Psychology Research

Last week Greta was telling her class about a study that related to a well-known story. She started off the discussion with a reference to the story, indicating that “of course you all have heard the story of _______” (I can’t tell you the name of the story now because it’s the subject of our study). As you may have guessed by now, she was greeted by a roomful of blank stares. She was surprised, because she grew up hearing this story and assumed that her students would have heard it as well. So the question is, why? Do the common stories we all know go in and out of fashion over the course of generations? Or was this story just less familiar than Greta thought? We think we’ve devised a way to find out. Click here to participate As usual, this week’s study is brief, with about 20 questions. It should take only a few minutes to complete. You have until Thursday, March 19 to complete your response. There is no limit on the number of respondents. Don’t forget to come back next week for the results! Read the comments on this post…

Last week Greta was telling her class about a study that related to a well-known story. She started off the discussion with a reference to the story, indicating that “of course you all have heard the story of _______” (I can’t tell you the name of the story now because it’s the subject of our study). As you may have guessed by now, she was greeted by a roomful of blank stares. She was surprised, because she grew up hearing this story and assumed that her students would have heard it as well. So the question is, why? Do the common stories we all know go in and out of fashion over the course of generations? Or was this story just less familiar than Greta thought? We think we’ve devised a way to find out. Click here to participate As usual, this week’s study is brief, with about 20 questions. It should take only a few minutes to complete. You have until Thursday, March 19 to complete your response. There is no limit on the number of respondents. Don’t forget to come back next week for the results! Read the comments on this post…

Last week we asked readers to rate two hypothetical job candidates for a communications assistant position in a large neuroscience lab. The task seemed to pit education against experience. Everyone saw some version of these two resumes: (click for a larger image) Emily was Magna Cum Laude at Harvard, while Suzanne was an average student at a regional state college. But Emily appeared to have never held a paying job, padding her resume with activities like “Botanical Garden Society President” and “Varsity Tennis.” Meanwhile, Suzanne had held an impressive internship and had three years of related job experience. Most respondents — nearly 80 percent out of over 800 who completed the survey — selected experience over education, preferring Suzanne over Emily. But that wasn’t the real purpose of our study. We were actually interested in a subtler point: should you put more effort into the overall look of your resume, or into proofreading to fix typographical errors? Respondents actually only saw one of three possible pairs of resumes. Each pair contained the same information, but one pair was full of typos (here’s an example ), while another pair was badly formatted, with ugly fonts and inconsistent layout (here’s an example ). The final group of respondents saw attractive and accurate resumes. So which resumes were rated highest? Here are the results: Read the rest of this post… | Read the comments on this post…

Last week we asked readers to rate two hypothetical job candidates for a communications assistant position in a large neuroscience lab. The task seemed to pit education against experience. Everyone saw some version of these two resumes: (click for a larger image) Emily was Magna Cum Laude at Harvard, while Suzanne was an average student at a regional state college. But Emily appeared to have never held a paying job, padding her resume with activities like “Botanical Garden Society President” and “Varsity Tennis.” Meanwhile, Suzanne had held an impressive internship and had three years of related job experience. Most respondents — nearly 80 percent out of over 800 who completed the survey — selected experience over education, preferring Suzanne over Emily. But that wasn’t the real purpose of our study. We were actually interested in a subtler point: should you put more effort into the overall look of your resume, or into proofreading to fix typographical errors? Respondents actually only saw one of three possible pairs of resumes. Each pair contained the same information, but one pair was full of typos (here’s an example ), while another pair was badly formatted, with ugly fonts and inconsistent layout (here’s an example ). The final group of respondents saw attractive and accurate resumes. So which resumes were rated highest? Here are the results: Read the rest of this post… | Read the comments on this post…

After taking a first look at last week’s survey responses, I realize there’s one more question I should have asked. So if you have a couple minutes, whether or not you participated last week, could you respond quickly to this short survey? You’ll just be asked to look at two resumes and answer two quick questions about each. Click here to take survey Thanks! Update: Okay, got what I need. You can still take the survey if you’re curious, but I’m not going to tabulate any additional data. Read the comments on this post…

