Reference no: EM131469577 , Length: word count:2000

Human Social Behaviour

Lab report overview Culture

GENERAL REQUIREMENTS

The purpose of a psychological lab report is to present an original research study to the scientific community. It comes in a specific structure that enables the reader to find specific information quickly and easily, and ensures that the authors include all the necessary details of the research conducted.

Learning outcomes of assignment

The assignment assesses your achievement of these learning outcomes:

Evaluate the degree of empirical support for the major theories of social psychology, including cross-culturally, and relate this knowledge to practical problems.

Differentiate between the methods used by social psychologists.

Select relevant social psychological findings and construct a convincing written argument regarding an applied problem.

We also expect that it will help you with your progress towards these important Deakin graduate outcomes:

1 Discipline-specific knowledge and capabilities
2 Communication
3 Digital literacy
4 Critical thinking
5 Problem solving
6 Self-management
7 Global citizenship

Generally, reports start bydescribingrelevant literature about the topic being studied, which justifies why research on the particular topic is needed, and leads logically to the aim of the study, and what the research expects to find (the hypothesis, or prediction).Then the method section provides a detailed description of how the study was conducted and what was measured (what data were collected), so the study can be replicated (repeated) by other researchers. The results section reports statistical analyses ofthe data, in order to test the hypotheses. This is followed by a discussion analysing what the results were, whether they were consistent with what was expected, and an interpretation of the findings in relation to the literature outlined at the start of the paper.

In this assignment, you will need to write up a psychological study in the form of a fully referenced APA-style lab report, including a:
- Title page - with your report title, name, and report word count
- Abstract - including brief statements related to the introduction, method, results, discussion
- Introduction (that ends with a clear aim and hypotheses for the study)
- Method (including Participants, Materials, and Procedure)
- Results (including table of means)
- Discussion (that includes limitations of the study and a brief conclusion)
- References
- Appendix

The report must be between no more than 2000 words in length. The 2000 words does NOT include the title page, abstract, tables and table headings, reference list, and appendices (citations in the body of the report do count towards the 2000 words though). There is a 10% leeway on the word limit (but there is a penalty in marks for exceeding that leeway, which is 10% of the marks available for the assignment). You can use less than 2000 words, but we suggest you'll find it hard to cover all the necessary material if you do so.You are also expected to find and cite at least TWO additional journal articles (not books or book chapters) that you consider relevant to the assignment.

To give just a few examples, relevant articles may refer to topics such as:
- Cross-culturaldifferences in attributions
- Self-other asymmetries in explanation
- Culture and situational salience

You are expected to discuss and cite these articles in the introduction and/or discussion of your assignment, to include these two journal articles in your reference list, and to provide a copy of the abstracts of these studies in an appendix (labelled "Appendix A").Introduction - General structure

The introduction section should justify why the study is needed by unfolding an argument for it
Starts with very general info (general relevance of area of research) & ends with very specific study aims & hypotheses
First overview relevant knowledge on topic (including definitions)
Then identify problem/gap in literature want to investigate
Aim should follow logically on from research presented & gap/problem identified
Hypotheses (what predict will find in relation to aims) should follow logically on from research too

Focused on cross-cultural differences in the actor-observer effect.
The actor-observer effect is a cognitive bias where people tend attribute their own behaviours externally (to the situation) and others' behaviours internally (to their disposition) [textbook p. 50]
As an observer, you use dispositional factors more than situational factors to explain a behaviour in another person, &, as an actor, you explain the same behaviour in yourself as due more to situational factors than dispositional factors
Extension of the correspondence bias (tendency to attribute behaviour to dispositional factors even when there are clear situational causes) - AOE highlights attributional differences when the observer is now the actor
Several explanations have been given for the AOE including the focus of attention:
When we observe other people they are the focus against the background of the situation, however, when we consider our own actions we focus outwards on the situation rather than inwards on our self: the situation is causally more salient

Introduction: Aim & hypotheses

Aim of study
To compare Malaysians' and Australians' attributional differences in how they explain their own and others' behaviours in a hypothetical situation.
Hypothesis (prediction)
How specific you want to get is up to you, but must relate to aim of study, & to the analyses you report in the Results section (which are meant to allow the hypothesis to be tested)
Given that Malaysia has a collectivist, interdependent culture while Australia has an individualistic, independent one, would you expect a large difference in the attributions Malaysians and Australians make for their own versus others' behaviours? Would you expect participants from one culture to demonstrate stronger actor-observer differences than participants from another culture? If so, which one?
Make sure hypotheses are justified - i.e., they must clearly follow from a reasoned argument stemming from the literature you've reviewed

