--Original published at Alex's Thoughts

My research scenario would be focused on how people’s literacy levels affect their memory. Does the amount that a person reads in their life affect how they perceive and remember the world around them? This particular question interests me, as I have noticed that people who tend to read more are often able to draw on the experiences depicted in the works they have read, even if they read the work very far in the past. The hypothesis that I would like to test would be that the more a person reads or has read, the better their memory should be, both short-term and long-term. As such, I would introduce a questionnaire to my participants with these questions.

1. How often would you say that you read in a week?
2. Give a rough estimate of the amount of books you have read in your life, and another estimate of the amount of articles you have read.
3. What genre of books tends to hold your attention the most?
4. Would you say that you are a forgetful person?
5. What is your age?
6. Would you describe yourself as a well-read person?
7. If you enjoy reading, why do you enjoy it?
8. What is your gender?

After the participants have filled out the questionnaire, I’d assign them a random candidate number to ensure their test results are paired with their questionnaires, while their actual identities remain anonymous. I’d have them play Simon Says, the simple memory game. I’d measure how far each candidate got in the game in terms of rounds. I’d allow each candidate five trials with Simon Says, then have them read a short story, no more than 10 pages. After that, I’d have them play five more trials of Simon Says. I’d then have them memorize the layout of a small fictional town, with a 3 minute time limit. This would be followed by 5 more trials of Simon Says. After the final trial, the subject should recite the plot of the short story to the best of their knowledge, especially with respect to character names, locations, and plot actions. This should be followed by five more trials of Simon Says, then finally, the subject will be given a blank map of the small town and asked to find and identify the major landmarks in the town. The trials with Simon Says is testing the subject’s ability to recall short-term events, while the plot summary is a test to recall long-term events. In the case that the person is not particularly literate, the map of the small town should provide an extra opportunity to test long-term memory. The interruptions with trials of Simon Says also provide an additional challenge for the person’s long-term memory to cope with a current task. I would be interested to see the results of such an experiment.

--Original published at WilliamsCollegeBlog

The ever-popular show, “MythBusters”, creates scenarios that are tested to either be plausible or not. The experiment for this episode was supposed to test if the amount of alcohol consumed from anyone would affect their judgement in how they viewed the opposite gender. The first round was the three participants rating the opposite gender on a 1-10 scale based on attractiveness. The same three were supposed to get buzzed and do the same procedure. Lastly, they got drunk and repeated accordingly.

I believe that there were more weaknesses to this test rather than strengths, which led to somewhat of a failed experiment in my eyes. The first flaw was the minimal number of participants for what would seem like a popular test for many individuals. With only three people, the results are more likely to get skewed one way rather than what was expected. Even adding another female participant would have made for better results, since there were two males and one female initially.

It was also noted that in the beginning that each attempted test brought a new group of photos for each participant. This brought another flaw because even though each group was considered “matched” in terms of attractiveness, the participant might not think the same way as whoever chose those photos. If the same group of people were shown each turn, the results might reflect a better outcome.

A strength from the test was how the scaling for rating each person was a general system used daily and most people can make a fair judgment using those numbers. The other strength goes along with the rating system, but because there was no prior description as what qualified as attractiveness, the rates for each person was solely based on the participant selecting a number. This made for fair assumptions no matter how drunk a participant was at each point in the experiment.

At the end, the experiment was deemed plausible based on initial hypothesis. After reviewing the case, it was not approached from a good angle and therefore not designed in a good way. The weaknesses outweigh the strengths in my opinion and makes for a poorly executed plan. Analyzing how beer effects a person’s mind and visualization of any person is a quality thought. Since the majority of the results reflected some sort of inflation in overall rating of groups of people, the hypothesis was accepted.

--Original published at MaddieHinson

For this experiment, they had a woman dress up in a different breast size each day to determine if people would tip more with a bigger breast size. They had the woman wear the same clothes, and work the same time shift, and the only thing changed was the size of her breasts. One of the issues with this experiment is that there could be different days of the week where this coffee shop is busier. Yes, she could’ve gotten more tips on a Wednesday when there was more customers, versus on a Thursday, when it was slower. A solution could be to do the experiment on each Saturday at the same time, so it would be a closer estimate to the amount of business.

Another issue I noticed was the fact that it’s hard to determine the reasons behind a customer tipping. It’s hard to know for sure, that the reason the customer gave a tip was because she had big breasts. A possible solution to this would be to give a survey after they tip, to determine the reasoning behind why they did it.

