Читать книгу Interpreting and Using Statistics in Psychological Research - Andrew N. Christopher - Страница 36

We will begin by discussing a research study titled “Gender differences in aggression: The role of status and personality in competitive interactions,” which was conducted by Heather Terrell, Eric Hill, and Craig Nagoshi (2008). In this study, there were 150 undergraduate students (78 women and 72 men) at a large southwestern U.S. university. Upon arriving at the research lab, each participant completed measures of his or her personality.

Each participant then answered six questions about his or her hobbies, interests, and accomplishments. These questions are contained in Table 2.1. The researchers told each participant that his or her responses to these six questions would be exchanged with the “other participant,” who was located in a room down the hallway. However, there was no other participant. The supposed other participant was a confederate; that is, he or she was part of the experiment and pretended to be a participant in this study. The answers that the real participant received were “staged” to make the supposed other participant appear to be either “high status” or “low status.” Recall from Chapter 1 the notion of random assignment. Each of the 150 participants was randomly assigned to receive feedback that made the (not real) other participant appear to be “high status” or “low status.”

Table 2.1

Figure 2.1 Sample Screen Displays in Terrell et al.’s (2008) Research

After learning the status of the other supposed participant, the real participant was then informed that he or she would be competing with this person on an upcoming task that involved learning and reaction time. Here are the directions that the researchers gave the participant:

The task (in the experiment) is to find a target letter among four letters on the computer screen. As soon as you press the response key, the screen will change. If there is no response, the screen will change approximately every 2 seconds. If the target letter is in the layout of letters, you will press 1. If the target letter is not in the layout of letters, you will press 2. (Terrell et al., 2008, p. 819)

You can see an example of one of these computer screen displays in Figure 2.1.

After practicing the task for two minutes, participants were informed:

[F]or the competitive trials, both of you (the actual participant and the supposed participant down the hallway) will be wearing headphones, and you will have the option of administering noise blasts to your competitor in order to distract (him/her). Pressing the space bar produces the noise blasts. These noise blasts are very unpleasant, and will disrupt performance, causing errors in the competitive task. (Terrell et al., 2008, p. 819)

Of course, the real participant was told that the other (bogus) participant could also give noise blasts. Indeed, each real participant received 30 randomly spaced noise blasts while performing the task, which lasted 10 minutes. The real participant could administer noise blasts, too, which again, would impair the performance of his or her supposed high- or low-status competitor. Terrell and her colleagues (2008) wanted to see how aggressive the real participant would be toward his or her supposed competitorbased on the real participant’s sex and personality and the competitor’s supposed status.