AP Psychology students transformed the library into a clinical laboratory at the annual psychology fair Wednesday.

After learning about different psychological behaviors within the class, students were challenged to create an experiment testing social, cognitive, and behavioral theories on their peers.

“The psych fair was designed to give students an assessment of all the knowledge they have gained over the year, after the AP test is over. Now that they have learned all of the content, this gives them a way to apply it,” psychology teacher Heather Weisenburger said. “They come up with something creative that they want to test on students and then examine the results.”

Throughout the fair, students were required to test 150 subjects. Experiments ranged from taste testing to examining social conformity, and after analyzing results, students create a report on whether or not their hypotheses were accurate.

Discovered by Ivan Pavlov, classical conditioning is an unlearned, automatic response to an external reward or punishment. “We tested classical conditioning, for which you pair a stimulus with something you are saying, and then the test subject is conditioned to respond to the question without knowing,” junior Natalie Krasuski said.

Krasuski’s group tested subjects by telling them to take a piece of candy after answering a question correctly. However, after a set of questions, on the final question they are not instructed to take a piece of candy, but many subjects do because of the automatic response created.

Krasuski enjoyed seeing how her test subjects reacted to the experiment. “It is interesting to see how people react. It is funny because the students figure out what we are testing and then they realized they were tricked,” Krasuski added.

Additionally, the psychology fair gave other students the opportunity to learn about the class and test their brains. “I have been to the psychology fair before. I like to test myself to see if I can beat the system, or if they can trick me,” junior Harrison Kranz said.

By Drew Danko

Photo by Jack Heerhold