BBC Lab UK

The Big Stress Test was Lab UK's beta launch candidate in May 2009. The experiment was designed by Professor Peter Kinderman from the University of Liverpool and Dr Sara Tai from the University of Manchester. The experiment was promoted via the BBC's mental health and wellbeing website ‘Headroom’. This experiment received roughly 6,000 participants. The experiment was updated and re-launched in 2011.

A collaboration with the Medical Research Council, Cambridge University, King's College London, the Alzheimer's Society and the BBC One Television programme, Bang Goes The Theory - this longitudinal experiment, launched in September 2009, sought to discover whether brain training games made any improvement to IQ for a healthy, general population.[6] The Lab UK website hosted a series of brain training games and the study was structured as a clinical randomised controlled trial. The study contained over 60,000 people for six weeks. The study designers, Dr Adrian Owen and Professor Clive Ballard analysed the data and concluded the games made no difference to a healthy adult population.[7] The results were published in Nature and televised on a BBC One special.

Launched on BBC One's One Show in November 2009, this cross-sectional survey was developed in partnership with University of Cambridge. It used the Big Five personality measure and a range of other well-used psychometric and health measures to determine the correlations between personality and life outcomes. The results informed the returning series ‘Child of Our Time’.[8] The online website featured interactive video presented by Professor Robert Winston which presented your personal results of the personality test. The experiment received over 100,000 participants in the first two days and has received more than 750,000 participants in total.[9]

This experiment was launched in conjunction with the BBC Two programme ‘The Virtual Revolution’ in February 2010.

Developed by researchers at Goldsmiths College, University of London, this experiment explored the relationship between potentially untapped musical ability and musical sophistication. The test was promoted in conjunction with BBC Radio 3’s ‘Genius of Mozart' season in January 2011.

This was the first social science experiment to be co-commissioned by the BBC’s Current Affairs department.[10] Professor Mike Savage and Professor Fiona Devine designed a survey to measure different sociological capitals. The stated ambition was to create a new snapshot of British society and develop some newer, more relevant class labels for the 21st century. The BBC later commissioned a face-to-face recruited survey of roughly 1000 people to overcome the intrinsic class bias of the BBC audience.[11] The survey was promoted on BBC One’s One Show by Professor Mike Savage in January 2011. (also see 'The Great British Class Survey')

Collaborating with BBC One’s consumer programme Watchdog, this experiment aimed to discover the psychological traits that led to money problems in a large general population. The test was designed by Mark Fenton-O'Creevy from the Open University and Adrian Furnham, University College London. It was launched in April 2011 by Watchdog’s finance presenter, Martin Lewis, who featured in the interactive video feedback.[12]

This experiment was developed by Professor David Spiegelhalter and Dr Mike Aitken of Cambridge University. It tested a hypothesis of linkage between numeracy and judgement of risk. The experiment contained various verified measures and a selection of interactive puzzles which tested various aspects of risk judgement. The experiment was promoted on the BBC One science TV programme, “Bang Goes the Theory” in April 2011.[13]

This updated version of the earlier experiment presented more comprehensive feedback and was re-launched by Claudia Hammond on BBC Radio 4’s ‘All in the Mind’ in June 2011.[14]

This experiment into job seekers’ psychological skills accompanied BBC Three’s ‘Up For Hire’ programme. It was promoted in October 2011.[15]

This experiment was developed by researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Building on from ‘The Disgust Test’, this test aimed to test a Human Superorganism hypothesis, and an evolutionary theory of human morals. The survey contained detailed demographic information and 33 ‘vignettes’ which attempted to test people's responses to immoral behaviour across different moral domains. The test was promoted in November 2011.[16]

This experiment was developed by researchers from Sheffield and Wolverhampton Universities. The experiment aimed to test how effective 4 different sports psychology techniques were compared to a control in improving performance at a simple number grid task.[17] The test provided randomised psychological interventions to participants via video clips from Olympic sprinter, Michael Johnson. Participants played the 'Grid' game four times and their performance improvement (or not) was measured. Part of the interactive video feedback by Johnson was the first item to be filmed at Lund Point, the decommissioned block of flats in Stratford that was to become BBC TV's Olympic HQ. The experiment was launched by Michael Johnson on BBC One's The One show in May 2012.[18]

The original data was combined with the data from the re-launched experiment. The findings were significant and were publicised both in peer-reviewed journals and on BBC News and Radio platforms. An All in the Mind special edition detailed some of the ‘thinking styles’ which can lead to depression. More than 30,000 cases of data were analysed to find these results.[19]

The data from the longitudinal study was analysed and the results were featured in Nature - ‘Putting brain training to the test’. The results were publicised on BBC One's Bang Goes the Theory Television programme. The results have caused some controversy, as some researchers said the study ignored the training effects on older, less healthy subjects and that the study instruments weren't sufficiently similar to commercially available products.[20][21]

Preliminary results were extracted from the initial data, which contained more than 100,000 cases. These were used to inform the subject matter of the BBC One TV programme, ‘Child of Our Time’ which aired in May 2010. Over 500,000 cases were recorded in the database by May 2013.[22] The first peer-reviewed paper published based on these data, concerned the psychological aspects of childhood sexual abuse survivors.[23] A study has been published examining the geographical associations between personality and life satisfaction using over 50,000 cases from residents of London. [24] A further study, mapping the regional differences in personality in Great Britain was published in PLoS One.[25] These two studies were the basis for the BBC iWonder's interactive guide "Where in Britain would you be happiest?"[26]

Over 50,000 people completed the survey. The results were written up in the Journal of Information Management in 2011. The authors believed they detected differences between 'generations' in their information seeking strategies with younger people apparently possessing "poorer working memories and are less competent at multi‐tasking" [27]

Over 100,000 people completed the survey. Results were written up in a series of papers. The authors found money attitudes (money as power, security, generosity or autonomy) and financial capabilities (making ends meet, keeping track, planning ahead, and staying informed) to be significant predictors of experiencing adverse financial events ranging from denial of credit to bankruptcy).[28] The test found clear linkages between impulse buying behaviour and serious financial problems and found impulse buying behaviour to be predicted by difficulties in emotion regulation.[29] Combining data with the Big Personality Test they also found impulse buying behaviour to be predicted by personality and money attitudes.[30]

Over 150,00 people completed the test. The researchers’ findings were published in PLoS One in February 2014.[31]

Over 150,000 cases of data plus the recruited GfK survey led to a paper in Sociology.[32] This was synchronised with the publication in March 2013 in the BBC News website of the Great British Class Calculator. The calculator is a web application that asks seven questions from the original survey, and categorises each person into the newly found class categories, depending on their results.[33] The calculator was extremely popular with it being used over 6.5 million times in a week.[34] However it was misunderstood in some quarters with some people thinking it generated the results itself, rather than analysis of the original survey data. The Class Calculator spawned spoofs in popular media but also serious criticism in social science circles.[35] The paper published by Sage Journals is the most downloaded Sociology journal paper of all time with over 23,000 downloads.[36] The paper revealed a new class system for Britain with seven classes which described the changing stratification of modern Britain and the reduction of size of traditional class segments like the working class and the traditional middle class.

Over 110,000 people took part, with a sample of 44,000 analysed. The results were written up in the Frontiers of Psychology journal and found that brief online psychological training could be effect in improving performance, especially the use of the 'self-talk' technique. Other findings noted the importance of emotional control, and the general improvement of the control group throughout the trials demonstrating the value of practice and Michael Johnson's control interventions.[37]