Stimulus Materials and Researcher Instructions – Spring, 2020 – Consensus Conformity Study

Stimulus Materials and Researcher Instructions – Spring, 2020 – Consensus / Conformity Study

Instructions: This Spring, 2020, we are going to run a series of studies looking at how participants respond to a cheating scenario. We’ll do this by showing participants a fake Facebook page that contains the user’s confession to cheating followed by different feedback comments from her friends (opposing, supporting, or mixed feedback). The main focus of our study is to see how our participants perceive the cheating based on whether the user’s friends are unanimously supportive, oppositional, or mixed in response to the cheating. Because research suggests that people don’t like to break unanimity, the likelihood is high that participants will conform their own feedback and thoughts about cheating in the same direction as the user’s friends.

1). For your first experimental study, you will play the role of researcher, and you will collect data from three different participants (though you will combine your data with other class members, so your final data set will have nearly 140 people!). There are two phases to this study. In the first phase, you will orally ask participants if they are willing to participate in a research study. In the second phase, participants will complete a five-part survey. In Part One, participants will read the “About” Facebook page for a college student named Abigail Foster, getting some general information about Abigail, looking at a confession that she made about cheating on an exam, and reading the feedback that her friends gave her regarding her cheating. In Part Two, participants will rate Abigail’s behavior. In Part Three, participants will rate how they would respond to Abigail, how they would respond themselves in the same situation, and provide some ratings of their general impressions of Abigail. In Part Four, participants will complete demographic questions. Finally, in Part Five, participants will tell us about the general nature of the feedback Abigail’s friends gave her (our manipulation check in this study). To run this study, use the following steps:

A). Your first task is to approach three different participants (not all at the same time!). They must be people that you do not know, and cannot be taking a psychology research methods class during the Fall, 2019 semester or the Spring, 2020 semester. Please DO NOT complete this study yourself, and use only FIU students or strangers as participants (no family / friends for this study – You will use them in a later replication study toward the end of the summer semester). There are 48 students in our class, so with each student getting data from 3 people, our final sample will be around 140 participants total.

B). Phase I: Informed Consent

1). Informed Consent:

Ask the potential participant if he or she is willing to participate in a study for your research methods class. You will get their informed consent verbally. Tell them:

“Hello, this semester in my psychology research methods class, we are collecting different types of data (demographic information, open-ended questions, scaled questions, etc.) that we will analyze in our statistical lab. I was wondering if you would be willing to participate in my study. The study takes about five to ten minutes. There are no risks to participating, and the main benefit is that I can complete my class assignment. Will you participate?”

An oral Yes or No response is fine. If they say no, thank them and find a different participant. If they say yes, move to the next step (Phase II – Questionnaire).

C). Phase II: “Questionnaire”

1). General Instructions

After getting participant’s oral informed consent, randomly give them ONE of the three “Research Study – Florida International University – Spring, 2020” documents. These documents contain our primary independent and dependent variables for the study. One third of our research participants will be in the “Support” consensus condition, one third will be in the “Oppose” consensus condition, and one third will be in the “Mixed” condition. Participants should not know what condition they are in.

Ask participants to follow the instructions at the top of the questionnaire. Tell them to read EVERYTHING on the Facebook page, as they will answer questions about it later and will need to do so through memory. They can move through the five “Parts” in this survey at their own pace. Make sure they complete all questionnaire parts (though they can leave some demographic questions blank if they do not want to provide the details).

2). Questionnaire

In Part I, participants look at the Facebook “About” page for a college student named Abigail Foster. The page contains a picture masthead profile picture of Abigail, a generic “About” section (which contains basic information About Abigail), fake advertisements, a “Friends” list with selfies of six friends, and a long paragraph that Abigail posted earlier that day. This paragraph is very important, as it discusses an incident in which Abigail accidentally received an exam answer key during an exam and used it to get the best grade in the course (raising the curve and potentially hurting the scores of other test-takers). She feels bad about it, and wants some help from her friends. Please note that EVERYTHING on the Facebook page up to this point is identical across all three conditions (but don’t tell participants that!). So what differs? The comments from her friends! You will notice that in one survey, the comments universally support her cheating. In another survey, the comments universally oppose her cheating. The comments on the third survey are more mixed. That is …

In the “Support” consensus condition, there are eight comments from Abigail’s friends, which universally support her cheating. These include comments like, “Wow, Abigail, sounds like you really lucked out there. Take the grade. You “earned” it!” and “Listen, it’s not like you intended to cheat going into the exam. The prof should have checked to make sure he was handing out only blank exams. His mistake – your big break! Take the grade.”

