17 Social Experiments That Led To Unexpected Results

Idea: The self-service fields that run by the roads mean anyone is invited to pick whatever they please in the field, whether it’s fruits, vegetables, or flowers. There is no vendor to control the transactions. The sign with a price tag and a box to put money in is all there is to make a purchase for whatever it is that people picked in the fields.
Result: Not only were no thefts reported, but people would pay even more than the price tags asked.

Idea: The “Real Beauty Sketches” experiment conducted by Dove asked women to describe themselves to an FBI forensic artist, who drew their portraits based solely on the description. Then, strangers described the appearance of the same women, and the artist drew another set of portraits of them. Each participant was given two portraits of themselves that turned out to be radically different.
Result: The portraits based on the strangers’ descriptions were clearly more beautiful, happier, and more accurate. An average person tends to exaggerate her own flaws, while strangers see the appearance as a whole, focusing on positive features.
“What has stayed with me are the emotional reactions the women had when they viewed the composite sketches hung side by side. I think many of these brave women realized that they had a distorted self-perception that had affected parts of their lives in significant ways,” said the FBI forensic artist.

Idea: In this social experiment by the Danish brewery Carlsberg, the subjects, unsuspecting couples out to watch a movie, walk into a crowded cinema. There are only 2 seats remaining, right in the middle, with each of the rest taken by a rather tough-looking and tattooed male biker.
Result: As the informal experiment (which was actually intended to be just an advertisement) unfolds, not all of the couples end up taking a seat, and upon seeing the bikers decide to leave immediately. Some couples do choose to take their seats however, and are rewarded with cheers from the crowd and a round of free Carlsberg beers. The experiment was a good example of why people shouldn't always judge a book by its cover.
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Idea: As part of a campaign against xenophobia, the prejudice against people from other countries, supermarket 'Edeka' in Hamburg, Germany launched a social experiment. Supermarket employees removed all the foreign-made products from the shelves and left only those that were made within the country. 
Result: Supermarket customers were greeted by empty shelves and helped raise awareness about how different and lower-quality life in Germany would be without cooperation with other countries. The experiment also shows that foreigners can add value to our lives even on a domestic scale.

Idea: In his 1973 paper “On Being Sane in Insane Places”, psychologist David Rosenhan strongly criticized the psychiatric hospitals and the treatment the patients received there, but most of all, he criticized the quality of the psychiatric diagnosis. Rosenhan's stance was based on research conducted by himself and seven other experimenters who acted as pseudo-patients in different hospitals around the U.S. where they were all diagnosed with psychiatric disorders.
To be admitted into the hospitals, the pseudo-patients complained about auditory hallucinations. After admission, however, they behaved perfectly normal, telling the medical staff in the hospitals that their hallucinations had disappeared.
Result: The medical staff in the hospitals still regarded the pseudo-patients as mentally ill and fed them antipsychotic meds.
The pseudo-patients would flush the medications down the toilet, and continue acting in a calm, rational fashion, writing down their observations of the staff and the other patients. However, they were still treated as having mental problems. Instead of investigating the issue, nobody regarded their behavior as normal, because apparently inside the walls of a psychiatric hospital, the only sane ones are the employees.
I wonder if Rosenhan had read Chekhov's "Ward No. 6".

Idea: On 12th January 2007, about a thousand morning commuters passing through a subway station in Washington, D.C. were, without publicity, treated to a free mini-concert performed by violin virtuoso Joshua Bell, who played for approximately 45 minutes, performing six classical pieces (two of which were by Bach), on his handcrafted 1713 Stradivarius violin (for which Bell reportedly paid $3.5 million).
Result: Only 6 people stopped and stayed to listen for a while. About 20 gave him money but continued to walk their normal pace. He collected $32. When he finished playing and silence took over, no one noticed it. No one applauded, nor was there any recognition. No one noticed that one of the best musicians in the world had played one of the most intricate pieces ever written with a violin worth 3.5 million dollars. The experiment raised some interesting questions about how we not only value beauty, but extent that which the setting and presentation make a difference. Three days earlier, Bell had played to a full house at Boston’s Symphony Hall, where seats went for over $100. (Source: Snopes)

Idea: In another experiment from Volkswagen’s Fun Theory campaign, a regular staircase was replaced with a musical one. By stepping on the stairs, a person would play their own melody on a gigantic piano. The idea was to make people take the stairs instead of an escalator.
Result: The musical stairs, which were right next to an escalator, were used 66% more than normal as people took their time playing a tune. The idea quickly blew up around the globe and became installed in Kuala Lumpur, Seoul, San Francisco, Mexico City, Sarajevo, Vienna, and other cities.