Example studies

Truman comes with five finished studies. Each one answers a question, and each uses a different part of the platform. The quickest way to start your own is to read the one closest to what you want to run, then change it.

Four of them are running as demos. Each one's page has a Try it button that opens it the way a participant would see it.

About the rebuilds

Three of them are rebuilds of published designs. We made them to check that Truman 3 can run that kind of study. They are not the original authors' materials, and each page says so.

What do people do when someone is cruel to a stranger?

EatSnap is a food-photo site with 76 made-up people and 284 posts. Somewhere in the feed, one of them says something cruel to another. Which cruel comments a participant sees depends on their condition. This is the site the first Truman study ran on, in the version that shipped with the older Truman code.

Start here if you want a large, lived-in feed that runs over two days.

Does it matter who flagged a post?

Who flagged this? puts a "Flagged as harassment" notice on one comment each day. The notice says other users flagged it, or an automated system did, or it doesn't say. Lower in the feed is a second harassing comment that nobody has flagged, and the question is whether the participant flags that one.

It's a rebuild of Bhandari et al. (2021). Start here for a study with two factors, or one that uses labels on posts.

If more people seem vaccinated, do you think it's the norm?

Vaccine frames is a one-minute scroll through 30 everyday posts. Two, five, or nine of the 30 people have a "vaccinated" frame on their profile picture. Afterward, a survey asks what the participant thinks is normal.

It's a rebuild of Aghajari et al. (2024). Start here for a short study where the measures are in a survey afterward.

Is rudeness contagious?

Town talk puts six real participants in one town forum. The cast answers a neighbor's question politely or with insults. Then the participants write, and they see each other.

It's inspired by Cheng et al. (2017), and it isn't a rebuild of it. Start here if your participants need to meet each other.

What happens when a pile-on starts?

Bystander has someone post her first painting. A few minutes later a classmate mocks it. In one condition someone steps in. In the other, someone likes the mocking comment. What the cast does next depends on what the participant does.

It's made up for testing and isn't from a published study. Start here to see how beats work, including private messages and a cast that can write its own replies.

Side by side

If you're choosing between them, this table lines up the basics.

Study	Conditions	Runs for	Participants together	Uses
EatSnap	5	2 days	No	A large scripted feed, scripted reactions to the participant's posts
Who flagged this?	6 (3 x 2)	2 days	No	Labels, flagging, community rules
Vaccine frames	3	About a minute	No	Profile pictures by condition, a survey link at the end
Town talk	2	About 15 minutes	Six to a world	Shared worlds, automatic rules, live moderation
Bystander	2	1 day	No	Beats, direct messages, optional live writing

Getting one

On hosted Truman, each example is on the New study page, under Where do you want to start?, as Example: EatSnap and so on. Choosing one copies its people, posts, conditions, beats, and tests into a study that's yours to change. Its consent page and the other steps a participant goes through aren't copied, since those have to be your own.

Every example is also in the repository, under studies/examples/. On your own Truman, one command brings it in as a frozen version you can launch:

pnpm study import studies/examples/bystander

Studies as files explains what's in the folder. Four of the five also come with scenario tests, which Testing a study covers.

The consent pages are placeholders

That's true of all five. A real study uses the text its ethics board approved. For IRBs has what your board will want to know about Truman itself.