Word may gotten out into the student culture and they are being cagey (those tricky psychologists . . . ya gotta be cautious or they'll show you how shallow you are). I get this sometimes when I do demonstrations for some cognitive heuristics and biases.
On the other hand, maybe this represents some backsliding in feminism . . . I can remember a time when "girls" could easily be 65 years old! I wonder what would happen if you used different age-stereotyping words -- refer to the female as a "babe" or a "chick" (now there's some sexism!) or as a "mother" or "adult female" Claudia J. Stanny, Ph.D. Director, Center for University Teaching, Learning, and Assessment Associate Professor, Psychology University of West Florida Pensacola, FL 32514 - 5751 Phone: (850) 857-6355 or 473-7435 e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] CUTLA Web Site: http://uwf.edu/cutla/ Pesonal Web Pages: http://uwf.edu/cstanny/website/index.htm ________________________________ From: Steven Specht [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, February 06, 2007 2:49 PM To: Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS) Subject: [tips] curious Dear Colleagues, For over a decade I have been using a neat (and tidy) experimental exercise in my methods course modeled after the work of the famous psychologist Elizabeth Loftus. I show a 30 second video clip of a scene in which there is a female screaming. She is definitely NOT the focal point of the scene (which is a man being held over the side of a bridge about to be dropped into the river below as a result of a drug deal gone bad. BTW, it's the opening scene from the movie "New Jack City"). Anyway, after I show this video, I distribute a short questionnaire (4 questions to be exact). The third question asks "What is your estimate of the age of the woman who was screaming in the video?" However, for half of the class, the word "Woman" is replaced by the word "girl". The responses to the question vary, but there has typically been a statistically different response (p<.01 in many instances) when the word "woman" is used, compared to when the word "girl" is used. This short demonstration is very effective in starting to discuss experimental manipulation (and the importance of careful word selection) and tends to capture students' attention. Semester after semester, the results had been predictable (15 or 16 semesters in a row I would get impressively similar and statistically significant results... on average the woman is estimated to be a bit over 29 yrs and the girl around 23 yrs). What is curious to me is that in the last 5 semesters I have done this exercise in class, it has only "worked" 2 of 5 times (and one of those two the results were barely significant). So I've asked myself "why has there been a change in the results of something that had worked MANY, many times consecutively?" One of the hypotheses I have to entertain-- especially given that the experimental manipulation is so subtle-- is that students may becoming less concerned about "details" when they read a sentence. They may be becoming "gist" readers (i.e., get the gist of the sentence and don't worry about the details). That interpretation would certainly be consistent with some of the other academically-related problems I seem to be encountering with some of my students. Just thought I'd share these curious observations. Cheers, -S ======================================================== Steven M. Specht, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Psychology Utica College Utica, NY 13502 (315) 792-3171 "Mice may be called large or small, and so may elephants, and it is quite understandable when someone says it was a large mouse that ran up the trunk of a small elephant" (S. S. Stevens, 1958) --- To make changes to your subscription go to: http://acsun.frostburg.edu/cgi-bin/lyris.pl?enter=tips&text_mode=0&lang=english
