1. A group of college students were
given a short course in speed-reading. The instructor was curious if a
monetary incentive would influence performance on a reading test taken
at the end of the course. Half the students were offered $5 for
obtaining a certain level of performance on the test, the other half
were not offered money.
Independent variable:
Monetary incentive ($5 or no money)
Dependent variable:
Performance on reading test
Experimental group: $5
group (receive monetary incentive)
Control group: $0 group (no
monetary incentive)
2. A social psychologist thinks that
people are more likely to conform to a large crowd than to a single
person. To test this hypothesis, the social psychologist had either one
person or five persons stand on a busy walking path on campus and look
up. The psychologist stood nearby and counted the number of people
passing by who also looked up.
Independent variable: Size
of group (5 people or 1 person)
Dependent variable:
Conformity (measured by number of people looking up)
Experimental group: People
passing 5 person group
Control group: People
passing single person. (This group gets “less” of the independent
variable)
3. To test a new voice feature in a
cockpit design a flight simulator was used. The simulator was
programmed to give visual readings of flight information, or to give
visual and auditory (voice) readings of flight information. All
test pilots were put through a simulated emergency landing procedure,
but were randomly assigned to the visual, or visual and auditory
conditions. Flight experts rated each pilot’s performance in the
simulator on a scale of 1 (very poor) to 10 (excellent).
Independent variable:
Presence or absence of auditory (voice) readings. (All pilots received
visual readings, so that is a constant variable.)
Dependent variable: Ratings
of pilots’ performance
Experimental group: Pilots
in auditory readings condition (visual + auditory)
Control group: Pilots in
visual reading only condition (no auditory)
No comments:
Post a Comment