I also noticed that they split up the tips between men, and women, and gave a statistic that women tipped 40% more when she was wearing the bigger breast size. Again, I don’t think it’s accurate to say that, unless they had an equal number of women customers coming each day of the experiment.

I think Mythbusters did a good job of monitoring the experiment to see the reactions of the customers. Filming the customers faces, (especially some of the men) was interesting to see because they were clearly checking her out, and could possibly be the reason they gave her a larger tip.

--Original published at JanellesCollegeBlog

For this assignment I chose to watch the Mythbuster’s video “Do Hands Free Devices Improve Driving Safety?” There were two different experiments included in the clip that tested this question. The first experiment took place on a man-made track that was mostly made of cones. The second experiment took place on a virtual track. Thirty people took part in the second experiment, while only two men took part in the first experiment. There were many strengths and weaknesses of the research methods used in both experiments.

One of the weaknesses of the first experiment was the amount of trials that were conducted. There was only two trials for each variable, hands free and hands full driving. Two trials is not sufficient to gather concrete evidence in order to make an end claim. A solution for this weakness is to have more trials of each variable. The second experiment did this. There were fifteen volunteers that drove hands free and fifteen volunteers that drove hands full. The second experiment was also better because the volunteers did not test both variables, only one. In the first experiment each volunteer completed both types of driving.

Another weakness in the first experiment was that each volunteer essentially had two tries. The second time that they drove through the course it is likely that they knew it better as they had already driven through it once. This would in turn not provide accurate data. The solution to this would be to have each volunteer only test one of the variables. One of the strengths of the second experiment was that each trial was regulated. The volunteers did not know what the course would be like because they only completed it once.

One of the weaknesses of the second experiment was how accurate the virtual road was. Not only were the volunteers distracted by a device, but there were also other cars as well as bikes on the road that they were on. It would be hard to distinguish in this situation whether the device or other distractions had the most effect on the driving.

In the end of the first experiment it was determined that there was no real difference between hands free and hands full driving. The average score for hands-free driving was 71, while the average score for hands-full driving was 72.5. The same results were shown by the second experiment. There was 1 pass and 8 crashes for the hands-free drivers. On the other hand, there was 1 pass and 9 crashes for the hands-full drivers.

--Original published at Allison's Psych Blog

The myth busters clip I decided to watch and critique was “Do beer goggles really exist?” The point of this experiment was to see if the myth that people become more attractive to a person the more they drink, is true. This experiment was set up into three trials. The first trial was a set of 30 girls/guys on a computer system, and everyone had 5 seconds to rate each of the pictures 1-10. The second trial was when the myth busters were only buzzed, and they had to rate 30 new people. The third trial was when they were completely drunk, and they had to judge 30 more new people. A weak spot in this study was that for each trial, between being sober and being drunk, the pictures changed, the myth busters never saw the same picture twice. If they wanted to find out if people become more attractive to them, they should have rated the same picture all three times to test if that was true. Using different people for each trial does not help the study as much as it should. Another weak point in the study was that the way people react to alcohol was not taken into account. All three of the busters drank the same amount of alcohol, but the girl seemed to be way more affected than the men were, clouding her judgement even more. I do think though, that doing three trials and testing them between being completely sober, buzzed, and drunk was a good way to test their hypothesis. It was interesting to see how much alcohol changed their point of view.

--Original published at Jessica K's College Blog

I

A study made by the popular television series MythBusters tries to decipher the puzzling circumstances around yawning, and to prove whether or not yawning can easily be passed from one person to the next. Throughout the ages, yawning is perhaps one of the more known mysteries of human nature, letting the action be linked to a tiring atmosphere, boredom, or an evolutionary trait, the circumstances behind yawning has proven to be an anomaly.

From the episode, the group forms the hypothesis that yawning can be contagious, and build an isolated waiting room with recording devices, a two-way mirror, and a hidden camera to monitor the test. Then, they gather an audience of nine strangers (independent variable), and one of the testers places themselves in the room, purposefully spreading the “yawning sickness” (dependent variable).

The control, or the independent variable of the test, is the group sitting patiently in the room, and while they are not allowed to talk, are measured on the the times they yawn. However, ten minutes passed, and not a single yawn was recorded.

Then the dependent variable was introduced, the group is given a clipboard with tax laws, letting ten minutes pass once again to record the results. Eight and a half were recorded from one person, while five and a half yawns were shown in the rest.

While the results were promising, the variables between the amount of volunteers and the studied time were constant, it can perhaps be a weakness to the test. If the stimuli and the allotted time within the studies could be changed, then they could get a more accurate set of results.

