
TB
While I will never claim to even begin to understand the human psyche, I think there is a fatal flaw in the way you are going about this. That being that since people know it's for an experiment, they will no doubt be more inclined to donate than they would have otherwise.

That said, a new member showing up out of the blue asking for free vehicles presumably wouldn't get you very far. Your two options, as I see it are tell us what you're up to and skew the number towards generous or give us next to no information and show us all as selfish.
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I would whole heartedly agree with this. The only reason I feel inclined to send one is to find out what exactly is going on. Which, well as you said is skewing your results.
 
Personally, I'd give you a car, but you coming to PSN first instead of Xbox Live is what's confusing. (More users = More Results, no?)
 
I guess its good to help strangers, they might help you in the future. lol
 
biscuit07238
I'm at the University of South Carolina.
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Thats where I stopped reading and realized this was a scam. :dopey:
(see my username:))
 
biscuit07238
Slight bump just to start week. I won't shamelessly bump this. Perhaps one more before weekend traffic.
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Oh, come on now. You broke the rules. We are after all a melting pot, let's say of different coffee. You cannot just dunk yourself in our pot of coffee, Mr Biscuit.

I would say you've failed your experiment by trying to influence or skew it's outcomes. This is no longer a hands off experiment. I would even go as far as to say your hand could be completely on it.

So no tasty treats in the shape of a car for you Mr Biscuit.
 
If I was your sociology tutor I would give you a great big 'F' :sly:
 
biscuit07238
Slight bump just to start week. I won't shamelessly bump this. Perhaps one more before weekend traffic.
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Don't bother. Another bump will see it locked.

Why didn't you just start a thread titled, "Send me free cars"?
 
Oh My God, :scared: Laugh Out Loud, :dopey: Laugh My Arse Off, :lol: What The Funk?!?! :boggled: And I didn't violate the AUP!!! What does that mean Mr. Psychologist? What does this whole thread mean?!?! Why did I waste my time bolding those letters one by one? I'm going insane! AHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!

Oh, and no free cars for you! :ouch:
 
Tut tut, trying to scam people isn't nice biscuit even if you are a jammy dodger :dopey:
 
Do you use the same (book of) lines in bars but replace "cars" with "BJs"?

Oh if your hypothesis is no one will send you anything? I guess you win? Good.
 
killerjaaaaack
Do you use the same (book of) lines in bars but replace "cars" with "BJs"?

Oh if your hypothesis is no one will send you anything? I guess you win? Good.
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I would have, but he posted. Rule breaker!

So to miss quote a show I never liked anyway, "No Supra for you!"
 
Milldrum
I would have, but he posted. Rule breaker!

So to miss quote a show I never liked anyway, "No Supra for you!"
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That's my favorite quote from Seinfeld. :)
My baseball coach used it a long time ago.
"NO SOUP FOR YOU!!!!"
lmao
Sorry, just got sort of nostalgic there. lol
 
I've been given a free car before so I'll play along. Whether experiment or scam doesn't really matter to me, I'm doing it with no expectation of return. I'll send you one of my favourites, duped first of course. :D Enjoy.
 
You have to give the guy a plus for originality... but the time he spent thinking and writting that he could have earn a few cars playing the game !!!! Yes my friend, you can actually PLAY the game... they give money and cars... go figure...
 
Tokitai
You have to give the guy a plus for originality... but the time he spent thinking and writting that he could have earn a few cars playing the game !!!! Yes my friend, you can actually PLAY the game... they give money and cars... go figure...
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Hahaha yes that's very true.
 
Meh. Even if it is just somebody trying to get free cars, at least he is being honest that he doesn't plan to send anything in return and wont send it back. So you know what you are getting into instead of making a deal with someone and then getting scammed out of a car after you send yours. So I see it as worst case scenario, this could be a more community friendly and socially responsible way of being a lazy turd. lol Plus after looking at his trophy info on the psn, maybe I'm just helping out a noob that doesn't think people will help if he told the truth.
 
Do people still bother scamming? Seems so stupid after the fog of release has cleared. I didn't trade for the first couple of months as the race to completed everything raged. But now it seems to be so unnecessary.

Back to the experiment. Maybe he was testing how the mood would change as everyone posted. He would have predicted the posts would lean towards or away from him and get worse as people jumped on board.

He's still not getting a car. Go scam if you want one that bad.
 
This now concludes the experiment. Thank you all for taking part. I had wanted to run it for two weeks but if I bump it again it will be locked and given the fact that I only get an influx of responses after a bump it does not seem that I would receive that many more significant replies by letting it sit open on the forums for seven more days. Plus when I couple these comments with the other ones from my other posts I should have enough data points to test statistical significance.

First let me say that if you were one of the ones who sent me a car, please send me a private message on this message board and your psn name so that I can return it. Please make sure you send it as a PM because this topic should be locked shortly. I never actually anticipated keeping any cars I was given but the experiment was based on the presumption of getting "something for nothing". Thus, any gifts had to be given with the anticipation of no reciprocal. You will find that there have been no miles added to the vehicles or changes made of any sort. Please make sure you PM though as I have ran this same message on a few different boards so I need to make sure the right cars get to the right PSN names.

