 I'm a huge nerd and pretty much write and make videos about things that I find interesting. I'm curious about the world and feel like sometimes I'm interested in some ridiculous topics. With that being said, I was extremely surprised how many of you enjoyed my last video about why the Danny Gonzales TikTok song didn't go viral. Aside from analyzing human behavior and the psyche, I like trying to figure out why things did or didn't happen, so I'm extremely grateful that so many of you are inquisitive as well. With this video, I don't mean to milk the Danny Gonzales TikTok song topic, but this is something that was on my mind throughout watching his video. While watching Danny's video, I just kept thinking, there are so many things wrong with this experiment. I debated on discussing it in my last video, but I figured that'd make it way too long. I love that Danny goes out of his comfort zone and tries new things, and I think that's one of the reasons why he's one of the best YouTubers on the platform right now. It's easy to see that Danny has a curious mind and it's great to see him experiment. So I'm hoping that if Danny sees this, it will help him improve his method for the next experiment. But more importantly, I hope it helps all of you think a little bit more critically about how we conduct experiments to get a little closer to the truth. Scientific literacy is extremely important in this day and age. We're constantly flooded with clickbait headlines that say things like, New study shows breathing air cures cancer, or how drinking a gallon of mayonnaise can extend your life by three and a half years. Yes, I know those examples were exaggerated, but you know what I mean. In a world where people are fighting to get our clicks rather than deliver us the truth, I feel it's important that we understand what a good experiment looks like. Each day, we put our trust in politicians, doctors, and others who tell us about studies. Too often we succumb to confirmation bias while neglecting all of the flaws in the study that we're being informed about. Up until this year, I didn't know how to independently think about different studies and the information I was receiving. So I made it a personal goal to better understand how studies are done and what separates good science from bad science. I'm also extremely fascinated how people can fall for conspiracy theories. So I was able to scratch all of these itches of curiosity with some great books. Some of the books that really helped me better understand the scientific method and good versus bad studies are The Skeptic Sky to the Universe, Science Fictions, and Calling BS. While I personally find this topic extremely interesting, I know learning about scientific studies and research can be pretty boring for some. So this is why I love nerding out by taking pop culture topics like the Danny Gonzalez TikTok song to help people better understand these sometimes boring topics. So in this video, we're going to pretend that Danny hired us to help him make a viral TikTok song. Hopefully by the end, Danny and the rest of us can improve our experimenting process. First, we're going to take a look at some of the research questions we'd want to answer as Danny when trying to make a TikTok song go viral and then we'll form our hypothesis. After that, it's time to scrutinize our hypothesis and variables to try and make sure we're not missing anything with our process. Finally, we'll put it all together to see what a proper experiment would look like as well as some limitations we may face while running it. But before we get started, if you're new to the Rewired Soul, make sure you subscribe and ring that notification bell. Here, we use critical thinking and practice skepticism to better understand the world and improve our overall well-being. And if you're interested in any of the books that I mentioned, the affiliate links are always listed down in the description below. Every experiment should have a goal and most experiments start with a question. Sometimes our questions are too broad or too vague, so it's important to sit down and really see what we want to accomplish with this experiment. We want to help Danny make his TikTok song go viral, but what kind of research will we be doing? The two primary types of studies are quantitative and qualitative. Qualitative studies are often used in psychology, but they're much harder to properly analyze because some of the data is based on subjective experience. With quantitative research, we're looking at numbers. Since we're trying to make a TikTok song go viral, we're going to have clear metrics we can look at, but there may be some additional subjective factors, so it'll be both qualitative and quantitative. Next, we need to narrow this down a bit. What are we going to do? What do we think might work? Well, let's say after consulting with Danny, we think that there's a formula for viral TikTok songs. So the more precise question we want to ask for our research is, can a formula make a TikTok song go viral? Now it's time to form a hypothesis and set up some variables. Our hypothesis is what we want to test, what we're changing, and what we think is going to happen. First, we need to make sure we have an independent and dependent variable. The independent variable is what we're going to change or control, and the dependent variable is what we're hoping to have an effect on. So in this situation, the independent variable is a formula we're going to come up with for Danny's TikTok song, and the dependent variable is the amount of times people use the song in TikToks. When we put it all together, our hypothesis is that you can use a specific formula to make a TikTok song go viral. Next, it's time to get serious and really figure out how