However, with the dependent variable proven successful, MythBusters made the logical conclusion to confirm that yawning is contagious. In conclusion, yawning in of itself is relatively unpredictable, and even if the group was able to record a reasonable amount of yawns, many people can assume that yawning will still remain a mystery, waiting to be properly studied and solved.

--Original published at Maddy Vingom's PSY105 Blog

In this clip from MythBusters Adam and Jamie are testing their driving abilities while using hands-free devices, to discover whether or not it results in safer driving. I hypothesize that hands-free devices are equally as dangerous as using a cellphone while driving, because they are still considered a distraction. The episode opens with the two men discussing the subject of distracted driving. To begin their research they discussed their methods, Adam and Jamie will both drive through a course two times. Adam will run the course once while holding the phone and once using a hands-free device, and Jamie will complete the task in the opposite order. They scored their driving in both situations based on the same 100-point scale. Each of the tests produced very similar results, however their test contained a few flaws. First the course they drove though did not simulate actually driving on roads with other drivers, needing to read signs, and focusing on directions. In addition, they need more than two participants who are non biased to complete the course, in order to have multiple comparisons that are impartial. They then refined and completed another trial using Sanford University’s driving simulation with 15 outside participants. They determined through the second study that there was no statistical difference between hands-free devices and talking on the cell phone. Meaning that, according to this study, both options for driving while talking on the phone are equally dangerous.

--Original published at Emily's college blog

The Mythbusters episode that I decided to watch was “Are women Better Than Men at Reading Emotions?” In this short clip, the Mythbusters put this question to the test by taking five different pictures of themselves, showing a different emotion. In these photos, the men and women participants would only see the Mythbuster’s eyes and they would only have a selected amount of time to guess the emotion that each Mythbuster was trying to portray. After the experiment, Mythbusters declared the combined score from all the women was a 10.6 and the combined score from all the men was a 9.6. This was not a significant difference, but it was a big enough difference that they decided that women could read emotions better than men.

Although this was a fun and interesting experiment, there were some questionable methods used to design it. One being that the Mythbuster’s facial expressions in the photos may not be what they would actually express if they felt those emotions. Since there is no specific expression for a certain emotion, the Mythbusters were only showing how an emotion is supposed to look. An emotion is something everyone can feel but it is not something everyone expresses the same way. Also, it can be hard to read an emotion when only looking at an unfocused picture of someone’s eyes. Two pictures were so misleading that no one had actually gotten the expression correct. Instead, everyone had guessed the same answers of what they actually saw. I also noticed that during one point of the experiment, two of the Mythbusters had different scores for one of the participants. This one, simple mistake can damage the total data for the results.

Some ideas to perhaps fix these methods would be to show the Mythbusters different videos, pictures, or stories that would force their true expression to be expressed. This way, they would actually be feeling and showing their own expression of the emotion. They also could have used a professional camera in good lighting instead of an old, dark photo-booth. Then, the photos would be clear, focused, and of exceptional quality. I think since the Mythbusters would now be expressing their actual emotions, it would not be as misleading as before to show pictures of only the eyes. Especially since the camera quality would be much better, so the participants would have a better chance of trying to guess the emotion as well. Lastly, the Mythbusters should pay closer attention to the answers so that there is no confusion on the participant’s score.

The Mythbusters did, however, have some ideal methods to their design. They kept good timing on the participants and noted that women were answering faster than most of the men. They also made sure to have a decent number of participants in order to balance the playing field of men vs. women.

--Original published at NataliesCollegeBlog

After watching the video by Mythbusters titled Laws of Attraction – Gentlemen prefer blondes? it left me surprised that there is no significant difference among hair color and attractivness. Throughout my childhood it has been a myth that blondes always have more fun and get more men swarming around them. As a brunette, seeing this study immediately made me curious to find the answer.

In the beginning of the clip, the researchers stated their question of interest on if men thought blondes were more attractive; however, they lacked a hypothesis in the study. This is a problem because you can not conduct a study until you have a specific hypothesis you will be testing. Having the hypothesis there is no difference between attractiveness and hair color is an easy solution to create a testable hypothesis. The men conducting the study had some clever ways of testing their question by having all of the nine women hide their natural hair color by putting a wig on during their dates. In the study, three women would have a blonde wig, three women would have a brunette wig, and three women would have a red wig. Nine men would come in and go on speed dates with each women to see which ones they found more attractive. The researchers conducting the study with three trials and have nine different men for each. The only problem so far with this study is the researchers did not specify how these men were found. The problem with this could be these men were not randomly selected. For example, there could be a possible male in the study knows his girlfriend is in the experiment could sign up to pick her as the most attractive every time. This would alter the data and lead to biased results. A way to improve their experiment would be demonstrate how the men for this study were randomly selected. This would also help with biased answers.

