Psych 458 - Questions to ponder, 5/24/99
Lord, Lepper, & Preston, 1984
Nisbett, Fong, Lehman, & Cheng, 1987 (try to get the gist of this article)
Lord et al., 1984
1. What are two strategies the authors suggest for getting people to consider the opposite?
2. What is the Abiased assimilation@ that the authors refer to in Experiment 1? What are the findings of previous studies investigating this phenomenon? (It=s important for you to understand the previous studies so you can understand this study.)
3. Who were the subjects in Experiment 1? On what basis were they selected?
4. What were three possible conditions that subjects could be assigned to in Experiment 1? What was the additional independent variable in Expt. 1 that was not manipulated by the experimenters?
5. What were the dependent variables in Expt. 1? Under what conditions did the researchers replicate the findings of previous studies? When did they find different results? What did the researchers find when they examined attitude polarization?
6. What evidence do the researchers use to suggest that the effects of considering the opposite are not solely due to demand characteristics? Are the results regarding demand characteristics the same in Expt. 2?
7. What kind of judgments are the experimenters trying to de-bias in Expt. 2? What strategies did Snyder already try to de-bias subjects in his 1981 study? Did these strategies work?
8. What constituted a confirmation bias in Expt. 2? (In other words, based on the earlier work by Snyder and Swann, 1978, what were the current researchers hoping to make go away by asking subjects to consider the opposite?) Did considering the opposite reduce the bias?
9. Given the results of the two studies, does telling subjects to be unbiased reduce the confirmation bias?
10. What other biases do the researchers think might be helped by considering the opposite? What role do anchoring and accessibility play in the mechanisms via which considering the opposite reduces bias?
Nisbett et al., 1987
11. The authors contrast domain specific skills with domain-independent, abstract skills. Can you think of an example of each?
12. What difference does domain make in people=s usage of the law of large numbers?
13. When trying to teach people about the law of large numbers, what strategies did the researchers use? Did these strategies improve the quality of subjects= answers?
14. Which holds up most during a delay, improved performance due to training in a specific domain, or improved performance due to training in a different domain? Do both kinds of training provide an improvement over no training?
15. Does taking statistics appear to help the quality of judgments?
16. What kinds of problem-solving abilities are helped by studying psychology at the graduate level? Are these abilities improved by studying other disciplines?