Question

1. A psychologist conducted a study at her home during an annual activity of children wearing masks and

going door-to-door receiving candy. Some of the children arrived alone, while others arrived in a group.
Over the course of the night, the psychologist asked half of the children to remove their masks when they
arrived at her door. The remaining half kept their masks on. The psychologist told every child to take only
one piece of candy. She then went inside the house, leaving the bowl of candy outside. This gave children
the opportunity to take additional candy. The psychologist measured the percentage of children who took
additional candy. The psychologist's hypotheses were that children would take more candy when they
were alone and that children would take more candy when they were masked. The results are shown in the
graph below; assume all differences are significant.

Answer 1

a) The dependent variable is defined as the variable that is being tested. The dependent variable here is the percentage of children who collected extra candy.

b) The data does not support the hypothesis 1 of the psychologist which states that the children would take more candy when they were alone. In the graph, percentage of children that took extra candy was higher when they were in group than when they were alone.

The data supports the hypothesis 2, which states that the children would take more candy when they were masked. From the graph, the percentage of children who took extra candy was higher when they were masked than when when they were unmasked.

c) The psychologist cannot generalize her findings to all children because she didn't use a random sampling procedure and she used children only from her neighborhood which doesn't represent the general population of children.

d) This study is not a naturalistic behaviour because the psychologist is dealing with subjects. She may also choose to manipulate the variables. Therefore we cannot call this study a naturalistic behaviour.

e) Modeling: This may play a role in the children's behaviour because the children may try to imitate what others did. The children may take extra candy because they saw others collecting extra candy.

Deindividuation: Here, the children's behaviour may be influenced by a feeling of anonymity. The children may take extra candy because they feel anonymous. Deinvuduated children feel anonymous due a feeling of loss of identity.

This explains why the percentage of chidren who took extra candy when in group was higher than that of the children who were alone.

Note: The graph is attached