More Top Ten Online Psychology Experiments

By Sandra Kiume

More Top Ten Online Psychology Experiments After the publication of our 2008 top ten online psychology experiments list — which detailed the best psychological science research projects seeking online participants — we’re back with a follow-up.

At any given time, hundreds of online psychology experiments are going on. They are a great, cost-efficient method to gather experimental data from the multitudes of people online. These experiments can be fun to try, but also provide researchers with valuable data that future research may be based upon. Here are all-new experiments as well as a couple of classics:

10. Sexual Infidelity. Can you guess who cheats, from listening to their voices? New research, with voices speaking vowels, and some facial images, too. Unfortunately, no results shared.

9. Daily News Memory Test. neuroMod at the University of Amsterdam studies memory, and this short test module is also available in Dutch. Clean and well-designed.

8. The Moral Sense Test. Available in five languages and quite wordy, with complex test scenarios appealing to budding philosophers. How wrong are certain theoretical decisions, and how intentional are actions? You judge.

7. Emotional Experiences is about how people experience emotions, and allows you to compare your results to others. This is qualitative research that requires writing narrative, so a bit more demanding than the average quiz.

6. Signs and Aliens: A Cognitive Study. A simple Flash-based visual perception and cognition experiment. It’s got 200 signs, which takes longer than five minutes but the cute aliens are worth it.

5. Music & Emotion Profiler. How well do 63 adjectives describe your connection to music? Inquietude, joyful activation (dancing), longing, peacefulness, and wonder were among the nine qualities measured. Choose any song, using one you either like or dislike strongly for best results.

4. Two enduring sites from our first list: The Perception Lab at the University of Aberdeen and Face Research both do research using images and videos of faces (including babies) that you judge and change based on your perceptions of emotions, male and female, attractiveness, and other measures while giving context with short personal questionnaires. Here’s a new survey looking to gauge scariness and more, with a fast slick interface.

3. DIY Eyewitness Accuracy Experiment. Create your own online psychology experiment on eyewitness accuracy and demonstrate how fallible memory is, using your own materials. Great idea from The Psych Files.

2. Pew Research Center asks How Millennial are You? and other questions in studies on Internet and technology use, and have compiled a lot of valuable data. Always topical with leading edge results, Pew is as good to follow for their Twitter account as their in-depth research reports.

1. Puntastic! What makes puns funny? You tell them what makes you laugh most and they’ll explain why. Scientifically. “Benefits: At the end of the experiment, we will explain the experiment and our hypothesis. We will describe potential implications of the study both if our hypotheses are supported and if they are disconfirmed.” A “quit playing” option lets you decide how long the test will be, but there’s no need to stop quickly when the jokes are good. Research has never been so fun.

We think these are among the best and most fun, but there are plenty more to try. Three excellent meta lists, DMOZ Online Experiments, Psychological Research on the Net, and Web Experiment are generally kept updated and well-tended.

Found an online psychology experiment not on our list? List your favorite online psychology experiments below in the comments.

Looking for more great experiments?
Check out psychology videos and experiments on Channel N.

Sandra Kiume is a mental health advocate. Along with contributing to World of Psychology, she writes Channel N (PsychCentral's neuro/psychology video blog), and @unsuicide. She lives in Vancouver, Canada.