Group 3 therefore decided to investigate whether young people would assume young drivers are more competent than older ones (despite insurance company data, and the high cost of young driver insurance that would suggest otherwise). They showed participants two pictures, one of a young male and one of an older male, then asked the questions:

1) Which one is the better driver?

2) Rate these drivers on a scale of 1-10, with 1 being the worst and 10 being best

3) Which driver is most likely to crash?

4) What are your views on older drivers in comparison with younger drivers?

Asking young people only, this group found a consistent bias towards younger drivers, i.e. young people showed in-group favouritism, as would be suggested by Social Identity Theory.

60% of young people thought the young driver would be the better driver, and this was supported by the ratings in Question 2 (mean 5.2 for older drivers; 6.15for younger drivers). 55% thought the older driver was more likely to crash. When asked for their views, young participants 45% made comments favourable to younger drivers, 20% were neutral and 35% were favourable towards older drivers.

This group did not experience any problems in actually running their survey, but there is a problem in terms of the interpretation of the results. They did find a bias towards the younger drivers, but as you read the figures, it has probably occurred to you that the differences are not that big. So could this difference have just occurred by chance, depending on who they asked? To answer this question, we would have to use some statistical tests. Yr 12s will be learning how to do this this term, so for future practicals, they will be able to add this layer of sophistication, and be able to interpret their results more rigorously.

1) Which of these two people is more intelligent?

2) On a scale of 1-10, how intelligent do you think this person is?

3) Why?

Participant responses overall showed little direct effect of the wearing of glasses.

For the pictures of men, the wearing of glasses made little difference to the assessment of intelligence. Participants were evenly divided in which of the pair was more intelligent, with some referring to other facial features, such as the teeth, to make their assessment.

However, for the pictures of women, contrary to the expectations of the investigators, most participants identified the individual not wearing glasses as more intelligent. Only one participant referred directly to the glasses, but this was negatively, ie, that the glasses implied less intelligent. This participant’s response to question 3 showed that this was because she was wearing the glasses part way down her nose, not because she was wearing glasses per se. Several participants saw this image as being a ‘celebrity’ pose, and flirtatious, and this elicited negative comments about her level of intelligence. The rest of the participants identified other variables, such as ‘looks like a lawyer’ to make their decision.

We can therefore conclude that although these participants were making prejudiced assessments of intelligence based on appearance, the wearing of glasses seemed not to be the determining factor. Although it was not directly the subject of investigation, seeing a female image as a ‘celebrity’ did seem to make an important contribution to assumptions about lack of intelligence.

This group also learned about the problems of Psychology research, but in a different way compared to Group 1 (see previous post). Keeping the questionnaire simple had the distinct advantage that it was easy to run, and to process the responses acquired. There was a problem however, in that the data was a little too simplistic, and participants gave too little information in terms of how they were making their judgements to be able to assess exactly what the determining influences were. The investigators felt participants may not have been consciously aware of what factors were influencing their assessment. The Group had taken time and trouble to match the pairs of photographs as closely as possible, but there were still other differences between them, as well as the wearing of glasses. These might have been confounding variables, which interfered with the influence of glasses-wearing. There may also have been gender influences at work, as all the participants were male, which may have contributed to the overall pattern of assessing the female images in stereotypic ways more than the male images.

Combining the experiences of Groups 1 and 2, this teaching group realised that psychological research is always a compromise. Although we know what we want to investigate, and often have very creative and exciting ideas as to how to investigate it, this has to be both practical and ethically sound. There is generally a pay-off in terms of the practical logistics of doing the research and the quality of the findings. Although the more ambitious design (Group 1) would have yielded high quality results, it became impossible to carry it out; the simpler design (Group 2) was easy to carry out and process, but yielded insufficient data to make full interpretations. This teaching group should now have a good understanding of some of the difficulties and limitations when conducting psychological research.

Group 1 decided to investigate how far people make stereotypic associations linked to music genres. They thought that an individual’s taste in music might be highly influenced by the people they socialise with, in that particular types of music are seen as ‘socially desirable’, but this varies from one social group to another. Taste in music might therefore not be a matter of personal ‘liking’, but a reflection of the groups we belong to. This group consisted of  an Asian student, an African student and a White student who were curious about the differing assumptions that might be made about them and their choice of music. The original plan was to play music clips of differing genres and ask participants which of the three researchers would be most likely to listen to the genre played.

