BBC Lab UK

» see bbc.co.uk/labuk as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

The thing a public broadcaster has that a psychology department does not is several million people who will do what it suggests on a Tuesday evening. The BBC noticed this in 2008. Lab UK was what came of it: a website where the audience of a television program became the sample of an actual experiment, designed by actual academics, with the results submitted to peer review.

It was commissioned by BBC Commissioner Lisa Sargood and conceived by executive producer Richard Cable, who edited it from 2008 until 2011. The beta was the Big Stress Test in May 2009 and pulled around 6,000 people. Twelve experiments ran over the next four years. Each one gave you your own result the moment you submitted, and each one handed a clean anonymized dataset to the research team that had designed it.

The numbers are the part that still looks improbable. The Big Personality Test launched on BBC One's The One Show in November 2009 and took 100,000 participants in two days, ending up above 750,000. Brain Test Britain ran more than 60,000 people through a six-week randomized controlled trial of brain training games and published the result in Nature in 2010, which was that the games did nothing measurable for a healthy adult population. Test Your Morality collected 80,000 responses from 202 countries.

Data collection stopped in May 2013, after the site was migrated into the BBC's Knowledge & Learning product. The pages stayed up for a while carrying a line that read "All the experiments have been concluded and Lab UK is now closed", along with a warning that you could no longer see your individual feedback. The site was formally archived in March 2016. bbc.co.uk/labuk returns a 404 today.

~ the case file ~

~ the class calculator ~

The Great British Class Survey is the one that escaped. Mike Savage and Fiona Devine designed it to measure different kinds of capital rather than income alone, and it drew over 150,000 online responses. Because a BBC audience is not Britain, the BBC then paid for a separately recruited face-to-face survey of about a thousand people to correct the bias. The paper landed in Sociology in April 2013 and proposed seven classes instead of the familiar three.

That paper is the most downloaded article the journal has ever published, past 23,000 downloads. The calculator BBC News built alongside it was used 6.5 million times in a single week. A good deal of the country spent that week finding out it was "emergent service worker" and arguing about it, and a good deal of British sociology spent the following year arguing about whether the model held up.

~ a very british thing ~

Every experiment launched off the back of a program. The One Show, Watchdog, Bang Goes the Theory, All in the Mind. That was the whole mechanism, and it meant the project only existed if you had BBC One on in the evening. I did not, and neither did anyone else in Ankara. From here the entire thing is something you meet later, in the methods section of a paper, where a sample of 60,000 is explained by a footnote about a television show.

~ what got buried with it ~

The individual feedback died first and it was the reason most people took part. You did the test, you watched a short piece of video where Robert Winston or Michael Johnson explained what your answers meant, and then that result belonged to you. When the site closed the personal results went, and the closing notice said so in the first sentence.

The science survived. Datasets from the class survey and the personality test went into the UK Data Archive at Essex and are still there for researchers. Papers were still coming out of the Test Your Morality data in 2023, a decade after the last person filled it in. The Open University built nQuire with the BBC in 2018 on what Lab UK had taught them, so the model outlasted the site.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »