HBO

11/16/23: Human Behavioral Observation Experiment

In the experiment that I conducted, I sat down for about 50 minutes to an hour watching an elevator on the second floor of LSC. Using duration coding, I watched and timed how long it took the elevator to open after someone pressed the button. I began this study at a time when a class ended so there wouldn't be an overload of time intervals right away due to everyone rushing to class. I started this study at about 2:30 pm and over the hour, I saw 12 people press the button to the elevator. The human behavior I studied was patience because some people who were in a rush didn't feel like waiting. Patience is defined online as, "The capacity to accept or tolerate delay, trouble, or suffering without getting angry or upset." Out of the 12 people who pressed the elevator button, 3 left by either running up the stairs or walking away completely. For the 3 people who left after pressing the button, I still recorded the time it took for the elevator to open. I chose duration coding because I believe patience and timing go hand in hand. My results for this duration coding experiment from the 12 people who pressed the button were:

1. 26 seconds (person left)

2. 16 seconds

3. 2 seconds

4. 9 seconds

5. 16 seconds

6. 12 seconds

7. 2 seconds

8. 2 seconds

9. 42 seconds 

10. 15 seconds (person left)

11. 6 seconds

12. 18 seconds (person left)

One thing I noticed is when the elevator was already on the second floor when a person pressed the button, it only took 2 seconds for the door to open. The longer it took for the elevator to open, the more impatient a person usually was. One abnormality from my data was the time when it took 42 seconds for the door to open. The person didn't seem to be in any rush as they simply were on their phone the entire time. When the elevator finally opened, I saw 2 janitors with their carts come out, which is probably why it took so long in the first place. This experiment worked out well for me but some of the weaknesses were that timing how long it took for the elevator to open didn't always tell me if a person was patient or not. Timing the door to open only gave me limited contextual information about each person, unless they looked like they were in a rush and left after pressing the button. Another weakness was that my timing could have been off by a second or two on some of the attempts skewing my data result. On the flip side, some of my strengths include showing a pattern and having a standardized and measured data set..