Research and Experiments
A shill in a psychology experiment, or the like, is called a confederate. In Stanley Milgram's experiment in which the subjects witnessed people getting electric shocks, a confederate would pretend to be one of the experimental subjects who would receive the fake shocks, so that the real experimental subject would think that a draw of names from a hat was random. The confederate would always play the role of the learner, and the subject would be the teacher, and the subject would think that this was a random draw from a hat containing papers that say "learner" and "teacher".
In performance art, such as DECONference (Decontamination Conference), the confederates were called deconfederates. When a large group of DECONference attendees were asked to remove all clothing prior to entry to the event, the deconfederates, planted among the attendees, would comply immediately with the request, causing all of the others to follow the orders and disrobe as well.
Read more about this topic: Shill
Famous quotes containing the words research and, research and/or experiments:
“I did my research and decided I just had to live it.”
—Karina O’Malley, U.S. sociologist and educator. As quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education, p. A5 (September 16, 1992)
“Our science has become terrible, our research dangerous, our findings deadly. We physicists have to make peace with reality. Reality is not as strong as we are. We will ruin reality.”
—Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921–1990)
“Science is a dynamic undertaking directed to lowering the degree of the empiricism involved in solving problems; or, if you prefer, science is a process of fabricating a web of interconnected concepts and conceptual schemes arising from experiments and observations and fruitful of further experiments and observations.”
—James Conant (1893–1978)