Overview of materials & procedure

After ethics approval, online recruitment & data collection
All participants (Malaysian or Australian) first completed demographic items
Participants then read the following scenario [vignette responded to as an observer]:
You have arrived to participate in a psychology experiment and are waiting in a room with three other people. Before the study begins, the experimenter makes a formal request of everyone in the room: "As you may know, this university has a strong interest in social justice. Staff in the School of Education are asking for volunteers to help run a teaching and learning event for underprivileged teenagers in two weeks' time. They only have limited funds to run the weekend, but they can afford to pay those who volunteer a small reward per hour. Could you help out?" One of the participants in the room offers to volunteer for about 4 hours. After taking down their details, the experimenter invites you all into the next room to start the experiment.
Then asked, in relation to the volunteer (where 0 = not at all likely, to 8 = very likely):
How likely do you think they would have volunteered to help the university? [dispositional motive]
How likely do you think they would have volunteered to earn some money? [situational motive]
Participants then presented the same scenario to read, but the outcome was altered to: After hearing this request, you offer to volunteer for about 4 hours. After taking down your details, the experimenter invites you all into the next room to start the experiment.
Then asked about the same two motives but for themselves [vignette responded to as an actor]
How likely do you think you would have volunteered to help the university? [dispositional motive]
How likely do you think you would have volunteered to earn some money? [situational motive]
Debriefing

SOME BACKGROUND TO THE LAB REPORT

The research study you're writing up looks at cross-cultural differences in the actor-observer effect. The actor-observer effect is a cognitive bias where people tend to attribute their own behaviours externally (to the situation) and others' behaviours internally (to their disposition), and is considered to be an extension of the correspondence bias (fundamental attribution error), as we'll discuss in the seminar on this assignment.

There is some evidence to suggest that the actor-observer bias differs cross-culturally, with Choi and Nisbett (1998, study 2) finding that individuals from a collectivist East Asian culture (Korea) were less likely to show actor-observer differences in their attributions when situational factors were made salient, compared to individuals from an individualistic Western culture (the US).

However, the actor-observer effect has not been consistently replicated, nor have cross-cultural differences been studied across other cultures. Therefore the current study investigates whether this cognitive bias emerges in a different collectivist culture (Malaysia) when compared to a different individualistic culture (Australia).

Specific information about the study is below. You are asked to put the information that is provided below into your own words, in full sentences and paragraphs. Obviously, your wording of the aim, method and results sections will be very similar to what we have provided you, but you're expected to show that you've attempted to alter the wording or order of the wording a little, while conveying the same meaning.

NECESSARY INFORMATION FOR THE LAB REPORT

Title

Your title should summarise the findings of the study or the focus of investigation. It's important that your title is a direct description of your findings. Researchers often use the title of a paper to decide how important it is to the questions they're trying to answer, and if it's any way unclear they may not read your paper (and that's the whole point). It's best to generally stick to a description of your research question (e.g. "Why do people use Facebook?"), your topic (e.g. "Impact of diet on learning, memory and cognition"), or even better, your results (e.g. "There is no coherent evidence for a bilingual advantage in executive processing").

Abstract

A good abstract will give a brief but comprehensive summary of the entire report (aims, participants, method, major results and implications).

Introduction

The purpose of an introduction is to justify why the study is needed and to unfold an argument for the aim of that study and its predictions, with reference to prior research evidence and theoretical reasoning. It is expected that it will start with very general information (i.e., introduce the topic at a general level) and that it will end with a very specific statement of the aim and hypotheses of the study. In the main part (body) of the introduction, you should try to construct an argument for the aim and hypothesis, based logically on the research evidence you present. If it helps, you might want to visualise the introduction as an inverted triangle, starting broadly with the general topic, and becoming more and more targeted in what's covered, till it logically points to a specific aim and hypothesis.

The dot points below outline what you'll need to cover in the Introduction, and the marking criteria for the Introduction closely reflect these points:

- The introduction to your lab report will need to begin broadly, by identifying the general relevance of this area of study. By this, we mean that you need to begin with some sort of introduction to the topic of interest in the study: the actor-observer effect and how it differs cross-culturally.What is the actor-observer effect, and why is it important for researchers to investigate this cross-culturally (and not just cross-cultural psychological differences in general)?

- Your introduction then needs to focus on the relevant existing knowledge on the topic. You'll need to overview the main explanations given for the actor-observer effect (there are at least two), before you go into the literature on cross-cultural differences in it. Given the evidence, what cross-cultural differences would be expected to emerge when investigating the actor-observer effect? Why would you expect these differences? This is where we want to see that you understand how differences between cultures (e.g., in holistic vs analytic cognition, or interdependent vs independent self-views) may lead to differences in attributional biases. What studies have investigated cross-cultural differences in the actor-observer effect, on what cultures, and what was found? What explanations were given for these cross-cultural differences? We expect that you'll use Chapters 2 and 11 of your textbook, the other assignment readings, and probably your two additional references, in this section. As there aren't many research studies specifically on cross-cultural differences in the actor-observer effect, we expect you to also refer to relevant broader cultural psychology theory and findings here.

- The point of conducting research is to address unanswered questions and fill the gaps in current knowledge. You need to explain what the rationale was for doing another study on cross-cultural differences in the actor-observer effect, and in particular for our own study.What gap in the literature did the study hope to fill? Why were the cultures we looked at chosen?

- The rationale should lead logically to theaim of the present study, whichwas to compareMalaysians' and Australians' attributional differences in how they explain their own and others' behaviours in a hypothetical situation. This aim should logically follow on from what you have written up to that point in the Introduction, so really your aim should not be a surprising one, given the evidence and the arguments you have present.