In the “Oppose” consensus condition, there are eight comments from Abigail’s friends, which universally oppose her cheating. These include comments like, “Wow, Abigail, though it sounds like you really lucked out there, you can’t take the grade. You didn’t really “earn” it!” and “Listen, it’s not like you intended to cheat going into the exam. The prof should have checked to make sure he was handing out only blank exams. His mistake – but your integrity! Don’t take the grade.”

In the “Mixed” no consensus condition, there are once again eight comments from Abigail’s friends, but these are more mixed (with some of the same oppose comments from the “Oppose” condition and some of the same support comments from the “Support” conditions intermixed). Thus there is no real consensus in this condition

A quick note for you (the researcher): If you look at the bottom of the survey in the footer on the second survey page, you will see one of the following: “S”, “O”, or “M”, which relate to the three study conditions – That is, S is for “Support”, O is for “Oppose”, and M is for “Mixed”. It’s a nice shorthand so you can tell which survey the participant completed (but this is not something you need to report in your papers – it’s just a handy reference for you as you collect data)

In Part II, participants will rate their impressions of Abigail Foster’s behavior (the Facebook user). Here, participants are asked to agree or disagree with seven statements about Abigail, with all seven using an interval scale ranging from 1 (Strongly Disagree) to 6 (Strongly Agree). These statements include, “Abigail’s behavior was wrong”, Abigail’s behavior was understandable”, “Abigail’s behavior was reasonable”, “Abigail’s behavior was unethical”, “Abigail’s behavior was immoral”, “Abigail’s behavior was appropriate”, and “Abigail’s behavior was unacceptable.” Although you can look at any (or all) of these seven statements when you write Paper II (which focuses on the methods and results for this study), you only need to focus on one of them in your later analyses. You’ll note that many of them are similar (terms like “wrong”, “immoral”, “unethical”, and “unacceptable” are similar, and will produce similar ratings). We expect participant ratings to differ depending on their condition. That is, participants will probably rate Abigail’s behavior as more wrong, immoral, unethical, and unacceptable (and less understandable, reasonable, and appropriate) in the “Oppose Consensus” condition than in the “Support Consensus” condition, with those in the “Mixed Consensus” condition falling closer to the center of the rating scales. That is, participant responses will conform to the consensus of Abigail’s friends.

In Part III, participants will rate several statements about what advice they would give Abigail, how they would respond in the same situation, and provide ratings of their general impressions of Abigail. Statements 1, 2, and 3 relate to the advice they would give Abigail (“I would advise Abigail to keep silent”, “I would try to comfort Abigail”, and “I would give Abigail the same advice that her friends gave her”). We expect once again that participant ratings will differ depending on their condition, with “Oppose” consensus participants less likely to endorse keeping silent or comforting Abigail than “Support” consensus participants. The third question, though, is very interesting. If conformity is really working in our study, then both “Support” consensus and “Oppose” consensus participants should strongly agree with statement 3! That is, we shouldn’t see differences between those conditions. Statements 4 and 5 are based on how the participant would respond in the same situation. Given social desirability biases, participants will most likely respond in a socially desirable way (say they would not keep silent). The remaining items in statements six through twelve are based on the warmth/competency scales developed by Fiske. We will probably ignore these in our own analyses, but it might be interesting to see how participants rate Abigail in terms of her personality traits.

In Part IV, participants will complete demographic questions. Most of these items are easy to complete without violating participant’s privacy, but they will know they can leave blank any question(s) they feel uncomfortable answering.

In Part V, participants will tell us whether the feedback Abigail received from her friends tended to support her behavior, oppose her behavior, or was more mixed. Unlike the statements in Parts II and III (which used interval scales, allowing us to analyze them with t-Tests or ANOVAs), the nominal scale used in Part V (three answer options in no particular order) only permit us to use a chi square analysis. We’ll discuss those more as we get to Paper Two.

