Coming from a group of academics in the nineteen-seventies, the contention that people can’t think straight was shocking. The students in the second group thought he’d embrace it. What sort of attitude toward risk did they think a successful firefighter would have? The students who’d received the first packet thought that he would avoid it. The students were then asked to describe their own beliefs. Once again, midway through the study, the students were informed that they’d been misled, and that the information they’d received was entirely fictitious. In the other version, Frank also chose the safest option, but he was a lousy firefighter who’d been put “on report” by his supervisors several times. According to one version of the packet, Frank was a successful firefighter who, on the test, almost always went with the safest option. The packets also included the men’s responses on what the researchers called the Risky-Conservative Choice Test.
Frank’s bio noted that, among other things, he had a baby daughter and he liked to scuba dive. The students were handed packets of information about a pair of firefighters, Frank K. “Once formed,” the researchers observed dryly, “impressions are remarkably perseverant.”Ī few years later, a new set of Stanford students was recruited for a related study. Conversely, those who’d been assigned to the low-score group said that they thought they had done significantly worse than the average student-a conclusion that was equally unfounded. The students in the high-score group said that they thought they had, in fact, done quite well-significantly better than the average student-even though, as they’d just been told, they had zero grounds for believing this. At this point, something curious happened. (This, it turned out, was also a deception.) Finally, the students were asked to estimate how many suicide notes they had actually categorized correctly, and how many they thought an average student would get right. The students were told that the real point of the experiment was to gauge their responses to thinking they were right or wrong. In the second phase of the study, the deception was revealed. The students who’d been told they were almost always right were, on average, no more discerning than those who had been told they were mostly wrong. Though half the notes were indeed genuine-they’d been obtained from the Los Angeles County coroner’s office-the scores were fictitious. They identified the real note in only ten instances.Īs is often the case with psychological studies, the whole setup was a put-on. Others discovered that they were hopeless. Out of twenty-five pairs of notes, they correctly identified the real one twenty-four times. Some students discovered that they had a genius for the task. The students were then asked to distinguish between the genuine notes and the fake ones. In each pair, one note had been composed by a random individual, the other by a person who had subsequently taken his own life. They were presented with pairs of suicide notes. In 1975, researchers at Stanford invited a group of undergraduates to take part in a study about suicide.
0 kommentar(er)
