“Nozick’s Experience Machine: An Empirical Study”, Frank Hindriks, Igor Douven2017-12-01 (ethics)⁠:

Many philosophers deny that happiness can be equated with pleasurable experiences. Nozick introduced an experience machine thought experiment to support the idea that happiness requires pleasurable experiences that are “in contact with reality.” In this thought experiment, people can choose to plug into a machine that induces exclusively pleasurable experiences.

We test Nozick’s hypothesis that people will reject this offer. We also contrast Nozick’s experience machine scenario with scenarios that are less artificial, and offer options which are less invasive or disruptive than being connected to a machine, specifically scenarios in which people are offered an experience pill or a pill that improves overall functioning.

…Question Q1 asked whether Weijers’ finding that the vast majority of his participants rejected the offer of being hooked up to the experience machine could be replicated given a version of Nozick’s scenarios stripped down to its essentials. The data bearing on this question came from the group of 35 participants who had received the MP vignette followed by the yes/no question. Of these, 10 answered positively.

This is a considerably higher percentage (29%) than was found in Weijers2014 study, in which 16% accepted the offer of being hooked up to the machine (De Brigard2010’s finding was exactly the same as Weijers’s). A binomial test showed that this difference in percentage was statistically-significant, p = 0.043 (one-sided).¹³ On the other hand, it is still the case that a vast majority rejected the offer of being connected to the machine.

To answer questions Q2 and Q3, we started by comparing the response frequencies to the 3 yes/no questions. These are displayed in Figure 1: This figure shows that the proportion of positive responses to the question concerning the functioning pill is very high and (much) higher than the corresponding proportions for the other 2 conditions, and further that the proportion of positive responses to the question concerning the experience pill is considerably higher than the proportion of positive responses to the question concerning the machine.