I'm probably a bad person because of this, but I'd probably bruteforce the most thorough genetics research we'd ever had. I'd remove/disable/alter gene sequences in the human or in an animal genome one by one and see if they have a visible effects. Then if they had little to no visible effects, I'd note them down and toy with THESE genes in pairs/combos. Continue until there's nothing to toy with (which means I've just proven we have garbage DNA) or all gene sets effects have been classified. Then I'd do a whole, more thorough pass on the known genes/combos to see if there's any special effect I can achieve (anything from muscle growth to brain growth). So the long of the short is I'd probably deconstruct what genetics is and possibly try to make an Ubermensch in the process, or at least figure out how to reconstruct and extend DNA longevity to increase lifespan. And then when/if that's done and the above didn't cover this case, I'd start researching ways to allow humans to survive, without being harmed, massive accelerations (in the orders of about 4000 gs - the sort of acceleration I'm thinking might be necessary for proper space flight). Then I'd research cryogenics. If I succeed at cryogenics, start researching better, lighter forms of radiation shielding for space travel. Then advanced methods of propulsion. Then I'd pour all of the money into energy research - fusion reactors, battery and/or supercapacitor/battery capacitor tech, so on. And finally, I would fund research into alternate weaponry.
TL;DR: my social experiment is making a legit space supervillain of myself and seeing how the world would react
More realistically, though? I'd do a social experiment on human nature. Lock someone in a studio-apartment - a single, warehouse-sized room (not as high obviously - but surface area) with a relatively large, but mostly empty bathroom (equipped with a bath-on-legs, a toilet and the most basic of sinks). Basically a huge blank-slate apartment. Then give them a single terminal from which they can order anything - furniture, food, equipment, materials (including wall-building supplies), workers or company (whether paid to do stuff or just a legit room-mate). These are the test parameter groups I would do (all experiments start with a single person in the apartment - for maximum research value, select widest variety of people from a multitude of countries):
Control group:
-No limit on number of people in apartment.
-No visitation hours restriction.
-No presence restriction (person can leave at any time for any duration of time) Group 1: Sedentarization/initiative tests
-No people limit
-No visitation hours restriction
-Participant cannot leave apartment Group 2: Isolation/social priorities tests
-No people limit
-Only four cumulative hours of visits per day (one person can stay four hours - four people can stay one hour, eight can stay half an hour and so on)
-Participant cannot leave apartment Group 3: "The Fortress" (safe space experiment)
-No one but participant can be in apartment.
-No presence restrictions Group 4: Work hour balance Tests (whether self-
-Credits given per activity/objects/tasks done
-Participant can exchange credits for rights (hours of visitation, hours of absence, hours of usage of items being classified as 'non-productive entertainment' such as the non-educational channels of television, access to accounts on the Internet, so on) Group 5: Motivation tests (which also aim to determine which, if any, differences are there between what realtors consider valuable versus what people seem to find attractive in a living space
-No visitation limits
-No people limit
-No presence limit
-Participant is told that at the end of the trial, the apartment will be sold to real-estate agencies. On a set period of time (depending on which rooms, may be daily, weekly or monthly), an agent (which will be either a real, established realtor, a trained actor set to react to certain criteria or one of the scientists, who will be told to consider it according to their own tastes) enters the room (with several reminders for the participant: two days, one day, six hours and one hour) and evaluates it's perceived 'value' versus what people actively find beautiful and/or would live in.
-At the end of the trial, all three types of agents aforementioned walk in and give a percieved value without debating among themselves for comparisons. Group 6: "Madhouse Factory"
-No people may ever visit the apartment. All supplies are delivered by machines.
-No access to any website with a social function.
-No access to any media that features any of these: human voices, human faces (and at least one room will have this extended to no human bodies), stylized writing. Group 7: "End of Days" (to simulate a possible, worst-case scenario apocalypse)
-No people may ever visit the apartment. All supplies are delivered by machines.
-Only one hour of access to any social group via Internet per day.
-Electricity will randomly fail (the room is either to have no windows, or if it has windows it will need to be nowhere near any population centers), deliveries will randomly not-be-delivered, or partially delivered, equipment will be designed to randomly fail, water will randomly be cut (if it was enabled in the first place)
There's probably a few more I'm forgetting.