Attitudes about groups and beliefs about strangers
For those of you who participated in this study, here are the results. Much of the background is identical to a previous post of mine where I went through the results of a study called “Strangers in a not-so-strange land”. That study didn’t seem to work and so I changed a few things. As you will see, the changes were not enough; this experiment failed to produce the results I had hoped, too.
To recap what you did (you probably don’t remember the details as it has been two months), the first stage of the experiment asked you a series of questions that probed your attitudes about social groups. These were questions like, “How much do you agree or disagree with the notion that some groups of people are just more worthy than others?”
Next, you evaluated a series of pictures, each of which had a different arrangement of circles, which were either blue or red.
The reason we asked you these two sets of questions was to get you thinking about social groups. In the next stage of the experiment, each of you read a description of a hypothetical interaction in which you and other person were each given 10 dollars. You (the other person) could transfer anywhere between 0 and 10 of those dollars to the other person (to you). Every dollar transferred got doubled.
This type of interaction is sometimes called a Prisoner’s Dilemma. The dilemma exists because each player does best by not transferring anything, irrespective of what the other person does. For example, if the other person sends you nothing, you maximize your earnings by keeping everything too, which, in this case would be $10. If, instead, the other person had transferred the full $10, you would still do best by keeping your $10 so you would take home a total of $30. So, each player does best by keeping everything.
Notice, though, if both people play this way, they each go home with $10. That is, they keep everything and transfer nothing. If they had both transferred all $10, they would each go home with $20.
This is a dilemma because each player does best by being selfish, but both could do much better (double in this case) if they gave away everything.
In this experiment (as in a previous experiment called “Strangers in a not-so-strange land”), there were two variables. Variables are nothing more than what they sound like—things that vary. In this case, they vary between participants. The two variables were (1.) Question Order and (2.) Dyad Color.
In the experiment each of you was asked two questions:
- How much would you transfer to the other person?
- How much do you think the other person would transfer to you?
Roughly half of you saw the questions in the order presented above (Transfer First) and roughly half saw the questions in the other order (Receive First).
(I say roughly half instead of exactly half, because participants were assigned to different conditions based on a randomization procedure. It’s like a coin was flipped to determine whether you ended up in the Transfer First or Receive First condition. Because this process is random, there is no guarantee it will be 50-50. However, as the number of participants increases, distributions will get close to that 50-50 mark.)
While reading about the interaction and answering the above questions, there were pictures next to the text, meant to depict the interaction. These pictures included arrows for direction of a (hypothetical monetary) transfer and avatars meant to depict you and the other person. The avatars were either colored blue or red. Roughly half of you were in the Same Color condition, in which both avatars were the same color (both were blue or both were red). Roughly half of you were in the Different Color condition, in which one avatar was blue and the other red.
Saturday, November 10, 2007
Okay, that was the basic set up. Now, when it comes to experiments in general, researchers usually have specific predictions they want to test. These predictions are derived from existing theory or gleaned from other experimental results.
In this case, there is a large body of research in social psychology on so-called in-group favoritism in Minimal Group Experiments. The basic setup is to bring subjects into the lab and assign half of them to one group and half to the other. The assignment process can be arbitrary. A rather odd, but popular one used is to ask subjects whether they prefer the paintings of Paul Klee or Wassily Kandinsky. Now, subjects play a game, like the Prisoner’s Dilemma described above, either with someone who shares their preference in painters or not. Surprisingly, subjects tend to be more generous when paired up with someone who has a similar preference.
I was interested to know whether this would extend to a web setup where there was no real group assignment. Instead, there would be a hint of similarity or dissimilarity based on the colors of the two avatars. In this way, this experimental design was identical to the previous experiment I ran called “Strangers in a not-so-strange land”. The difference was that I first asked you a series of questions about groups and had you evaluate a series of pictures that were comprised of different arrangements of blue and red circles. My hope was that these two things would have made things a bit less subtle and helped to “prime” you to think about groups when making decisions.
I had two specific predictions in mind when conducting this experiment.
(1.) People will offer more and expect more (hypothetical) money in the Same Color condition compared to the Different Color condition.
(2.) People will offer more when in the Transfer First condition compared to the Receive condition.
As in the previous experiment, the results didn’t confirm the predictions. It seems that the visual cues to group membership either didn’t work at all or were simply too subtle.
On average, people said they would offer about $5.80 to the other person and thought they would get back about $4.30.
Other than that there wasn’t much going on. Question Order didn’t have any effect. That is, people offered the same whether they were asked about how much they would transfer first or asked about it second. Also, Dyad Color didn’t seem to matter. People offered the same and expected the same whether or not the two icons of people matched color or not.
As I mentioned in the previous post, this failure to confirm predictions could mean one of two things. Either it means that the variables I am investigating do not have differential affects on behavior. Or, it could mean that the experimental design was not sufficient to elicit different behaviors.
In my case, given that researchers have been documenting systematic differences in terms of behaviors and attitudes in minimal group experiments, I have a feeling that my failure to confirm predictions resulted because the design was not a good one.
I have just completed a follow up study that gets at inter-group psychology more directly. Hopefully this one will work!
Same Color
Different Color
