Are the clothing and hairstyles so out-of-date that their age guesses
are more random?
And, yes, it is snowing in Boone, NC, at the moment.
Ken
Steven Specht wrote:
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)
--
---------------------------------------------------------------
Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu
Appalachian State University
Boone, NC 28608
USA
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