> -----Original Message----- > From: Lester Kenyatta Spence [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sent: 22 December 2003 04:07 > > > > It's a bit of a chicken'n'egg question I suppose. > > Not in this case....the power of the experiment is that you're able to > ferrett out the causal element... > > Take a population of subjects and split them in two (or three, four, etc.) > such that if you compare the resulting groups to each other, there is no > substantive difference. There aren't more women than men, there aren't > significant income differences, etc. > > Then you expose one group to one set of stimuli, and expose the other > group to some sort of placebo. > > The difference in the response to the dependent variable HAS to come from > exposure to the stimuli.
There are a lot of problems with an experiment like that, though, IMHO. First off, the test subjects would almost certainly arrive having already developed attitudes towards both violent hip-hop and violence as a means of conflict resolution, which I think could skew the results significantly. Second off, you wouldn't be accurately recreating the way in which people listen to music - you may end up proving, for example, that spending ten minutes listening to violent hip-hop in a controlled environment doesn't make you more prone to being violent, but I'd be dubious about that conclusion applying to people who listen to violent hip-hop for years and years in various emotional states. > So if the groups are the same in the hiphop experiment I note above, then > the only reason the one group prefers violent conflict resolution is > because there is something about what they were exposed to that CAUSES > them to. But you could well find that some in the group always preferred violent conflict resolution and did so even before they heard violent hip-hop. Wouldn't that screw things up a bit? Sorry for going so off-topic! But I'm suddenly bizarrely fascinated by the idea of this experiment :) Brendan
