Interesting Psychological experiment I could use in high school?

How will you measure face symmetry?

This being for high school, and with the sensitivity that a lot of high school kids have for their own face and body issues, I would shy away from anything that touched on any kind of “preference” or “ratings” idea (as a beauty contest always does).

On the other hand, it might be interesting to review cultural gender-based differences, which will also ruffle some feathers, unfortunately, but may not be (or appear to be) targeted at individuals, at least.

For example: a survey of participation in various sports, clubs, hobbies and other extra-curricular activities by gender.

Maybe for perception you could do perceived meal size depending on the pate it is on? Since our society os kind of food and diet obsessed? The same size meal on a large plate is perceived as small, while on a normal size plate it is perceived as adequate. Something along those lines? Just thinking out loud.

@snowberry However, the more symmetrical faces are perceived as prettiest when studies have been done.

Here is an interesting and not-too-long essay on Cargo-Cult Science (presented by Richard Feynman as the commencement address to the Caltech graduating class of 1974) which isn’t hard to understand and has direct application – you’ll see where as you read it – to any proposed experiment that you or anyone else would want to run on adolescent humans.

See if that gives you any ideas.

Yes, people with more symmetrical faces are perceived as more attractive. I saw a neat experiment once. Get a mirror. Hold it long ways in the center of your nose so that people looking at you see what you would look like if both sides of your face were identically symmetrical. Have some one take a picture. Do that for both the left side and right side of your face. Be sure to get pictures. I think you’ll be startled at what you see.

Or, hey! You can just do this. (That stuff above I learned pre-digital days.)

Is it really a good idea to do a project comparing the relative attractiveness of a classroom of high-schoolers?

I wasn’t suggesting comparing all the kids. I was suggesting using only her face. The results are really fascinating!

An experiment that has been done before but still might be interesting to try, is to compare people’s perception of varying amounts of distance, weight and time to actual values. The idea is to start with a standard unit, say a pound of weight. Then give things of different weights and ask the person how many times heavier the object is than the unit.

If the symmetry thing doesn’t work out, you might be able to do something like the Invisible Gorilla Test and that would hit on Perception/Consciousness. The actual concept it demonstrates is inattentional blindness, which is pretty cool. It’s a very famous study, but I didn’t learn about it until after high school.

How about: The effect of eating gummy bears on the pain tolerance to electric shock of high school students.

Blind fold a person and stick a onion in their face. Ask them to raise their hand when you remove the onion. Never remove the onion. It will happen and there is a lot of science behind it you could explore.

An experiment you could try is the differences between male and female perception of facial expressions, using photographs to illustrate different facial expressions i.e. surprise, happiness, anger, confusion, sadness. Show the photographs to equal numbers of men and women and ask them to interpret the expressions, choosing from the five options above. I carried out this research myself to evaluate the consistency of male and female perception and also whether the gender of the person in the photograph would make any difference to that perception. I found the exercise interesting. There is existing research material available for study if you choose this.