we're going to run this experiment. I'm currently taking a course on effective research methods, and something the instructor said was extremely important. She said, a proper experiment is trying to find the truth, but if you're just trying to confirm your hypothesis, you have an agenda. When we hear about research, we often don't want to do the extra work and get the details about who ran the study and why. We often forget that even scientists have biases and agendas, and unsurprisingly, they can also be motivated by money. Decades ago, a group of scientists from Harvard came out saying that facts were the primary danger and not sugar. Years later, it was discovered that the researchers were actually paid by the sugar industry to do this research. Disgraced doctor Andrew Wakefield, the man who started the anti-vax movement, was being paid by the lawyers of parents to prove the MMR vaccine caused autism. Since then, his research has been retracted, but as we all know, the damage has been done. Although we're not making major decisions about health like the above examples, in this hypothetical situation, Danny hired us to help with some research, and since we're ethical scientists, we're going to do some good work. That's why we're going to scrutinize our hypothesis and variables before we get started. First and foremost, we need to ask a very important question. Does the problem underlying our research really matter to society at large? Well, it's easy to say no, helping Danny go viral on TikTok doesn't matter. We need to think about the bigger picture. If we can prove that a formula can make something go viral on TikTok, this is huge for people who are passionate about creating and want to be an influencer. Even more importantly, think about the implications this could have for charity organizations and raising awareness about important global issues. If we were to help the ASPCA go viral on TikTok, think about all the animals that we could help. Or what if the National Alliance on Mental Illness wanted to raise mental health awareness? We can help them out significantly with this formula. Next, we need to ask ourselves if we'll be able to locate evidence for our research. Something that separates real science from pseudoscience is that the real science is falsifiable. In this case, if our hypothesis is that a formula can make Danny's TikTok song get 50,000 uses, we'll have data to know if we failed or succeeded. If this was a pseudoscientific study, we wouldn't be able to falsify it because we'd say something like, the lack of views actually shows that it was a success. It's a heads I win, tails you lose scenario. But we're awesome researchers, so we don't play like that. Now, we need to take a look at the extraneous variables. And I think this is where Danny could have really improved his experiment. An extraneous variable is something that could affect the results of the experiment that we may not be expecting. In this case, the biggest extraneous variable we might face is that people recognize Danny. With 1.5 million followers on TikTok and over 4 million on YouTube, if people find out it's Danny, it's an issue. Why? Due to his popularity, if the song does go viral, we won't know if it was because of our formula or because of the fact that popularity can beget popularity. Like I said, I think this was the biggest one that Danny didn't think about. But if you can think of any other extraneous variables, do me a favor and leave a comment down below. With a proper experiment like this, we're starting from scratch. So in this fictional world where Danny hired us to help him, we're going to pretend he never independently ran his experiment on his own. But at the brainstorming table, Danny brings us some ideas he had for running this experiment, and they sound pretty good. Some of Danny's ideas include, find a common style of beat that works for viral TikTok songs. Gather a bunch of viral TikTok songs and create a word cloud. Create a new account with a fake name to promote the song. Then create consistent content with the song and use some current TikTok trends to try and gain some traction. These are all great ideas and we're going to run with them. But Danny has one last idea. He's going to record the song and the videos while wearing a minimal disguise. Well, this is why Danny pays us the big bucks because we immediately bring up the extraneous variables. Danny has a unique voice and short of a special effects team, but it may not be too hard for people to figure out it's Danny. So, what's a better way to run this experiment? First, we're going to hire an actor to be the song's artist, Ned Flanes, AKA Fox Season. In order to limit other factors, we need to find someone with a similar build to Danny. We want to hire an actor with a slim build about six feet tall and has magnificent hair. It's important that we find someone similar looking to Danny because let's say you cast me and the song flopped. Is it because the formula was bad or because I'm overweight? Or if we hired a woman, we'd have to take those factors into consideration as well. But we'll circle back to this topic during the replication process. Next, we need to find someone with a similar quality of rapping as Danny. Maybe the actor we hired can flow and if that's the case, that's awesome. If not, we need to find someone else. As we all know, Danny can rap. So, we can't just hire someone like your dad to record the track. Even if Danny writes the lyrics, we need someone he can coach to have a similar style and quality. And now that we have everything that we need, we can run the experiment and check the results. Well, the experiment is over and since Danny hired the best team in the business, we not only hit our goal, but we passed it. Within