I went to a small high school.  Less than 500 students in the entire school.  For my experiment I sent facebook messages to old classmates.  But only, to classmates I didn’t know particularly well.  This meant that while all of them would know who I am, none of them would expect to receive a facebook message from me.  For the most part I tried to choose classmates who I had never spoken to on facebook at all, even while we were in school together.

So in this case it was hard to get the sample that I wanted since I was restrained by whether or not my old classmates were online or not, but the basic idea was that I would select a few classmates and divide them based on gender and on whether they were older younger or the same age as me.

At first I had trouble getting responses.

However, after a while I got my first few bites.  And I noticed a few things.  In general, students who were younger than me responded, and did so quickly.

Youngins:

and pretty much anyone who was in my class responded as well (admittedly tho I knew these two pretty well),

and I didn’t get a single response from anyone older than me.

and just for fun here are some extra examples.  The one on the left was a guy I met at wrestling camp around 4 years ago.  I’ve had no contact with him other than this message I received the other.  This gave me a good chance to be on the other side of the experiment which I thought was interesting.  The girl on the left was an Au Pair from Germany who I met at the beginning of freshman year.  I hadn’t spoken to her since then