There’s a lot of advice online about what makes a good resume, and in these tough economic times, getting a job is tougher than ever. So this week, I thought we’d test some different resumes and see which factors are most important in picking a good candidate. You’ll be asked to read two resumes very carefully, then answer a few questions evaluating each candidate. I’ve changed just a few items on each resume, so make sure you read them closely. Then next week we’ll see which factors matter the most. Click here to participate As usual, the study has just a few questions, and should only take a few minutes to complete. There is no limit on the number of respondents. You’ll have until Thursday, March 5 to complete your response. Don’t forget to come back next Friday for the results! Read the comments on this post…

This week’s Casual Fridays study was inspired by this comment on the Random Number thread: When a freshman at Penn State too many years ago to count, the intro psychology prof did an amazing demonstration. I wonder if anyone knows the answer to this which I have long forgotten. He said he had written the numbers 1 through 5 in random order on a piece of paper. He then asked the very large class to read his mind and write down his number order. When the class compiled the answers, more than 50% of the class had his order, and so proved that telepathy was possible!!! The class was ecstatic, until he then told us that humans more often than not arrange those numbers in that particular sequence that he had. Does anyone know what that sequence order is? I have puzzled over this for years since. I thought we might do Bobbysoxer a favor by uncovering the number sequence, if indeed it exists. I was skeptical: half the class? A sequence of five items, in random order? Since there are 120 possible unique sequences of the numbers 1 through 5, a random distribution of responses would mean fewer than one percent of answers would be in any given order. Chances that HALF the responses would be the same seem remote. That’s not to say that responses will be truly randomly distributed. But I doubted that any single combination of digits would even approach 50 percent. Our survey asked respondents to randomly arrange the digits 1 through 5 — and also 1 through 4, and 1 through 3. Perhaps with a smaller range of choices we’d get something approaching Bobbysoxer’s memory of the event. First let’s take a look at the distribution of responses for the digits 1 through 5. How “random” were our answers? Read the rest of this post… | Read the comments on this post…

A couple hours ago I posted a quick poll , in what might be construed as an unbiased fashion. I simply asked respondents for their sexual orientation, offering a wide array of choices ranging from “straight” to “mostly gay” to “gay” to “other.” In fact, my poll was biased — not because the question itself was slanted, but because of the way respondents were recruited: I titled the post “Are you homosexual?” Potential respondents who are homosexual or who don’t have traditional sexual preferences are more likely to be interested in the question, and therefore more likely to respond. How do I know this biased the sample? Because I collected similar data last week in the Casual Fridays survey about romantic gifts. In that survey, women reported same-gender partners 5.7 percent of the time, and men reported same-gender partners 3.7 percent of the time. I posted the poll because I had seen a similar poll on Twitter: Bruce Wagner asked “How Gay is Twitter?” and linked to his own poll. I suggested Bruce’s selection of responses would be biased, and he challenged me to prove it. Here’s the evidence: Read the rest of this post… | Read the comments on this post…

I’m having a dispute with a reader in an online forum. Let’s settle it here with a quick, private poll: What is your sexual orientation? ( surveys ) Trust me, this is related to psychology. Read the comments on this post…

Valentines’ Day is coming up in just a few weeks, so we thought we’d help our readers prepare by assessing the romance level of a few common gifts they might consider getting for their significant others. I’ve noticed that there’s often a fine line between a romantic gift and a disappointing downer. Does a box of chocolates signal true love or the fact that you’ve given up on your lover ever having a perfect figure? Is a cooking a romantic dinner an event in itself or just a way to guilt your date into “putting out” later on? What gift strikes the right balance? Maybe we can determine the ideal romantic gift. Or maybe we’ll learn that everyone has different ideas as to what constitutes “romantic.” Click here to participate As usual, the study should take just a few minutes to complete. You have until Thursday, February 5 to participate. There is no limit on the number of respondents. Don’t forget to come back next week for the results! [Thanks to Keldwud for the idea!] Read the comments on this post…