Welcome to the experiment

One of my favorite places to write down thoughts is the margins of any notebook I'm using. Whether it's philosophical questions in ethics, notes to myself/the professor in my math classes on homework, or thinking up experiments in psychology, something always gets put to good use. This is the latter. A series of empirical questions that could be carried out via experiment. I won't give away all of the details, because 1) I don't know what they are completely, and 2) if I ever actually end up running any of these, the fewer people that know what to expect, the better.

• Do we get freaked out by a run of consecutive answers on a multiple-choice test?
• I thought about this as I was taking a multiple-choice test, and I would test people's comfort level with choosing the same answer repeatedly. The conventional worry is that one of them has to be something different.
• When we don't know the answer, what are we most likely to guess?
• This would be something a little different. It seems as though C is the answer you go for if you have no idea what to choose, since C just seems to be the common answer for what test-makers usually have as the right answer. I have a really cool procedure for this, so no secrets here.
• Do we feel better about a score on an exam if the points are added or subtracted?
• Let's say you get a 76 on an exam. That can come by virtue of earning 76 points, or by having 24 subtracted for you. Same score, but do we feel better about one over the other?
• On what terms do we like or dislike someone?
• Studies (lots of them) show that the more similar someone's appearance, beliefs, attitudes, opinions, blah blah, are with our own, the more we will like that person. The converse seems to be true. But under what circumstances? One thing I thought of is pronunciation of ambiguous names. My psych professor mentioned Kitty Genovese to us this week, except she pronounced it "gen-o-vee-say," as opposed to how I say it ("gen-o-veese"). I already have an opinion/impression formed regarding my professor, but if I didn't, would I dislike her more than someone who said it the same way I do?

Yeah, so if I ever become a psychologist, and have the independence/freedom to do whatever I want, I totally wanna see the answers to these questions. Haven't done any literature review to see if anyone's already gotten to these ideas (Editor's Note: "gotten" sounds like not a word...), but this would be really cool to find out. This is why I am involved with psychology. Cool stuff like this.