OPERATIONALLY DEFINING VARIABLES EXERCISE

Remember that the variables that we make hypotheses about are often abstract constructs. Designing research to examine the relationships between variables involves the process of operationally defining those variables in terms of how they are manipulated or measured. Consider each of the following research descriptions, identify the variables, and briefly describe how they are operationally defined.

The full reference to these articles appears below:

Strayer, D., Castro, S. C., Terrill, J., & Cooper, J. M. (2022). The persistence of distraction: The hidden costs of intermittent multitasking. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 28(2), 262-282. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/xap0000388

Belmi, P., Jun, S., & Adams, G. S. (2022). The "Equal-opportunity jerk" defense: Rudeness can obfuscate gender bias. Psychological Science, 33(3), 397-411. https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976211040495

It is common to multitask in our daily lives. Strayer et al. (2022) conducted an experiment that examined the impact of doing a difficult counting task (count backward by 1s and 3s from a given number for 20 seconds) on participants' driving behavior. Participants simulated driving in a diving simulator under both easy (low traffic) and hard (dense traffic) conditions. They were instructed to stay in the right lane except to pass traffic that was traveling under the speed limit. While driving, the participants were also engaged in a Detection Response Task (DRT). This task requires that the participants press a button in response to a simple stimulus (e.g., a vibration) when they detect it. The stimulus is typically presented every 3 to 5 seconds. Driving performance was measured of lane position (how centered the driver was) and speed. The counting task was scored for accuracy and number of backward counts in the 20-second period. DRT performance was based on the speed of the response and hit rate (accurately detecting the signal) to the simple stimulus. As expected, the results indicated DRT performance was impacted by driving condition (difficult driving conditions decreased DRT performance). Similarly, the difficulty of the counting task also impacted DRT (counting backward by 3 had a greater impact than counting backward by 1). These results were demonstrated even after the counting task was over, suggesting that the effect of the distracting task persists to include periods when only one task is being performed.

Belmi et al. (2022) examined whether general rudeness can create the illusion of gender blindness making sexism hard to recognize. In one of their studies, they asked participants to imagine that they worked at an investment bank with a competitive culture. All participants were told that within they scenario they witnessed the male managing director tells a female intern that he did not understand "why the firm keeps hiring women like you." Participants were randomly assigned to one of four conditions. The baseline group only read about the director's behavior toward Amy. In the other three conditions participants were given additional material that included the director being rude to either one, two, or three male interns. Following the story, the researchers assessed perceptions of the manager as sexist (e.g., indicated on a scale of 1 [strongly disagree] to 7 [strongly agree] that the manager is "sexist") and gender blind (e.g., indicated on a scale of 1 [strongly disagree] to 7 [strongly agree] "the manager is the type of person who believes that all people are basically the same regardless of their gender."). The results indicated that when participants only were presented with the scenario with the lone female intern, they rated the manager as sexist and not very gender blind. However, the more participants were exposed to the manager being rude to men, the less they rated him as being sexist and the more they viewed him as gender blind.