Japanese Billionaire to Donate $9 Million to Random Twitter Followers to See If Money Makes Them Happier
A Japanese billionaire has announced plans to donate a billion yen (about $9 million) to 1,000 of his Twitter followers in an intriguing social experiment designed to show how money affects people’s lives. On January 1st, Yusaku Maezawa, founder of Japan’s largest fashion retail website, tweeted that he would be giving away 1 billion Japanese […]
Japanese Company Pays People to Be Filmed in Their Own Homes for a Month
Our online data is already monetized by several technology giants, but one Japanese IT company thinks real-life data could be monetized as well, and it’s willing to pay people to have their everyday life video-recorded and sold to various businesses. Last month, Tokyo-based Plasma.inc made national news headlines for inviting people to take part in […]
Would You Pay Thousands of Dollars Just to Let People Know You Have Money to Burn?
In what could be described as a very expensive social experiment, a young IT professional has created a website that allows people to upload a picture if they pay at least $1,000 for the privilege. Think of it as a status symbol, a way to show the world you have money to burn. The “Golden […]
Mayor Disguises Himself as Disabled Person to Test Public Servants
As part of an unusual social experiment, a Mexican mayor disguised himself as a disabled person in need of assistance to test the attitude of local public servants first-hand. After receiving a number of complaints from disabled and other socially disadvantaged people about the treatment they received from social workers, Carlos Tena, the mayor of […]
Artist Leaves 100,000 Pennies in Abandoned Fountain to See How People React to It
English artist Anna Brownsted left 100,000 pennies in an abandoned public fountain in Cambridge, over the weekend, in a bid to explore human nature. The money was all stolen in just one day. The coins worth £1,000 were placed in the fountain at Quayside, in Cambridge, at 8 am on Saturday, and were supposed to be left […]
Man Generates Almost No Garbage in Two and a Half Year Trash-Free Experiment
Darshan Karwat, a post-doctorate at the University of Michigan, is making headlines for having maintained an incredibly frugal and sustainable lifestyle during his student years. The man gave up fast food, new clothes, and even toilet paper, until he got to a point where his trash for an entire year fit in just two plastic […]
Straight Christian Pretends to Be Gay for a Year in Unique Social Experiment
Although he grew up believing that homosexuality was a sin, in 2010 Timothy Kurek, of Nashville, Tennessee, spent the entire year pretending to be gay in an attempt to truly understand and empathize with what homosexual people go through. Kurek’s social experiment is extraordinary, given the kind of upbringing he had as a conservative Christian […]
Staffless Pay-What-You-Will Bookstore in China Actually Works
A peculiar outdoor bookstore recently opened in Nanjing, China. There is no cashier desk and no working staff to keep an eye on the books. Instead, visitors are invited to peruse the reading material on offer and pay whatever they want for books by dropping the money in a lock-box. Organizers say the aptly named Honesty […]
Dutch Woman Uses Facebook to Deceive Family and Friends She Is on Trip to South-East Asia without Even Leaving Amsterdam
25-year-old Zilla van den Born managed to fool her friends and family into believing that she was on a five-week vacation in South-East Asia, when, in reality, she was at home in Amsterdam the whole time, clicking seemingly authentic holiday photographs and putting them up on Facebook to create the illusion! Zilla devised the elaborate […]
No Internet, No Cable, No Problem – Canadian Family Lives Like It’s 1986
Most people couldn’t imagine a day without their fancy smartphones, but a family in Guelph, Canada has decided to shun all post-1986 technology from their lives for a whole year, as part of a social experiment. It all started last year when Blair McMillan asked his five-year old son if he wanted to come outside […]