Another way I would change the experiment would be how the scoring system worked. In the study, after talking to their date for three minutes the men would rate the date on attractiveness and likability. After thinking about how talking to someone can change your initial attraction to someone, it made me think the study could be preformed differently. This could be solved by having all of the men rate the women on their attractiveness before talking to them for three minutes, and then rating the women on their likability after the three minutes. This course of action could possibly lead to other possible questions to be tested and also another way the researchers could eliminate personality as a bias.

The Mythbusters team did a good job at analyzing the data and showed there was no significant evidence between each hair color and attractiveness. When evaluating the whole experiment and basing it off the scientific method, seeking scientific review, publish, and replications was not used in this test. Since the study was not scientifically reviewed means this study could have been coincidental. A way to fix this is to have it reviewed and replicated in other places to see if this test is accurate among the whole male population.

A Case Example

After reading about Miguel I was able to notice the different theoretical approaches about his life lately. Psychodynamic is about how the unconscious mind and how emotional responses are changed by childhood experiences. Miguel’s id, ego and super-ego make up his personality. Since Miguel is a perfectionist, his id self causes the tiniest mistakes to make him lash out and doubt his self and causing him to become irritated. It could be possible his perfectionist habits also relate to his parents putting pressure on him as well. Behavioral psychology is when someone responds and learns differently based on their given situation. It is apparent that looking at a behavioral state, Miguel is struggling with his coursework and this is fueling Miguel to lash out on his roommate. The humanistic approach is strength based and to focus on personal growth and seeing yourself as a whole person. He could try to understand everyone makes mistakes and not having everything perfect should not ruin the rest of his day. He could see the good in his work and realize all of the work he accomplished before making a tiny mistake was good quality work and he should be proud. The cognitive approach in Miguel’s situation is on how he is struggling to think and focus on his assignments and it is making it hard for him to process the information. In his mind, he could be the type of student that thinks he is only a good student if he receives all A’s. This could be the root to why he starts to doubt all of his ability when he makes mistakes in his assignments. In neuroscience it becomes a similar approach that he is having hard time expressing how he feels and focusing due to the lack of sleep he is getting every night. From a cultural approach it could be the idea of having everything perfect is something that he was raised around and was passed on down from his parents and grandparents. The idea that he doubts his abilities could relate to his family being tough about everything being perfect in his house. This could make Miguel act like this with his schoolwork. Education could also be something that is highly valued in his family and could make him feel pressured to be the best at everything in school.

--Original published at Jess Principe's Blog

I selected the Mythbuster’s video “Are Women Better at Reading Emotions than Men?” The Mythbuster crew conducted their experiment by having their cast show different emotions while their pictures were taken, however, only their eyes were viewable. The question the crew imposed was “Can women read emotions more accurately and faster than men can?” The results showed women scored an overall average of 10.6, while the men scored an overall average of 9.6. Their results represent a difference in between the two groups, but not by a large margin. The crew claims their results are believable because women have a larger language and emotional memory center in their brains than men.

The method of taking photos of just the eyes of the people selected in their experiment, does make it harder to identify the emotion being shown without the observer being able to see the person’s body language. However, this method fails to account for people who do not show emotions through facial expressions. In addition, the crew members made their emotions very dramatic, which doesn’t allow the test to see if women can still pick up on emotions stronger than men if the eyes of the person in the images were not them attempting to show their emotions so strongly. An improvement to this method could be to do various images of the emotions like images of the entire person or their whole face only to show body language and the expression of their mouths which can also reveal emotions. The photos could be taken in a more natural setting instead of right in front of a camera because this could make it harder to identify the emotion, which would make the test harder to see if their is a stronger difference in the test scores between the men and women after that alteration to the experiment.

Another factor to consider was time. The Mythbuster’s crew said that women scored faster than the men, however they did not officially time them people taking the test, they only scored. An improvement to this method could be to time how long it takes the person observing the pictures to answer what emotion they believe the picture shows, and then take that data into accountability as well when comparing the men vs. the women.

Lastly, the pictures of the emotions sometimes were confusing to the test takers to determine what emotion the person in the image could have been attempting to reveal. For example, the “confused” emotion picture was sometimes misinterpreted for being the emotion “sexy”. An improvement to this method could be to give the people taking the test a sheet with the listed emotion options for them to choose from. This could make it easier and more accurate to track how the men and women answer what emotion they felt the picture represented.