Question

What is one possible systematic error in the experiement determining reaction time? Our entire class has values much lower than the accepted human reaction time. The experiment involved having one person drop a ruler from a certain marking on the ruler and have the other person catch it and determing how many numbers passed before they caught the ruler. Then we used formulas from there to calculate the actual value for our reaction time. I don't know why everyone's data would be much lower?

Answer 1

the accuracy of the experiment depends upon the human error involved.

if the measurement of distance fallen by the ruler and the actual measurement of the time interval in which a person notices the falling ruler and catches it , are erroneous, total exercise will be meaningless.

as time interval is very small, you need a very high precision timer / clock and multiple number of experiments without changing the outside environment in order to get an accurate reading of the reaction time.

one way to reduce human error involved is to perform one experiment without changing any other parameters and notice if the results are consistent or not.

and then remove the outliers and take average of the remaning readings to get a better data as compared to single experiment reading.