Possessions- What Do You Really Need?

     For this experiment, our willing volunteer Samantha took all of her clothing and electronics out of her room and take a photograph of all of these in one location. Needless to say, Sam had ALOT of clothes. After she took this first picture, she sorted through all her clothes an electronics and set aside the things that are absolutely necessary to her life, and put away everything else. She then took a photo of these things. As you can see, there is an astonishing difference between the amount of things she owns and the amount of things she actually uses. This lab show us how material our society really is. We are obsessed with buying new and "cool" things even though we don't need them. If we didn't spend so much time trying to make an income to buy more useless "stuff" and just spent money on the things we really NEED we would have more time to focus on building friendship and Social Capitalism in America.

Facebook or Friends For Real

     In this experiment, we decided to go off of Facebook for 31 hours, and attempt to meet people in real life instead. Life without was very trying. There was the constant urge to check and see if any new drama took place, if anyone got in a new relationship, or if our friends had tried to contact us. Although going off of Facebook for that period of time was challenging, the rewards of making these 5 new friends made it all worth it. Like the people we met yesterday, friends who we meet in real life end up being much closer to us than the friends we chat with once or twice over Facebook. Meeting these friends in real life increased our social capital infinitely more than simply being friends with a person you will never see in real life on Facebook.

Trust at UNCSA

     For this project, we "accidentally" dropped a dollar bill on the ground, and video taped peoples actions following this. Most people didn't notice, but for the few who did notice, more than half gave the dollar bill back to us. The rest picked up the bill and walked away, with no attempt to return it to the person who dropped it. This was an interesting experiment, because it showed us how honest people really are.
      In the second part of this experiment, we had Myra trip and drop her books on the ground. We discretely video taped while people either helped her pick up her scattered papers, or skirted around her. Overall, we found that students at UNCSA were very helpful to Myra.