fairfolio
Saved Projects

Does the Nose Know?

CSEF · 2011 Behavioral & Social Sciences

Joanna L. Tabacek · Tierra Linda Middle School, San Carlos, San Mateo County

Overview

Objectives/Goals The objective was to test if the power of suggestion can influence a person's perception of reality. The goal was to see if people's perception of what they smelled could be influenced because it was suggested to them that it was a different spice than it really was. Methods/Materials There were three stages to the experiment; the first was just having each participant smell each scent so they were able to recognize the scent. This was used this as a baseline. Second, the blindfolded participants smelled each scent as it was correctly identified and they were asked if they agreed or disagreed. This was to test if they really were able to recognize the scent. This was used as a control stage in the experiment. Third was the real evaluation. Each participant smelled a scent, it would be incorrectly identified, and the participants were asked if they agreed or not with what the scents were identified as. This was to test if they could be influenced to think they smelled a certain scent because it was suggested to them. The materials used in the experiment were 4 jars to contain the spices; and a teaspoon each of Cinnamon, Cumin, Mace, Ginger, a notebook to record data, a pencil, a flat surface, a blindfold and participants. Results It was found that in this test most people were not influenced by the suggestion and could correctly identify almost every scent. More people correctly identified the scents during the evaluation stage than during the control stage. Conclusions/Discussion The results showed that people trust their noses more than they trust what they are being told by other people. This means that even though the placebo effect that doctors use with their patients works, it doesn't mean that the power of suggestion can influence peoples' perception of reality in every test. In the end, the hypothesis was proved wrong.

Summary statement

Testing to see if participant's perception of smell can be influenced by suggestion.

Help received

Mother and father helped with experimental design, buying materials, and editing project display. School district mentoring program providing general guidance for project.

Competition history

  • CSEF 2011 Behavioral & Social Sciences · Entry J0425

Resources

Related projects

Closest projects by meaning, across every fair and year in the corpus.

Browse more like this

Source: California Science & Engineering Fair public projects

Save projects to your library

Sign in with Google to keep track of projects you find interesting, organized into folders. An account also raises your daily allowance for “Has this been done?”, and lets you create a key for the MCP server with a much higher limit than anonymous use. Browsing stays public.

Continue with Google