ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Social experiment

Okay, so have you ever played a game with your friends where you pretend to be someone else or act differently than you usually do? Well, a social experiment is kind of like a grown-up version of that game.

Instead of just playing for fun, though, social experiments are done to try to learn something important about how people behave or think in different situations. Scientists, researchers, or even just regular people might do these experiments to try to understand why people do what they do.

For example, let's say someone wants to study how people react to being told a lie. They might set up a social experiment where they have one person lie to another person, and then they watch how the person being lied to reacts. They might take notes or record what happens so they can learn from it.

Social experiments can be done in lots of different ways, and they can be about lots of different topics. But no matter what they're about, they're usually done to help us learn more about how people behave and think.