Psychology 3650

Hypothesis Writing

1) Lorge (1930) investigated the question of whether performance on a task is better when a person practices it continuously without interruption or when the person distributes the practice sessions. Lorge’s performance task was tracing a star as seen in a mirror for which people were timed. Lorge used three groups of participants, and each group traced the star 20 times. For one group of participants, the 20 trials were completed consecutively with no rest between trials. For the second group, each trial was followed by a one-minute rest period. The final group performed one trial a day for 20 days.

2) A researcher in was interested in alcohol consumption and birthrates. She obtained liquor sales statistics and birthrate statistics for San Francisco, California. The researcher concluded that birthrates and liquor consumption increased during the period of time for which she had statistics.

3) Asch (1952) conducted an experiment to determine whether the first information one hears about another person is more important in forming an impression of the person than later information about the person. Asch used a series of adjectives that were said to describe a certain person. The list was read independently to different groups of individuals. One group received positive adjectives first followed by negative adjectives. The other group received negative adjectives first followed by positive adjectives. Asch then asked participants to record their general impression of the person described by the adjectives.

4) Blind people are very adept at avoiding obstacles. However, little was know about how this was done. One possibility is that blind people develop the ability to react to changes in air pressure on exposed parts of the face and hands. Another possibility is that blind individuals use auditory cues to avoid obstacles. Supa, Cortzin, and Dallenbach (1944) attempted to test these possibilities. The researchers had blind participants walk around a large room in which obstacles were placed. Some of the participants wore a veil and gloves, and other participants wore earplugs. A third group of participants were allowed to navigate the room normally. The researchers measured the time it took each participant to successfully navigate the room.

5) An experimenter was interested in personality traits of people with extra-sensory perception (ESP). He gave each of his participants the short form of the 16PF. He then had the participants a simple task in which each person reported the contents of cards that were viewed by an experimenter in another room. Those participants that correctly identified the cards at a higher than chance level were determined to have ESP, and those participants scoring lower than chance level on the card identification task were deemed not to have ESP.