ASSIGNMENT #2 The purpose of this second assignment is to give you more practice thinking like a scientist about psychological research. You will examine a scientific study, and analyze its logic and research design. We are returning to our six principles of scientific thinking. The six principles of scientific thinking are: 1. Rule out rival hypotheses 2. Replicability 3. Falsifiability 4. Correlation # Causation 5. Principle of Parsimony 6. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence In the lectures, we also discussed the toolbox of psychological research, which includes naturalistic observation, case studies, self-report measures, correlational designs, and experimental designs. We discussed a number of ways and reasons these tools can be misused or can fail. Some examples include (with little summaries, because it's been a long time!): 1. Random selection and random assignment: If not every person in the population has an equal chance of participating, the sample can be biased. 2. Reliability and validity: We have to be sure our measures actually and reliably measure what we think they are measuring. 3. Social desirability and malingering: Sometimes people lie to try to change the way experimenters see them. 4. Control group: Without a control group, it's often hard to know whether our results could have been due our manipulation, or could for example stem from a placebo effect. 5. Confounding variables: If something other than the independent variable changes between groups (a confound), we can never be sure whether the independent variable or the confounding variable caused our effect. 6. Experimenter bias: Sometimes an experimenter's hypothesis or expectations might lead them to bias the study results. For your assignment, you should read the description of the research study that you will find later in this document (entitled: "Train your body to increase your empathy!), and ... 1. Identify and describe two of the six principles of scientific thinking that the research fails to follow. The research may do a good job following some of these six principles, but not all of them! Your job is to identify the principles of scientific thinking that the research does not follow. For each principle, a. describe the principle in (for example, describe in your own words what it means to rule out a rival hypothesis) b. explain exactly why you think the research does not follow the principle (for example, describe the rival hypothesis the research did not rule out) c. describe what would need to be done to make sure the research follows the principle (for example, say how the research could rule out the rival hypothesis). You should use the feedback provided for your Written Assignment 1 to help write this section. 2. Apply two aspects of research methods to the research description. When you identify flaws in the research methodology, a. define the concept involved (for example, what does it mean for a sample to be biased?, and why does that matter?) b. provide a comprehensive explanation of the flaw in the specific research context (for example, how exactly has this research study recruited participants, and why does this make random sampling unlikely?) c. describe what would need to be done to improve the research methodology in the research description (for example, how could the researchers have recruited their participants to ensure random sampling?). 3 of 4 + Automatic Zoom RESEARCH DESCRIPTION Print Download Train your body to increase your empathy! Empathy is the ability to understand and share another person's feelings and emotions. Most people agree that the world would be a better place if we all had just a little more empathy. Luckily, a team of researchers at St. Frank's University have been researching ways that we might be able to increase our empathy, with the goal of developing an empathy training program. They capitalize on lessons learned from the field of "embodied cognition", which has taught us that the way we think is actually influenced by aspects and experiences of our entire body. Embodied cognition suggests that we internalize things that we actually physically do. The idea is that by training the body on aspects of empathy, our brains will follow! 1. Take another perspective. One of the hallmarks of empathy is being able to see the world from another person's perspective. Well, what could be better for teaching our bodies about perspective taking than training our mental rotation skills? The St. Frank's team reasoned that playing Tetris would be an easy and fun way to train people's mental rotation skills, which they expected to lead to gains in empathy. To test this, they recruited a group of experimental participants by putting up flyers around campus looking for people that wanted to train their perspective taking abilities". When the participants came to campus, they were given a handheld game console and asked to play Tetris for 45 minutes, which they happily did. At the end of the session, the participants completed the "Empathy Questionnaire" (EQ for short). The Tetris-playing group had an average EQ score of 4.3 out of 5. After collecting the data, the team realized that their experiment needed a control group. They found a sign-up sheet from an old experiment recruiting people that were interested in improving their memory performance. Since this group didn't need to come to the lab to play Tetris, the research assistants simply called them and administered the EQ over the phone. In line with the research team's predictions, this group that didn't play Tetris scored lower on the EQ, with an average score of 2.9 out of 5. Statement from the leader of the St. Frank's team: "This finding shows that practicing imagining objects from different perspectives leads to us being better at taking other people's perspectives! We plan next to study just how much or how little Tetris practice a person needs to do to improve their empathy. It could be that we can train empathy with as little as a few minutes of Tetris a day!" 2. Walk a mile in someone's else's shoes. Don't just stand in someone else's shoes, but take a walk in them." Literally. In another experiment, the St. Frank's team tested whether walking a mile in someone else's shoes could increase empathy. For this study, they recruited participants from the university's SONA participant pool, and randomly assigned them to the experimental and control groups. Participants in the control group came to the lab, were given a pair of shoes the researchers took from the lost-and-found (they were very stinky), and asked to wear them, but had to remain seated in the windowless waiting room. After about 20 minutes, the participants gave the shoes back. Then, a research assistant came into the waiting room and pretended to accidentally drop the books and supplies they were carrying. About 30% of the control group participants helped the research assistant pick up their things before leaving. Participants in the experimental group came to the lab, and were given the same pair of lost-and-found shoes to wear. They were asked to go outside and walk a mile. When they arrived back at the lab, the same research assistant pretended to accidentally drop their things. In the experimental group, 80% of the participants help the research assistant pick up their things! Statement from the leader of the St. Frank's team: "This is clear evidence that literally walking a mile in someone else's shoes can cause you to become a more empathetic and helpful person. By wearing their shoes, you embody another person's perspective on the world. And this has a really big effect on whether they were willing to help another person out." 3. Learn to be quiet. One of the cornerstones of empathy is being a good listener. And one of the best ways to listen is to be quiet ourselves. In this study, the St. Frank's team took advantage of a special group of participants that has a lot of practice being quiet: monks. In a remarkable field study, two members of the St. Frank's team flew to Tibet and visited a monastery (this study was conducted pre-Covid). They used special, portable devices to measure the monks' brain activity (portable electroencephalography, EEG). Since older monks have a lot more practice being quiet than younger monks do, the researchers used a correlation design where the correlated age with the power of so-called "alpha waves" in the brain activity. They found that the older monk, and therefore the more experience the monk had with vows of silence, the stronger their alpha waves" were. Since alpha waves are sometimes associated with empathy, the research team interprets the stronger alpha waves as meaning that the monks that have more experience being quiet are also more empathetic. Statement from the leader of the St. Frank's team: "This incredible finding shows that the practice of being quiet can increase activity in the parts of our brains that control empathy, leading us to be more empathetic people. We are currently working on a program to rehabilitate murderers in prison by making them take vows of silence."