Social Study - Bocchiaro et al Flashcards
What did they want to understand?
The nature of disobedience (as opposed obedience) to unjust authority, the paradigm that gives participants the chance to obey, disobey, or blow the whistle against authorities, and the personal characteristics that differentiate them from those who obey
What is a whistleblower?
A person who makes public disclosure or corruption or wrong doing
What is a research paradigm?
A method, model or pattern for conducting research
What is a personality inventory?
A questionnaire designed to reveal personality trait of the respondent
What were the hypothesis?
Participants will obey the experimenter, relatively lower level whistle-blowing than disobedience, substantial overestimation of the tendency to disobey and blow the whistle, and weak effects for various personality variables
What is a pilot study?
A small-scale preliminary study designed to evaluate the feasibility of a full-scale study
How many pilot studies did they carry out?
Series of eight pilot tests
Why did they complete the pilot study?
To ensure that the procedure was credible and morally acceptable to the participants
What is the sample of the main study?
149 undergraduate students from VU university in Amsterdam, mean age of 20.8 years, 96 females and 53 males
How was the sample obtained?
recruited by flyers in the campus cafeteria at the VU university in Amsterdam and paid €7 for participants
What was the sampling method?
Self-selecting
Who met the participants and in what way did they do this?
The participants were met by a male Dutch researcher who was formally dressed with a stern demeanour
What were the participants asked to provide?
They were told a fake cover story about what the study was actually about and asked to give the ones of a few other students who could take part in the study
What was the planned study studying?
Sensory deprivation
What did they want to do the cover study?
They wanted to replicate the study at the VU University because they had no data on young people.
What were the participants asked to do after hearing this cover story?
Participants were asked to write a statement to convince the students they names earlier to take part in the sensory deprivation study. They were told if they did this they could be contacted for future promotion - perhaps more money
How long did the experimenter leave the room for? What did this allow the participants to do?
They then left the room for 3 minutes to give participants time to reflect on their decision and what actions they were going to do next (obey, disobey, or whistleblow)
What was in the second room?
The computer and a mailbox and a research committee form (which outlines ethics and how if the study violated this they could tick the box and put it in the mailbox)
What words did they have to use?
They were told to include the words ‘exciting’, ‘incredible’, ‘ great’ and ‘superb’