Prosocial behavior in Adolescents (Quiz 10)

Results: My associate and I arrived at Whitehall High School around 10 in the morning and told the principal that we would be performing a social experiment on the students. We were given visitor name tags, which we had to cover up with coats to lessen the suspicion of the students. When the bell rang at 10:13 am I began walking down the freshman hallway and while a group of students were watching I pretended to trip and spill books and papers all over the hall. At first a few of the students chuckled and told their friends "how retarded" I was. Then I moved on to the sophomore hallway where the students simply ignored my predicament. Then in the junior hallway I had the same basic reaction from a group of students walking by. While I was in the high school my associate was walking through the middle school (7th and 8th grade) halls where he said the students laughed out loud and made a slight mockery of him.
Discussion: While the experiment hadn't proved the hypothesis like I had hoped, that adolescents will become more pro-social as they age. There was a slight difference in pro-social activity between the sophomore/junior group and the freshman/middle school group. While it is an improvement, going from mocking to ignoring a person in distress, I still wouldn't classify either as a pro-social behavior and the data isn't significant enough to prove the hypothesis. I think one problem with the experiment was that we weren't in the subjects' in-group. I believe if we had students participate and drop their books, students would have been more likely to help, as in the Tabor study. The other problem with the experiment is that we were only able to run one test on each hall, any more and the students would be even more suspicious.