Question: What kinds of cool experiments would you do in schools?

Ben Kenward answered on 17 Jun 2017:

I’m about to do one in a school! We are trying to find out why children think people doing bad things should be punished. We have made a computer game where there are teams of players, who sometimes betray each other, or don’t share out the points fairly. We let the children act as referees in the game, so we can find out how they are thinking when they assign penalties. One of the most interesting parts of that experiment is looking into whether things that aren’t actually wrong might make people more likely to punish. It sounds odd, but humans have a tendency to think that people ought to behave the same way as others – people tend to think that the way most people behave is the right way to behave, just because, for no real reason. So we reckon that players who make a really unusual choice of colour for their player will actually get punished more harshly by the children. Sounds odd but there is some other similar work that does suggest we will find this out.