Each year, peer counselors apply their learning in real-life situations as they support 7th and 9th graders in their transition to Flintridge Prep. The Psych-Stat project brings all the students’ work together.

A required capstone project at the end of the year pushes psychology students to get curious about a social psychology topic and move out of their comfort zone by testing their theories with real subjects in downtown Los Angeles. Each experiment is required to have enough statistically significant data to be analyzed by AP Statistics students.

The project includes several phases. Students work in teams, pick a social psychology topic, conduct a literature review, and present their experiment to an ethics review panel of adults on campus, who provide valuable feedback.

Iteration is Expected

“Every year, projects need to be modified to make sure they are safe, doable, and answer the research question,” says psychology teacher and Assistant Head for Student Life Barrett Jamison. “We ask a lot of questions to help students evaluate their plans.”

Nicolle Riley ’24 had to rethink her group’s experiment for safety reasons. The team studied the bystander effect (a phenomenon in which individuals don’t help someone because they think others will). In the final experiment, they intentionally dropped a stack of boxes. “People were more likely to help me than a guy,” says Nicolle. “I think it builds off gender norms in society. The expectation is that men don’t really need additional support.”

Putting Yourself Out There

Ashlee Notley ’24, who was in both AP Statistics and Psychology, explored response bias, which describes situations where people don’t answer questions truthfully for some reason. Because “people are in a hurry commuting or on their lunch break,” it was difficult to isolate subjects’ rationale for participating or not participating.

Even so, Ashlee gained valuable insights. “The process of hopping on the Metro, find your way around, and going up to strangers—it was a life experience.”

Statistics teacher Todd Frost says that since statistics students help collect data, “they recognize where bias could show up. They are taking something they’ve learned in theory and applying it to a real situation.”

Making connections

Rhys King ’24 studied the spotlight effect (the tendency to overestimate how many people notice something about you) at the LA Public Library. One team member set off a phone alarm in the center of the room, while others observed reactions. People were generally unbothered by the interruption. “It’s a phenomenon felt by the person whose alarm has gone off,” says Rhys. “People are dialed into what they’re doing.”

This conclusion helped validate Rhys’ sense of when a spotlight can be truly valuable and healthy—when people need to feel seen and heard. As a peer counselor, he says he “realized what we mean to younger kids. Small things, like going out of your way to just say hi, are important to them.”