I will take a moment to answer a few questions and respond to a couple comments. The class itself for this experiment is divided into three groups. The control which are seeing how groups respond to an exchange of items of equal value. Another group is finding responses to people who are just given stuff without being asked for anything in return and of course there is my group where we are asking for something with out returning it at all. Of course all three groups are exploring these behavioral pattern with an emphasis on group behavior in a modern day internet society. We are using various online resources to conduct this analysis, such as PSN, Xbox Live, Twitter, Facebook, Myspace (yeah, even Myspace), PC gamers, Squiddo, etc.

Let me give thanks especially to the mod TB who allowed this post to be approved initially. This same message was posted on five boards. Three were allowed, two were denied by the moderators. I'm aware it was a bit unorthodox so I appreciate you giving the message a chance to be seen and responded to. In response to your initial reply, that was a very accurate way to view it. Naturally given what I was testing I would lean towards looking "selfish" because that is what we we testing in a way. With regards to saying up front it was an experiment, that was a requirement set out to us all by the Professor who gave us this project for ethical reasons (and potentially legal ones too for the University, of course that is pure speculation on my part). Also you mentioned me being a new member. Very true. I have been following this forum actually since the start of the year. I had intended to sign up long before I did but I knew early on that we would be possibly running an experiment similar to this and since I needed to start with a completely tabula rasa in order to prevent as little bias as possible I held off. That way when I made this post it would be the first one ever and no one could look at my past posts and have any preconceived notions. I needed to appear as a random stranger just asking for free stuff.

Geraghini asked why PSN and not Xbox Live. Good question. The reason being is that while most of us in my group had Xbox Live, only two of us were on PSN. Myself and one other student. He played World of Warcraft which I didn't, so we decided he would do the PC gamer portion of the data and I would take PSN. Someone else would handle the Xbox Live demographic.

gogatrs gets a nod for most humorist post. For the record, while I'm a USC student, I'm actually a fan of their in-state rival Clemson, so I actually probably hate them more then you do. :) I just go there because it's a lot closer to me then Clemson and Clemson doesn't offer the programs I need.

We decided to use GT5 for a few reasons. First off, it already had all the structure built in to allow us to see how people would react. They already had the "gifting" system in place it was just a matter of getting people to react to a complete stranger asking for freebies. Secondly, we wanted to have a more quantitative way to measure anything we did receive. While mostly what we are looking for are merely how people respond, what they say, how they say it, what questions they ask, we knew that some people would in fact actually offer us something and we needed to have a easy way to quantify the value of what was offered absent our own personal opinion. That is why I was asking for cars instead of paint chips or horns or anything like that. The cars are given a value by the software. Those values are assigned using complex algorithms that would take us much longer to develop as opposed to using what is already supplied to us. You could argue that someone could raise or lower the value of a car based on what they do to it, but the point is not what they could do to the car, but what the car is worth at the time of the gift. Using GT5's gift system and requesting cars that have a numerical value automatically assigned to them by the game itself allows to place a non-biased value to whatever we receive.

Hopefully all this will give you all a little insight into what we are looking at exploring in this study. While yes, there have been things we have received we are returning all the items we get. We are not so much in interested in WHAT we get but how people respond to a simple request (or offer of free stuff in the other groups case) and what they say or do or react is really what we are looking for here. We still have a lot of numerical crunching and a few of the other people still have to conclude their own experiments so I don't have any statistical analysis or hard numbers right now, but I will say that from the way it looks we should have sufficient data to draw a few conclusions.

For those still thinking it's a scam, well it's your right to feel that way. But let me leave you with this train of thought. The only cars that can be gifted have to be valued under $1,000,000. I have received about 1/3 of the trophies in the game, have won over 200 races, and have earned or bought almost all the cars on my "wish list". Granted there are about 3 or 4 left that I have to grind it out to get but they are in excess of $5,000,000 each. I can grind out $1,000,000 in less then 30 minutes (actually with the 1.10 update I can get 1M in less then 10 minutes now, Love that Lightweight K cup). I got 1.5 million this morning alone while I waited for my wife to get ready for work. I have received gold on nearly every event of the first three tiers. There is really nothing that could have been gifted to me that I don't already have or couldn't get quite easily myself if wanted. The goal here was about the social behaviors and interactions. The use of the car gifting system was just a catalyst to get said reactions and interactions from people in a cyber setting and to put a numerical value to any positive reactions without human bias involved.

Thanks again for everyone's help and comments.
 
If you were going to do this kind of survey then why did you hide behind a monitor instead of taking to the streets ?
 
As stated in my prior posts, this class is focusing on social interaction in a modern internet society. "Taking it to the streets" is the complete opposite of what we the Professor is having us learn about. We are looking at how groups of people respond in modern society in an electronic social setting (i.e. facebook, twitter, online gamers, etc). There are thousands of studies done on human behavior in a "face to face" setting. We are trying to see how people respond in a non face to face situation and using modern social media as a means. The "hiding" behind a monitor was sort of what we were looking at. How do people react when they are NOT face to face and are approached by strangers in an anonymous cyber setting.
 
USC is a good university. Saying you attend then bashing it doesn't make much sense. I too attended USC, however I was born and raised in Florida so I am a Seminole (FSU fan for those of you unaware) by blood. However I still got a good education. Hating USC while attending it...
 
Yeah. You make a good point. I should have been clearer. As a place for higher education I love USC. Good school good Professors. I was actually just speaking of athletics. Which is how I read gators comment. In sports I pull for Clemson. But I do like USC as a school.
 
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