In the end, this proved to be a little too ambitious (see later),and there were logistical issues surrounding the three investigators having to be present to run the survey, so to enable the group to carry out the investigation individually,  images of Asian, Black and White males were shown to participants instead. Samples of three different music genres were played (Dubstep, Rap, and Rock), and after each sample, participants were  asked:-

1) Which of these three people is more likely to listen to this music?

2) On a scale of 0 – 10, how much does individual No 1 (black)  like this track?

3) Describe the type of person who listens to this type of music  (eg, what do they wear, what is their behaviour like?)

This group found some strong stereotypic linkages. Dubstep was seem as favoured by the white person, whereas Rap was associated with the black person, and the black/rap linkage was the strongest, producing higher scores for question 2.  For qn 3, both Dubstep and Rap produced negative comment, in that listeners would be angry, urban and wear baggy clothes, whereas Rock was linked to ‘depressing’ behaviour (?), and seen as American. The Asian person was not strongly linked to any of these genres.

This group therefore concluded that music genres do elict stereotypic associations, and that these are strongly linked to differing ethnic groups.

This group learned a lot about the practical problems of conducting Psychology research. Although they had a sound idea of what they wanted to investigate, and how to do it, their original conception proved to be too demanding in the limited time available, requiring all 3 of them to be present, and involving a questionnaire that they estimated would take about 30 mins to complete. The actual survey conducted was therefore something of a compromise,but this is important learning. It is all too easy to look at studies in a textbook and be critical, seeing the limitations of what was done, and saying things like ”That’s obvious, why didn’t they. . . . ?”  Hopefully this group will have a better understanding of the practicalities, and appreciate that there may be many answers to that question.

We currently have 11 Yr 13 students and 16 Yr 12 students studying Psychology.

The Yr 12 students have now had a term of Psychology, and are gradually getting to grips with what the subject is about. Given that this is a completely new subject for these students, this always takes a bit of time, so we are pleased that most of them are settling into their studies. In the Autumn term, they have studied Cognitive Psychology, taking the workings of memory as an example of this approach. We hope that some of what they have learnt will be have useful application when they are revising for their external exams! They have also studied Social Psychology, focusing on how Obedience and Prejudice comes about. They should have been taking an interest in the Stephen Lawrence case as a topical issue to illustrate this approach.

Yr 12 students do not do an exam in January for Psychology, so they are now just beginning work for Unit 2, studying Learning, Psychodynamics and Biological Approaches. The Royal Institution Christmas Lectures were a timely and great introduction to what students study in their AS course; Lecture 1 was about the brain as an entity, and Lecture 2 focused on memory, so any prospective students considering studying Psychology will get a reasonable idea of what we look at by watching these lectures, which are now available online.

Meanwhile, Yr 13 students are about to take external exams, particularly Unit 3. Unit 3 looks at how we might apply our psychological knowledge to inform us about real-world problems. The summer of 2011 saw rioting in the UK, and a massacre commited by a lone individual in Norway, and we have taken these events as our key triggers for studying Criminological Psychology, looking at the causes of crime, and hence to the possible effectiveness of interventions other than prison.

The second part of the term shifted the focus to Health Psychology. Health Psychology aims to apply psychological theory to the promotion of more healthy behaviours in all of us, by understanding why people indulge in unhealthy behaviours, and hence in understanding how best to encourage and support the more desireable healthy behaviours. The most usual strategy society uses to reduce unhealthy behaviours is to ban them, so we have considered how far this is effective, and why we are so resistant to such intervention. We have looked at the effects of the UK Smoking Ban 2007 to assess this.

As well as their studies in the classroom, the Autumn Term saw our Psychology students ‘on tour’, attending a couple of day conferences. In October the Yr 13s attended an anti-stigma workshop organised by the Nottingham Mental Health Trust to mark Mental Health Day. In November, all of our students attended a conference on “Science and Pseudoscience”. Both these conferences will contribute to understanding for Yr13 approaching Unit 4 in the summer, as we turn our attention to Clinical Psychology and Issues and Debates in Psychology.

