Most people use language manipulation on an everyday basis as a way to influence answers and receive a specific reply; this is called anchoring. People use anchoring all the time, whether purposefully or not. There is a big difference between the question "Does this dress make me look fat?" and "How good does this dress look on me?." The former question might influence someone to think negatively in regards to the appearance of the dress, because something negative is pointed out with the "fat" reference. On the other hand, the latter question makes a positive remark, which may influence one to look for aspects of the dress that are just that, positive. The goal of this study is to figure out if rephrasing a question (anchoring) can cause someone to significantly modify one's answer.
There are numerous previous studies regarding the power of anchoring, and they all focus on a specific matter adjacent to it. Studies have tested on a multiplicity of subjects, varying from kindergarten students (Zern, 1967), to Swedish residents (Wahl, Svensson, & Hydén, 2010), to American college students (Liberman, Samuels, & Ross, 2004.) One study attempted to assess the effect of asking questions with three deviating variations (Zern, 1967.) Zern (1967) experimented with young school children and found that by independently introducing three variations of a basic question, the children's responses significantly changed. With this study, Zern (1967) concluded that responses may indeed change with a small matter of manipulation.
Similar to the study aforementioned, Ellis (1947) also tested his hypothesis with children, but his subjects were different due to his specific interest in comparing children with behavior problems and a non-problem group...
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...f direct and indirect phrasing in personality questionnaires. Psychological Monographs, 61(3), i-41. doi:10.1037/h0093564
Liberman, V., Samuels, S. M., & Ross, L. (2004). The Name of the Game: Predictive Power of Reputations Versus Situational Labels in Determining Prisoner's Dilemma Game Moves. Personality And Social Psychology Bulletin, 30(9), 1175-1185. doi:10.1177/0146167204264004
Wahl, C., Svensson, Ȧ, & Hydén, C. (2010). Effects of minor phrasing variations in traffic- related questionnaires — Comparison of objective equivalences and respondents' subjective statements. Transportation Research Part F: Traffic Psychology And Behaviour, 13(5), 315-328. doi:10.1016/j.trf.2010.06.002
Zern, D., (1967). Effects of variations in question-phrasing on true-false answers by grade-school children. Psychological Reports, 20(2), 527-533. doi:10.2466/pr0.1967.20.2.527
Bibliography 3rd edition Psychology (Bernstein-Stewart, Roy, Srull, & Wickens) Houghton Mifflin Company Boston, Massachusetts 1994
Predictive middle range theories have precise associations between the concepts or between the effects of the concepts on other additional concepts. Predictive theories look...
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Journal Of Family Violence, 28(2), 173-178. Tuckman, B. (1965) The 'Standard' of the 'Standard Developmental sequences in small groups. Psychological Bulletin, 63(6), 384. Lindsay, T., & Orton, S. (2008).
These children often show signs of emotional distress and immature behavior at a very young age. These symptoms might affect thei...
Irwin G. Sarason and Barbara R. Sara, Abnormal Psychology: The Problem of Maladaptive Behavior,10th ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ, 2002)
I chose this question as the topic of response bias project because I wanted to figure out how using unfamiliar or uncertain words affect subjects’ answer and to demonstrate the effect of both the response and wording of the question bias.
“Just as emotions provide valuable information to the self, emotional expressions provide information to observers, which may influence their cognitions, attitudes, and behavior” (Van Kleef, Heerdink, and Van Den Berg, p. 2, 2014). A positive feature of attitudes is that they are subject to change over time. According to Van Kleef, Heerdink, and Van Den Berg (p. 2), “We define attitudes as temporary evaluations that are constructed based on a combination of stored representations of an attitude object and information that is currently at hand. This working definition explicitly allows for changes in attitudes over time while acknowledging that certain attitudes have a relatively stable basis in a person’s memory system” (2014). This conceptual definition of attitudes and attitude change is that though attitudes can change based on new information or a different emotional reaction, they can also stay the same or relatively similar to their primary state. Overall, the information that individuals perceive through emotions can influence their attitudes, which can then alter their attitudes towards certain
...ies and questions about stereotyping, that it encourages psychologists, scientist and others alike to continue to learn about and examine this cognitive process.
Children raised in poverty display behaviors that are sometimes mistaken for emotional and behavioral disorders. Chi...
Robins R.W, Gosling S.D & Craik R.H (1999) An Empirical Analysis of Trends in Psychology. American psychologists, 54,(2), 117-128
A study by Memon, Holiday and Hill (2006) has proven that stereotyping can influence recall of memory. In the study, children aged five read one version of a story about a character called Jim by their class teacher. The three different versions described Jim as either careful – a positive stereotype; clumsy – a negative stereotype; or neither careful nor clumsy – a neutral stereotype. A few days later, ‘Jim’ visited their class and introduced himself. He performed some neutral activities, such as showing them a photo of his dog or playing the flute. One and three days later the children were read a description about Jim’s visit by a researcher. The description was the same for all three groups of children, and it contained misleading details; some of these details were positive and some were negative. Three days later, the children were tested on two sets of yes or no questions by a different experimenter. It was made clear to the children that one set of questions related to what happened during Jim’s visit and one related to what they were told about his visit. This procedure was done to find out whether stereotyping affects a child’s memory positively, negatively or both. They found that the children who had heard the positive details about Jim gave answers that were prone to fitting the stereotype. The children were more likely to say ‘yes’ to positive statements about Jim. However, the
As a counselor, one may come to the conclusion that Antwone was only displaying behaviors that he saw has a child. Bandura confirmed that children who experien...
Baumrind, Diana (1967). Child care practices anteceding three patterns of preschool behavior. Genetic Psychology Monographs, 75(1), 43-88.
In Bandura’s Bobo Doll experiment, performed in the 1960’s by Dr. Albert Bandura, showed the children a video of an adult hitting, punching, kicking and, moreover general aggression towards the doll. While another group of children viewed an adult, being gentle with the Bobo doll and a control group in which there was no influence towards the doll. Because Dr. Bandura used isolated groups and used unique methods with each group, his research, classified as an experiment as he was manipulating a factor, which was the type of attitude shown to the Bobo doll that the children watched (Myers, 2014). In the begging of the study, there were 72 children, 36 boys and 36 girls, observed at the Stanford University and tested for aggressive behavior