HYPOTHETICAL EXPERIMENT:
You, as an eager young behavioral scientist, have noted that many people don't wash their hands when they are in a public rest room, unless there is someone there who they believe is watching them. Because you are very aware of the public health impact of handwashing, you want to encourage washing of hands in public restrooms.
You design an experiment in which there are two conditions. In one condition, you place a person outside the door of the restroom, and count the number of people who go in and go out. That person also listens for the faucets to come on and go off.
In the second condition, you place a person inside the restroom, looking through his/her bookbag for something. This person records the number of people who come into the restroom, and the number of those people who wash their hands.
After several trials of each condition, you compare the number of people who washed their hands in the first condition to the number of people who washed their hands in the second condition.
You are not surprised to discover that people who went into the restroom where someone was already in there washed their hands more often than those who went in to a restroom by themselves. This confirms your belief that people who are being watched are more likely to wash their hands in public restrooms than those who believe that they are in there alone.
Okay, now answer the following questions, and submit the file to the Digital Dropbox for this course:
1: What do you think the hypothesis was in this experiment?
2: What was your independent variable? What was your dependent variable?
3: Which condition was your control group condition?
4: Is this experiment basic research, or applied research? (Hint: was this experiment intended to help solve a specific problem, or just to expand the breadth of knowledge about behavior?)
5: Do you think that this experiment utilized a heterogeneous (or normally distributed) sample? Why, or why not?