D). Once participants have completed the questionnaire, debrief them regarding the study. That is, tell them about Conformity / Consensus and your main hypothesis. Read them the following:

“Thank you for participating. The purpose of this study is to determine if Facebook feedback that seems to support or oppose cheating impacts how participants perceived that cheating. That is, will Facebook feedback that appears to support (versus oppose) a friend who cheated on an exam influence how participants perceive that cheating? To study this possibility, participants all read the same cheating scenario in which a girl (Abigail) cheated on an exam by using an answer key the professor mistakenly gave her. When seeking advice from her friends, he friends either gave her unanimously supportive feedback (“Wow, Abigail, sounds like you really lucked out there. Take the grade. You “earned” it!” and “Listen, it’s not like you intended to cheat going into the exam. The prof should have checked to make sure he was handing out only blank exams. His mistake – your big break! Take the grade.”), unanimously oppositional feedback (“Wow, Abigail, though it sounds like you really lucked out there, you can’t take the grade. You didn’t really “earn” it!” and “Listen, it’s not like you intended to cheat going into the exam. The prof should have checked to make sure he was handing out only blank exams. His mistake – but your integrity! Don’t take the grade.”), or mixed feedback. The word “unanimous” is important here. When the feedback is unanimous (either in support of the user or opposing her), it is harder to voice a contrary opinion. When feedback is mixed, it is easier to voice a true opinion.

In general, we predict that participants who read unanimously supportive feedback will rate the Facebook user’s conduct as more acceptable than participants who read unanimously oppositional feedback, with those who read mixed feedback falling between these extremes.

More specifically, participants in the unanimously supportive condition will more strongly agree with supportive survey statements (“Abigail’s behavior was understandable, “Abigail’s behavior was reasonable”, “Abigail’s behavior was appropriate”, “I would advise Abigail to keep silent”, and “I would try to comfort Abigail”) and more strongly disagree with oppositional survey statements (“Abigail’s behavior was wrong”, “Abigail’s behavior was unethical”, “Abigail’s behavior was immoral”, and “Abigail’s behavior was unacceptable”) compared to participants in the unanimously oppositional condition, with participants in the mixed condition falling between these extremes. However, participants in both the unanimously supportive and unanimously oppositional conditions will strongly agree that they would give Abigail the same advice that her friends gave her.**

We will test these hypotheses in our methods course this semester. Thank you for participating!

**Methods Students: Note that the underlined paragraphs above will be helpful when you write Paper I! In fact, you can use that underlined paragraphs in your first paper if you like (just copy and paste it into your hypotheses). However, the predictions ARE NOT INCLUDED in your minimum page count. That is, you can copy/paste the predictions, but they do not count in the page minimum! Also note that in the last sentence in this paragraph, I highlighted eight different dependent variables (understandable, reasonable, wrong, etc.). Since you are not required to analyze every dependent variable in Part III of your survey, feel free to edit this last paragraph to include ONLY the two dependent variables that you actually analyzed (this applies mostly to Paper II when you figure out which DVs you want to focus on in your Results Section analysis. There is no point in making predictions about dependent variables you did not actually analyze, so just focus on the two dependent variable most relevant to your own study in your predictions.)

2). Hold onto the completed questionnaires, as you will use them in an upcoming lab. You will enter data into SPSS and analyze it during your lab. Important note: Each student researcher is responsible for collecting data from three participants (one participant for each study condition – OC, SC and MC). However, we will combine survey data from ALL students in your lab section, so your final sample will include at least 140 or so participants. In your papers (especially Paper II), you will use this total set of research participants (at least 140), NOT just the three that you collected yourself. Don’t even discuss “Three participants”, as that is not correct. Discuss ALL 140 participants in your papers

3). One last note: Pay close attention to these instructions! You can use them as the basis for Paper II later this semester when you discuss your methods section. That being said, these instructions are too long for a methods section, and includes information you will need to omit for Paper II. When writing that paper, make sure to only report the important aspects (what you actually did in the study). Write about what you actually did in the study!