Langer and Abelson 1974 Flashcards
aim
to see if an individual labeled as a patient, would be perceived as more disturbed than if he were labeled as a job applicant. The researchers also wanted to see if different psychological orientations would demonstrate differences in how they label the individual.
sample
40 Forty subjects; either behavioral or psychodynamic therapists affiliated with one of three universities: State University of New York Stonybrook, New York University, and Yale: graduate students, post-grads, or faculty. The mean age for both groups was around 28 years old. Each group was randomly allocated to either the job applicant or the patient’s condition.
procedure
The researchers used a 2 X 2 factorial design: that is, there were two levels of a variable tested at two levels.
The videotape was an interview by a professor with a younger man about 26 years old. The interview was unstructured. It focused on the interviewee’s feelings and experiences relating to his past work. The interviewer’s voice was eliminated from the video as much as possible so that the viewers would focus on behavior and not on the actual responses to the questions. The video was also edited down to only 15 minutes.
The participants were interviewed in a room at their school. They were either told that the researcher was learning how to carry out job interviews – or to carry out patient interviews. The participants were instructed to watch the video and then fill out a questionnaire. To make the label salient, when the video finished, the researcher handed the participant the questionnaire and said, “Here is the patient (or job applicant) evaluation form.”
The questionnaire was made up of “free-response” questions. Questions included a description of the interviewee, his attitudes, and factors that probably influenced his view on life. The data was then quantified by graduate students who were blind to the hypothesis or the groupings. They were asked to rate each of the 40 randomly ordered clinicians’ questionnaires on a scale from 1 (very disturbed) to 10 (well adjusted). The inter-rater reliability of the judges was .76.
To make sure that the therapists held different theoretical orientations, a biographical questionnaire was given after the completion of the session. The final question asked them what school of psychology they identified with as a therapist.
results
The results indicate that both the psychodynamic groups’ ratings averaged on the “disturbed” side of the scale. It also shows that there is no significant difference between the ratings of the job applicant, but the psychodynamic ratings are significantly lower in the case of New York University.
Even though both conditions watched the same video, there was a clear difference in the descriptions of the interviewee. Behavior therapists used words like “realistic”, “unassertive, fairly sincere, enthusiastic, attractive, pleasant, relatively bright, and responsible. The psychodynamic therapists, when told that they were seeing a job interview, described him as attractive, candid and innovative, upstanding, middle-class, fairly open, and somewhat ingenious. When told he was a patient, they described him as tight, defensive, conflicted over homosexuality, passive-aggressive, frightened of his aggressive impulses, trying to seem brighter than he is, impulsive, considerably hostile, or rigid in thinking.
weaknesses
- lacks temporal validity as it is dated
- The study has a very small sample size. The results may be mathematically significant, but it is difficult to generalise beyond the programs of the universities. There is also a sampling bias, with all participants affiliated with the university.
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