You may want to assign Experiment 1 of
faces: Skilled performance with a
supportive audience. Journal
of Personality and Social
Psychology, 75, 1213-1230.
This well-written and interesting article shows that
although people think they perform better if they have a supportive audience, participants actually performed worse on a difficult task when they
thought a friend was watching them
than when they thought a stranger was watching them.
The article describes three experiments, but the only simple
experiment is Experiment 1. As of
this writing, the article is available from APA’s web site at
http://www.apa.org/journals/psp/psp7551213.html#tbl1
We recommend assigning the section of the article between the captions "Experiment 1" and "Experiment 2." To make the article even easier to digest, we also recommend handing out Table 1 (below).
Table 1.
Tips for Understanding Experiment 1 of Butler & Baumeister (1998) Experiment 1 “Competing hypotheses”: The hypothesis that supportive audiences will improve
performance versus the hypothesis that supportive audiences will hurt
performance. Method Participants: Note that, to maintain independence (see pages 248-249 of Research
design explained), participants did not interact . Procedure: Note that a participant who counted backwards “1470, 1460, 1447,
1434,” would be counted as having made only one error.
evaluation anxiety: worry about being judged. Results and Discussion First paragraph: The researchers did a ttest with
40 participants. The p did not reach the standard level of
significance (p of .05 or less). The d refers to the estimated
effect size. For more about d, see Box 9-2 on page 275 of Research design
explained. Second paragraph:
As Chapter 9 points out (see page 283 of Research design explained, as well
as pages 248-249 of that text), in a simple experiment, observations must be
independent. Therefore, the
authors argue that their observations were independent. Third paragraph: Note how this paragraph makes it relatively easy for you to understand the results. The firstsentence explains what behavior the researchers are measuring so you know what the scores are that are being analyzed; the second sentence foreshadows the next sentence by telling you that the statistical analysis led to a certain general conclusion (the authors tell you the "bottom line"); the third sentence (the onlysentence in the paragraph that has numbers in it) shows how the table of means and the statistical tests provide specific evidence for that conclusion; and the fourth sentence summarizes the paragraph. Fourth paragraph: “speed-accuracy trade-off”:
Often, the faster people do a
task, the more errors they make; conversely, the slower they do a task, the
fewer errors they make. The authors explain the speed-accuracy trade-off in the next
paragraph. Fifth paragraph: Good summary and discussion of the results
reported in the previous paragraph. Sixth paragraph: “postexperimental
questions”: questions asked after the participants had performed
the experimental task (counting backward). “marginally”: The p did not
reach the standard level of significance (p of .05 or
less). Therefore, the authors could not say that the results were
statistically significant. “perceived evaluation pressures”:
worries about being judged