Chapter One Topic: Georgia believes that people are more likely to behave kindly

Question

Chapter One Topic: Georgia believes that people are more likely to behave kindly towards others if they are in a good mood. She designs an experiment to test this hypothesis. She randomly assigns students who are participating for extra credit to one of two different groups. In one group, participants are told to write for 10 minutes about the happiest moment of their lives. In the other group, participants are to write about a typical day in their life. After this writing task, she sets up a hidden camera to film the participants leaving the experiment and encountering an actor who is pretending that they have lost their cell phone to see if the participants help. A) Why did Georgia assign participants to the groups randomly? B) What is the independent variable, and what is the dependent variable, and how is she defining each of these variables? Think about my Psamtick example in class, and how a good mood is produced, and what does behaving kindly mean? C) Which is the experimental group and which is the control group in this study? Note: You must answer all three of these questions if you pick this topic.

Explanation / Answer

A) the random assignment of the sample would help to ensure that each and every member of the sample has. The equal opportunity for being a part of either treatment conditions and thus help to generate valid findings without the influence of any confounding variables.

B) in the study, the generation of positive mood is the independent variable. The participants’ actual behaviour of helping the research confederate who lost his/her phone is the dependent variable. In the study, mood is manipulated by two treatment conditions, one where the participants write about the ‘happiest’ memory, that is an event associated with greater elevation in mood and then contrasted with another group which was asked to recollect an ordinary routine day( an event which triggers lesser degree of good mood) as a baseline measure for comparison.

C) the students who were asked to recall their most happy memory constituted the experimental group as they received the actual manipulation of the independent variable. The group which was asked to describe their mundane routine day belonged to the control group.

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