Psych 001 students participate in a new kind of people-watching

You might have seen students studying you as you passed by on Locust Walk last month, but don't worry - it wasn't because you were having a bad hair day.

Students in professor Paul Rozin's Psychology 001 class conducted a "racial association" study which found that, despite Penn's diverse student body, people on campus tend to spend time with others of the same ethnicity.

Rozin required his students to observe a minimum of 45 groups walking together - either in front of Houston Hall or on Locust Walk.

The Psych 001 students classified members of the passing groups as East or Southeast Asian/Pacific Islander, South Asian, black/African-American or white/Caucasian. There was also a place for students to mark "other" if they could not identify someone's ethnicity.

After compiling the data, Rozin found that people "have a very strong tendency to cluster with others from the same race," he said.

By probabilistic chance alone, 30 percent of groups of two would belong to the same race as a result of the demographics at Penn. In reality, Rozin's class found that 58 percent of groups of two walking throughout Penn's main campus belonged to the same race.

Although the results did not surprise him, "sometimes what we find out in psychology is that something everyone already knows is true, but once in a while we find it is the opposite of what we expect," Rozin said.

But the point of this exercise was not simply to analyze data. Rozin said he was trying to teach his students how hard it is to make accurate observations.

"It turns out when you want to observe something simple" - like someone's race - "you have to make a lot of judgement calls," Rozin said.

College sophomore Jayme van Oot conducted her study on a rainy day and said it was hard to discern race and ethnicity when people were wearing raincoats and holding umbrellas.

"My results weren't very accurate because they weren't representative of a normal day," van Oot said, adding that it is hard to categorize people unless you ask them to place themselves in a group.

College freshman Ali Levine also did not think her results were representative of those of the rest of the class.

"I didn't really see any patterns," she said. "In fact, a lot of them were mixed groups."

Levine said she was not convinced that there was a biological or psychological reason why students group together with others of the same race because her results did not reflect the norm.

Rozin's racial association study is just one of many studies he conducts in his Psych 001 classes.

He said he tries to "conduct a lab section without actually having a lab."

Levine said she enjoys the class-wide experiments because they serve as a medium between the lectures and the textbook - which she said barely overlap at all.

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