A busy time ahead for all!

WRONG!  WRONG!  WRONG!

In case you haven’t realised it, there are only about 11 teaching weeks left before you go out on study leave - that’s not many hours of input left. There is some really interesting psychological research around study habits. It has been found that students, particularly male ones:-

a) underestimate the task that needsto be done;

b) overestimate their own abilities to do it;

and

c) have poor concepts of time.

This doesn’t sound like a good recipe for success, does it? The result of this combination of phenomena is too little work input now; too much work tocomplete, stress, and all night revision sessions.

So – Hint of the Week – sort out your strategy for the summer now!

Decide NOW what grade you want in the Summer and start making everything count towards it.

If you’re in Yr 13, you will need to revise everything you did at AS level. You need to pace this revision through the next 12 weeks, on top of the new content you need for Unit 4, so work out now how you’re going to do this. I’d recommend you collect similar types of syllabus material together, eg, put all the methodology notes together, collect all the key issues together, etc.

If you are in Yr 12, you need to take note of what you could improve on from the mock exam and put them right. However, the single most important thing is to learn the work really well.  This sounds obvious, but evidence suggests that many students don’t do enough active learning. You need to know the material so well, that you can just write it in a test situation without thinking too hard about it.

So, start using the Cognitive Psychology you learned about and how your memory works – deeper processing; lots of rehearsal…..

pics from Phillip James and David Stokes,both on flicker creative commons

More on the subject of the influence of the moon on our behaviour (or not).  Here’s a link to a published paper on “The Disease of the Moon” – well worth a read!

If you are in Yr 13, you could approach this as a gentle introduction to Clinical Psychology – look out for ‘expectancy’ effects, types of evidence, and cultural differences (in this case through time) with respect to mental health issues, and changing practices with regards to ‘diagnosis’.

If you’re in Yr 12, just enjoy it – but it gives you a flavour of what you might be doing this time next year.

(Image from http://www.flickr.com/photos/pinksherbet/3561662932/)

• Topically – the most recent post is a bit more about expectations, and how they are better for you than fantasies – take a look!!
• The previous post is about the meaning of dreams - great for Yr 12s looking at dream analysis
• There’s a great collection of descriptions of Social Psychology studies - some of which you’ve heard of, others you haven’t – if you want to stretch your knowledge sideways, you could do worse than spend half an hour looking at this

Enjoy!!

So – if you looked here yesterday, did you find yourself doing anything unusual?

If you did, and even if you didn’t, you will have given yourself an example of ‘expectancy effects’. These affect us all everyday, and account for or influence a large proportion of our behaviour. They are relevant to almost all areas of Psychology that you have/will be studying, from your reactions to what you’ve learned, to what actually happened in many of the research studies you have looked at. I’m hoping you’ve realised that if you are ‘self-monitoring’, it’s quite likely you will change your behaviour anyway. If you were expecting unusual behaviour, it is likely you spotted some; if you thought the idea was ridiculous, you probably didn’t bother to self-monitor, or found nothing unusual – either way, whatever you were expecting probably happened!! (so you could consider the ethics of the previous post…!!)

If you are Yr 13 and revising Unit 3, this is an illustration of a phenomenon you need to know in detail for this exam – so a quick revision test:-

a) Identify the phenomenon

b) What research would you use to support this?  - findings (results/conclusions) from at least 3 studies.

c) Evaluate this as an explanation of criminal/anti-social behaviour.

If you are Yr 12, we have just started introducing Psychoanalytic ideas, particularly the idea of symbolism, eg in dreams or in artwork. So put your evaluative heads on – now we’re expecting to see hidden meanings – how likely is it that we’ll see them??

(and if any of you DID end up howling or shape-shifting (and can prove it!!), please let us know…..  )

[picture from http//terrorpixels.com]

Today is a full moon. There is a theory that people’s behaviour changes at full moon (particularly students, who tend to be awake all night anyway!) Monitor your behaviour over the next 24 hours. Is it different to usual?

Come back to this site tomorrow and report anything you notice.

(pic from ‘I am Marion’ Flickr creative commons (and that’s not me!))