A seventeen year old girl did just that, wearing a fake baby bump under her stomach, as a way to see how people would react. Only her mother, best friend, boyfriend, and principal knew the truth. Link here.
My first thought was it seemed pretty mean, especially for the parents of her boyfriend. And her siblings. I’d have a pretty hard time trusting her again. Plus, I don’t really see what value her experiment had anyway. To me it looked like someone who watched too “What Would You Do?” and thought, “Ooh, science!”
Just wearing one out in public wouldn’t be a big deal, but it’s a horrible thing to do to anyone whose life it will impact. Fooling the boyfriend’s parents is probably the worst offense (and that’s her boyfriend’s fault that he didn’t tell them the truth), followed by her siblings, other relatives, and anyone else who might be expected to play a role in supporting the baby or who might be thinking in terms of welcoming a new member of the family into the world.
If I told my sister I were pregnant then said six months later that it was bullshit, she’d kick my ass. And I’d deserve it.
No, I don’t think humans are so fragile that this would affect them long term.
I am offended at the reporter. I mean jeez! you think you can read off more than one card?
If she made even a couple of people reevaluate their prickish sensibilities than maybe it was worth it. Keep In mind that this wasn’t exactly all fun and games for the girl in question either. She basically sacrificed her senior year in HS just for this social experiment.
I’ll admit that I only took one sociology course and one anthropology course (which touched on it) in college. But I saw that she said she wanted to take sociology in college so it triggered my memory.
Wierd. Part of me thinks this is a great social lesson for teenagers. The other part of me says giant jerk. I go out of my way to make allowances, provide support for people with obvious disabilities and pregnancy. For someone to fake pregnancy could lead to questioning if someone is really pregnant or just trying to get some sort of special treatment.
I think, if you were the boyfriend’s parents, it would very likely poison your relationship with her forever if they somehow stayed together long-term.
Imagine your teenaged son knocks some girl up, and you’re trying to make the best of it, figuring out ways to help support the kid, getting ready to be a grandparent, thinking about buying baby stuff, and then you find out she was faking for a “social experiment,” and neither she nor your son could be bothered to tell you.
I think I would be pretty frigging upset with both of them.
Very much this. It’s akin to telling people falsely that a loved one has died. You don’t screw with people’s emotions like that and expect everybody to come out untouched.
Seems pretty stupid- wouldn’t it be just as easy to collect data on people’s reaction to pregnancy by finding and using someone who is actually pregnant to gather data
Also, the best example they came up with of people’s negative reactions:
"Her best friend, Saida Cortes, a 17-year-old senior who was sitting in the front row, read card No. 3: “Her attitude is changing, and it might be because of the baby or she was always this annoying and I never realized it.”
well…Maybe her attitude was changing, because of the experiment? maybe she was always that annoying and the quoted never realized it… not much of a hurtful rumor or stereotype, just an observation somebody made to someone else that may have been true anyway. Someone willing to fool their boyfriend’s whole family that way seems like a good candidate to be an annoying person.
Well, I think that was the climax of the whole experience. It would have been nice if the reporter gave us excepts from more than one frig’n card.
I understand. To me, it’s all about context. If she were standing in front of the assembly pointing and laughing saying “Ha Ha Ha! I sure got you.” That would be one thing. I think her intentions were good. So I’m not going to bust the kids balls over that.
Reminds me of the “social experiment” a couple of my classmates conducted once, in which one of them moaned and twitched spastically in a wheelchair while being wheeled through a grocery store by his friend. A lot of good data was collected from that.
Doing it to strangers is not a big deal, because it doesn’t significantly affect their lives. Anyone with the slightest bit of social intelligence would know what this would do to her friends and loved ones. Intentions matter, but she intended to manipulate other people who would be significantly impacted.
And, as far as I know, you can lie to people IF THEY’VE AGREED TO BE IN AN EXPERIMENT. And you have to inform every single person that it was fake. I don’t see how she could even do that. It’s not just the people in school who would have seen her.
Finally, I fail to see what validity this experiment would have. All she’s got are rumors that came back to her. That’s not data. She gave up her entire reputation at that school for nothing. Why in the world didn’t anyone tell her how stupid this idea was?
I mean, if I were her friend, I could never trust her again for lying about something so big. And I’m one of those people who thinks holding grudges is wrong. I could forgive her, but I couldn’t trust that she wouldn’t put some crappy experiment in front of our friendship again. The relationship would die.
You’d also have to debrief them later if the situation was potentially upsetting enough (just saying “lolz it was a joke/experiment” is not sufficient); I suspect this would probably qualify.