The word "naive" is standard research short hand for the fact that participants did not know about the specific research beforehand (also used in US English). So we know that they were not (for example) recruited from a class where the research might have been discussed or been part of experiment 1 (and therefore debriefed on a similar study).
I'm not sure I understand exactly what surprised you about the second sentence. The participants were British and they spoke English as native speakers (I would probably have used the word "and" instead of "that is"). Some could have been British citizens and not have spoken English as native speakers (e.g., a refugee or immigrant). No mention was made of how languages they spoke - only their native language ability. Marie Marie Helweg-Larsen, Ph.D. Associate Professor l Department of Psychology Kaufman 168 l Dickinson College Phone 717.245.1562 l Fax 717.245.1971 http://users.dickinson.edu/~helwegm/index.html From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Friday, June 28, 2013 11:51 AM To: Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS) Subject: [tips] A flavorful research article While reading a research report<http://www.flavourjournal.com/content/pdf/2044-7248-2-21.pdf> on the topic of the effect of cutlery on taste in the open access journal Flavour, I noted this sentence: "Forty naïve Oxford University undergraduate students participated in Experiment 2...". After wondering if that wasn't a redundancy (or if this description would apply to a majority or only a minority of Oxford students), I wondered what the word "naïve" might mean in this usage. It was used as if it were familiar jargon to describe an element of the design. Is this a common British term to mean "blinded to the experimental design or hypothesis"? My next favorite line from the article was, "all of the participants were British, that is, native English speakers, save one participant who was bilingual". I would have thought such as assumption to be more likely made of American than British university students (imagine the humor if the sentence had read, "all of the participants were American, that is, native English speakers"). Maybe they weren't really referring to how many languages of fluency but just that their first language was English. It was also interesting that the Methodology section came after the Results and Conclusions. If you couldn't access the hyperlink above, the URL of the article is: http://www.flavourjournal.com/content/pdf/2044-7248-2-21.pdf. Rick Dr. Rick Froman, Chair Division of Humanities and Social Sciences Professor of Psychology Box 3519 John Brown University 2000 W. University Siloam Springs, AR 72761 [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> (479) 524-7295 http://bit.ly/DrFroman --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13234.b0e864a6eccfc779c8119f5a4468797f&n=T&l=tips&o=26269 (It may be necessary to cut and paste the above URL if the line is broken) or send a blank email to leave-26269-13234.b0e864a6eccfc779c8119f5a44687...@fsulist.frostburg.edu<mailto:leave-26269-13234.b0e864a6eccfc779c8119f5a44687...@fsulist.frostburg.edu> --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected]. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=26309 or send a blank email to leave-26309-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
