1A) What is meant by dehoaxing and desensitizing and how are these concepts related to debriefing?
- B) Comment on the “pros” and “cons” of “complete debriefing” in Milgrams’s studies on
Milgram’s study:-
In keeping with psychology’s penchant for drawing data-based conclusions, the APA committee took an empirical approach when developing the code. Using a procedure called the critical incidents technique, the committee surveyed the entire membership of the APA (about 7,500 members at the time), asking them to provide examples of “incidents” of unethical conduct they knew about firsthand and to indicate what [they] perceived as being the ethical issue involved” (APA, 1953, p. 4). The request yielded over 1,000 replies. Although most concerned the practice of psychology (e.g., psychotherapy), some of the reported incidents involved the conduct of research (e.g., research participants not being treated well). A second committee, chaired by Nicholas Hobbs, then organized the replies into several drafts that were published in American Psychologist, APA’s primary journal; readers were encouraged to comment on the drafts. The APA’s council of directors accepted a final version of the code in 1952 and it was published the next year. Although it was concerned mainly with professional practice, one of its sections in this first ethics code was called “Ethical Standards in Research.”
In the early 1960s, not long after APA created its first ethics code, a young, Yale psychologist named Stanley Milgram began a series of studies that became as well known for the questions they raised about research ethics as it did for their conclusions about human behavior. Milgram, who was Jewish, was motivated by questions about the Nazi Holocaust and deeply concerned about the problem of obedience to authority. (During the Nuremberg trials, a common defense used by Nazi war criminals was that they were just following orders.) Did the Holocaust reflect some basic flaw in the German psyche? Or is the tendency to obey authority found in all of us, produced when the circumstances are right? To answer his own questions, he developed his now famous research on obedience to authority. In the guise of a study on the effects of physical punishment on learning, Milgram induced volunteers to obey commands from an authority figure, the experimenter (who was actually a member of the research team and a high school biology teacher in real life). Playing the role of teachers, participants were told to deliver what they thought were high-voltage shocks (no shocks were actually given) to another apparent volunteer (also a member of the research team and a railroad payroll auditor in real life) who was trying, without much success, to accomplish a memory task (see Figure 2.1). A surprisingly high percentage of subjects complied with the “orders” from an experimenter to deliver shock and, in doing so, most subjects became quite distressed. In his original study, Milgram (1963) reported he had observed a mature and initially poised businessman enter the laboratory smiling and confident. Within 20 minutes he was reduced to a twitching, stuttering wreck, and was rapidly approaching a point of nervous collapse.
2) Pretend that you’re writing a research report (journal article) on the effects of education level on time to complete a puzzle. Make up an abstract using no more than 250 words (use the “Lecture Notes” on Research Reports as a guide – file attached as “Lecture Notes”).
3) Give 3 operational definitions for “anxiety” and explain how research using all 3 definitions could result in converging operations.
4) Suppose that I’m convinced that bald men are more intelligent than men with hair because the four bald men that I know personally are indeed intelligent. Comment on the problem with this type if evidence and how it “fits in” with science.
5A) You want to determine the effectiveness of speech therapy and you have a choice between implementing a withdrawal design or a multiple-baseline design, which would you choose and why?
- B) Determine the effectiveness of a new treatment that stops “self-destructive head- banging in severely autistic children and have a choice between implementing a withdrawal design or a multiple-baseline design, which would you choose and why?
6A) A researcher uses a multiple-baseline design to evaluate the effectiveness of a therapy to treat one given behavior in the same person but in 3 different settings. The results showed that, in all 3 settings, the “treatment” responses increased in frequency as anticipated. Also, results showed that when the behavior was treated in Setting 1, the behavior in Setting 2 and Setting 3 also increased in frequency (even if it had not yet been treated in Situation 2 and Situation 3). Draw a graph that illustrates these above-mentioned hypothetical results (hand-drawn graphs are acceptable). Be sure to label where appropriate.
- B) Given the results, what conclusion can be drawn about the effectiveness of the therapy?
7) How are a theory and hypothesis related?
Suppose that you were working from the theory “frustration causes aggression”, what might be a plausible hypothesis (be sure to operationalize your independent and dependent variables)? If your hypothesis was substantiated, what can we say about the theory and how should you proceed? If your hypothesis was not substantiated, what can we say about the theory and how should you proceed?
