Research

This was a week of research. We had to do our first little research project, just to get into the swing of things. It had to include an element called ‘Action and State Orientation’, which is the idea that people are either one or the other; where the first is an orientation towards doing things and the second is more an orientation to your surroundings and dwelling on things (suffice it to say that the first is far more advantageous than the second).

We decided to investigate how something called stereotype threat (the anxiety associated with belonging to a discriminated group makes a person perform badly on tests) might be influenced by one’s action/ state orientation. (The prediction being that people that suffer from a stereotype threat will do more poorly when they are state oriented). The way we did that was through a questionnaire that we spent literally hours collecting all around the campus.

It was an interesting experience.

Just how people behaved towards the questionnaire in different areas of the campus was already quite revealing. Obviously the fellow psychology students were very helpful (reciprocal altruism, or ‘you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours’), but the problem with them was that they could probably figure out what we were doing (which might mitigate the effect) so we didn’t want too many of them. The consequence was that we had to go hunting around for other participants.

We tried the main building, which has the largest student population, but found that for some reason the people there were far more blasé about the whole thing. This building is filled with a large number of social science students and humanity students. They didn’t seem to like taking part in experiments. I kind of have the feeling it’s the ‘cool building’ to hang out, for those students that are more motivated by everything around class than what goes on in class.

The group that we found out was the most helpful ended up being the medical students. Maybe they feel some kind of kin ship with psychology students? (Psychology is being accepted more and more as a science and we do study a part of the body, even if it’s only a very small part of it. Maybe you could consider us like orthodontists, except we focus on the soft tissue and they focus on the hard stuff).

Or maybe it was that they liked answering our IQ questions, seeing as med students are generally some of the most motivated and hard working students in the Netherlands (it’s very hard to get in).

Except for learning that med students are great students (hurrah for med students) we spent most of the rest of our time finding out how we should make our test better next time. Fundamentally it meant spending more time prepping and doing more pre-tests before you start the main experiment.

Nonetheless, it was interesting enough that I’d like to do it again.