Psychology
Question:
This is a discussion for social psychology Kaplan University. Please have a minimum of 275 words for this discussion. For this task, you will be putting on your “researcher hats” and conducting a helping experiment of sorts. To simplify things, let’s all agree that the dependent variable will be the reaction of the person being helped (although I’m open to other meaningful variables if you want to come up with them) and let’s agree that we need a minimum of 8 participants/subjects. Think of ONE independent variable to manipulate. So, for instance, if you select ‘gender of person being helped’ as a variable, you can select 3 men and 3 women … however, you need a clear hypothesis about the differences you expect for each (this would be best if you base it on research/theory/concepts in the book). If you have a good friend who’s willing to play confederate, you can actually manipulate “gender of helper.” Do try and be creative about the independent variable you select that you think will impact the helping situation. In some cases, you cannot manipulate (i.e., gender of helpee) but in other cases you can so that half your “participants” get one level (i.e., male helper) and the other half get the other (female helper). Needless to say, please select a helping situation that doesn’t freak people out! 🙂 Come back here and post a summary of the methodology and findings from your study. Clearly identify your Independent and Dependent variables. Who were your participants and what was your helping situation? Identify your hypothesis(es) and the psychological reasoning behind it. What were your results – how did people react? What conclusions do you draw? What are the implications of your findings?