just a couple of weeks, over 75,000 people used this track and it's the latest banger on TikTok. Then, we revealed to the world that this was an experiment and we get Danny Gonzalez a million more followers on TikTok and on YouTube because we did such an epic job. The end, right? Well, not exactly. Now is the most important part of the study. Remember, we wanted to run this research for the greater good. We want to help hopeful influencers go viral and we also want to help organizations that are doing good for the world. So, before we publish our findings, we're going to want to do two important things. One, try to replicate our findings and two, try to disprove our findings. But first, let's start with trying to disprove our findings. We need to step into the role of a competing researcher or investigative journalist and do everything we can to debunk our findings. Then and only then can a researcher have any faith in their results. In the scientific realm, this is where peer reviews come in. When a group of scientists publishes their findings, more people from the scientific community get involved. While running our research, we may have been too narrow-minded and not thought of other factors that may have contributed to our findings or we may have succumbed to our own biases without even realizing it. But in my opinion, before publishing findings, you'll gain a lot more credibility by publishing all the things you did to try and disprove your research rather than confirm it. This not only makes the work easier during the peer review process, but it also shows that you're trying to have scientific integrity. Lastly, it's time to replicate the study. So let's say, since Danny is such a nice guy, he never made a sign in NDA and he wants us to go around helping other influencers with our findings. We give them our formula and see if they can replicate our success. Not only that, but we run our experiment multiple times as well to see if we can replicate it. One of the crucial aspects of analyzing results is having a proper sample size. If we only tested it once and it worked, we wouldn't know if we just got lucky. Maybe the TikTok algorithm just happened to help us more than it normally would or maybe a big influencer just happened to use our song. By running the research multiple times, we could see how legitimate our research actually was. Once replicated, we'd want to try a bunch of other different variables. We want to change different pieces of the formula and I think a great place to start is with the actor. We should try to replicate it with actors of various heights, weights, nationalities, clothing styles, and more. Then, we should also record tracks with a female rapper and hire actresses to see if gender played a role. Interestingly enough, there are companies that actually do this. For any of you who watch the social dilemma on Netflix, you know there's a lot of work that goes into the data that's collected. And hopefully, now that you've got a better understanding of the process, you can also better understand how algorithms are used to grab your attention for various agendas. But my hope is that you take this knowledge and use it to satisfy your own curiosity and run some proper experiments to help you in other areas of your life. All right, everybody. Thank you once again for nerding out with me. I think this is really important, right? Like, even though it's like fun, it's fun to look at like, you know, the Danny Gonzales TikTok viral song experiment. Like, I use this kind of stuff at my job. Like, I have a very cool position where I get to run different experiments and try different things to help our company, to help our clients, and I look at data and stuff like that. And I want to make sure that I'm looking at the data correctly. And here's the thing, here's the thing. This is something that I just started educating myself about like thoroughly, like this year, right? And I'm learning so, so, so much. Something that I didn't really dive into in this is biases, right? Like, I think one of the most important things, and I talk about it all the time when I talk about critical thinking and all of that, is like we need to educate ourselves about all the different biases we have. All the different biases. Because if not, we can just go down the wrong pathway. Like you remember in Dumb and Dumber, right? When they go on the wrong road for like hours or whatever and that's when they end up getting a little moped. Anyways, you know what I'm talking about. And that's why we need to be mindful of our own biases because our biases can make us feel like we're on the right path and we're just totally screwing everything up. But again, more importantly, we're constantly fed different studies and research and everything like that and educating ourselves about how proper research is done. We can go a step further and be like, is this really a credible study? What does the scientific community actually say? So like I said, I've listed those books down below, The Skeptics Guide to the Universe, Calling BS and Science Fictions. Those are all great if you're interested in this topic and how research is properly done, the difference between pseudoscience and regular science and all that stuff. So check out the description down below. All right, but anyways, that's all I got for this video. If you like this video, please give it a thumbs up if you're new. Make sure you subscribe and ring that notification bell and a huge, huge thank you to everybody who supports the channel over on Patreon or getting the books that I've written over at therewiresole.com or using my affiliate links to get the books that I recommend. That all helps, all right? You're all awesome. Thanks again for watching. I'll see you next time.