Question

A psychologist conducted a study at her home during an annual activity of children wearing masks and going door-to-door receiving candy. Some of the children arrived alone, while others arrived in a group. Over the course of the night, the psychologist asked half of the children to remove their masks when they arrived at her door. The remaining half kept their masks on. The psychologist told every child to take only one piece of candy. She then went inside the house, leaving the bowl of candy outside. This gave children the opportunity to take additional candy. The psychologist measured the percentage of children who took additional candy. The psychologist’s hypotheses were that children would take more candy when they were alone and that children would take more candy when they were masked. The results are shown in the graph below; assume all differences are significant.
A. Identify the operational definition of the dependent variable in this study.
B. Explain how the data support or do not support each of the psychologist’s hypotheses.
C. Explain why the psychologist cannot generalize her findings to all children.
D. Explain why the study is not a naturalistic observation.
E. Explain how each of the following might have played a role in the children’s behavior.
• Modeling
• Deindividuation
• Lawrence Kohlberg’s preconventional stage

Answer 1

Graph is attached.

Answer:

a) The number of children who took extra candy can be said to be the operational definition of the dependent variable here.

(The dependent variable is defined as the variable that is tested by the experimenter. The outcome of dependent variable depends on the independent variable).

b) The psychologist hypotheses are :

H1 : The children would take more candy when they were alone.

H2: The children would take more candy when they were masked.

The data does not in anyway support the hypothesis 1 of the psychologist because from the graph the percentage of children who took candy when alone was low.

The data fully supports the hypothesis 2. From the graph we could denote the percentage of children who colected additional candy when masked was higher.

c) The findings cannot be generalized to all children because only children from the psychologist's neighborhood was used in the experiment.

d) This study is not a naturalistic behaviour because the psychologist is manipulating a variable. Therefore we cannot call this study a naturalistic behaviour.

e) Modeling: Here the children's behaviour may be influenced because they may try to imitate what other children did. A child may take additional candy because another chid took additional candy.

Deindividuation: In this case, the children may feel a loss of identity or anonymous because they are in group. They may take extra candy because they feel anonymous.

From the graph, we could see the percentage of children in group who took extra candy was higher than the percentage of chidren alone who took extra candy.

Lawrence Kohlberg’s preconventional stage: A child's behaviour may be influenced by his self interest to gain reward. This may make the child not collect extra candy.

This Lawrence Kohlberg’s preconventional stage may also influence the behaviour of the children as the children may also be afraid of punishment, which may result in them not collecting extra candy