Have You Watched “100 Humans”?

I love behavioral psychology, and there’s finally a TV show to support my fascination with fellow humans.

The show is 100 Humans, and it’s on Netflix now. It features a diverse case of 100 people who willingly participate in a series of studies about human behavior. It’s a small sample size, but it’s still a helpful microcosm to explore characteristics like attraction, age, gender, and bias.

For example, one of my favorite experiments so far involved matchmaking bias. Each participant was presented with 3 real-life couples, though the participant doesn’t know they’re couples. 3 men, 3 women. The participant can ask them any questions, then they must divide them into pairs (they think they’re testing their matchmaking skills). Nearly every participant paired each of the men with a woman, and none of the participants asked the people about their attraction preferences. If they had, they would have realized that only 1 of the couples was heterosexual. This is despite a number of the “100 human” participants being LGBT.

There are also fascinating experiments about assembling furniture (which age group can communicate and build the fastest), humor (are men or women funnier), and bias (are people more likely to target certain race when they feel threatened). I still have 4 more episodes to watch, and I’m eager to see the results.

100 Humans isn’t just entertaining and insightful; it also provides an array of excellent conversation topics. When Megan and I watch, we often pause to discuss what we think will happen, what impacted the results, and how we see ourselves in the show. I love that.

Have you seen this show? What was the most surprising result for you?

6 thoughts on “Have You Watched “100 Humans”?”

  1. I’ve been really looking forward to watching this on Netflix, the premise is so interesting! Unfortunately, I just haven’t gotten around to it yet. If you’re really interested in behavioral psychology, though, you may like a blog series I’ve been working on about how understanding fundamental human behavior can help designers create better games.

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  2. While I tend to think of Netflix for Narcos Mexico (for me) and The Outlander (for Ping and me), I love to hear about some shows that are a bit more cerebral…thanks for letting us know about it.

    Cheers,
    Joe

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  3. Thanks for the tip on this one Jamey. My wife and I both work in psychology (I’m a clinical psychologist, while her training is social psychology) and I always find these shows really interesting. Sometimes, even when the “experiment” is something that’s been well known for a while, my wife and I will enjoy breaking down how they approached it, and how little changes to the way they present things to the participants might have influenced their results (in the example above with the matchmaking, what variations in the directions given to participants might have influenced their choices).

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