- You should also explain what you predicted to find in the study - that is, what your study's hypothesis was. This prediction should be based on the literature you've discussed throughout your intro. Given that Malaysia has a collectivist, interdependent culture while Australia has an individualistic, independent one (see Bochner, 1994), would you expect a large difference in the attributions Malaysians and Australians make for their own and others' behaviours? Would you expect participants from one culture to demonstrate stronger actor-observer differences than participants from another culture? How you word your hypothesis is up to you, but it should clearly link to the overall aim of the study, and should clearly relate to the analyses you report in the Results section (as those analyses are meant to be a way to test the hypothesis).

Method

To recap: this study is loosely based on the original study of the actor-observer effect conducted by Nisbett et al. (1973). It has been adapted to be run online by using a vignette (brief description of a scenario) instead of a behavioural experiment. Here, we investigate the actor-observer effect using a similar scenario to the original study, but in a more simplistic fashion.

The actor-observer effect is present when, as an observer, you use dispositional factors (here, motives) more than situational factors to explain a behaviour in another person, and when, as an actor, you explain the same behaviour in yourself as due more to situational factors than dispositional factors. The present study measured both these processes, and used the sum of the two scores as the measure of the actor-observer effect.

In this section, you are expected to have separate subheadings for participants,and materials and procedure. The content also needs to be put into proper sentences and paragraphs - and don't use bullet points like we've done below! Please try to reword the following in your own words, but make sure your reader could replicate the study if they wished, and that you include the information relating to ethical research procedures (informed consent, etc.).

Materials and Procedure

Ethical approval for the study was granted from the Deakin University Human Research Ethics Committee before the study commenced. If participants clicked on the Facebook advertisement for the study, they were taken to the study webpage (which was in English, as were the rest of the materials), and asked to read the study participant information statement. This explained the purpose of the study (that it was investigating motives for people's behaviours) and that participation was completely voluntary and anonymous, and invited them to click on a button labelled ‘I would like to participate' if they would like to complete the study.

After reading the plain language statement, participants first completed items assessing their gender, age, and nationality. Participants then read the following scenario:

You have arrived to participate in a psychology experiment and are waiting in a room with three other people. Before the study begins, the experimenter makes a formal request of everyone in the room: "As you may know, this university has a strong interest in social justice. Staff in the School of Education are asking for volunteers to help run a teaching and learning event for underprivileged teenagers in two weeks' time. They only have limited funds to run the weekend, but they can afford to pay those who volunteer a small reward per hour. Could you help out?" One of the participants in the room offers to volunteer for about 4 hours. After taking down their details, the experimenter invites you all into the next room to start theexperiment.

Participants were then asked about two possible motives the other participant may have had for volunteering: to help the university (item a), and to earn some money (item b), and rated how likely it was that each motive played a part in their decision (where 0 = not at all likely, to 8 = very likely).

After providing the ratings for the observed behaviour, participants were then presented the same scenario to read, but the outcome was altered to:

Youoffer to volunteer for about 4 hours. After taking down your details, the experimenter invites you all into the next room to start the experiment.

Participants were then asked about the same two possible motives they themselves may have had for volunteering: to help the university (item c), and to earn some money (item d), and responded using the same rating scale as above. They were then debriefed, then gave their informed consent for their data to be used, by clicking on a button labelled ‘submit data'. Data collected were stored on a secure Deakin University webserver and were only accessible to the research team.

Discussion

- Discussions generally start with a reminder of the aim of the study, followed by your hypothesis, and whether your findings supported your hypothesis.

- Once you've described your findings, explain and interpret them, referring back to the material you covered in the introduction. Are our results consistent with those found by Choi and Nisbett Study 2 (1998)?Are our results in line with the theory and evidence within the cultural psychology literature? When it comes to discussing the findings, remember, you can't ‘prove' your interpretations, so be tentative. You need to present arguments for your explanations by referring to the evidence or relevant theory.

- You should then outline any limitations of the study you're aware of, and explain how those limitations may have affected the results. One issue you may want to think about is that there are several different ethnic groups in Malaysia. The largest ethnic groups in Malaysia are Malays, Chinese, and Indians. There are also a number of indigenous ethnic groups. How might this diversity have impacted on the results of our study? Perhaps considerthe behaviour we chose to include in our scenario;would the same pattern be observed if the behaviour was less prosocial than volunteering? Are there any other methodological issues or any other limitations you can think of?

- Remember to also mention here some directions for future research following logically from this study. For example, should future studies control for issues of ethnic diversity?

- Wrap up your discussion with a conclusion that's at least a sentence or two - don't end your discussion abruptly.

References

- References are in APA (6th edition) style - please consult Taines or some other reference guide. We will be expecting to see all the readings listed on p.2 of this handout in the reference list, in correct APA style (which they are not currently in).

- You will also need to include in the reference list the two additional journal articles you found (see"Reference Material for the Lab Report" on p.2).

- If you choose to cite the above Malaysian government website in your lab report, you should include it in your reference list.

- Don't cite this handout in your references - just use the information in it to write your report.