Would you all help me out greatly by taking quick survey?
 

Just a quick, preliminary survey that I've created to get a feel for a (potential) future project. It shouldn't take more than a few minutes to complete.

edit: Survey is now closed!

Please don't post comments related to the survey within the thread as they could bias the results. If you have any questions afterwards, feel free to PM me. Thanks a lot!

done

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If you were holding a clipboard in a mall, I would walk right by you.

But on the internet...done.

done

...and one more post in my post count...

done..................

Thanks for all of your responses so far. If you've tried in the past few minutes and got an error message, that was me fooling around with some code that wasn't working right(on my end, not the survey site end--all data was saved). I just tought myself PHP and SQL in an hour to set this thing up and, well, it wasn't running so smoothly at first.

Anyway, it seems to be working fine now. Thanks again.

done

Done.

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Bingo Bango.

done

Uhh... it says I already took it but I haven't

Done. Strange that I saw something on the first question last night on the Discovery Health channel.

Done

DONE

dOnE!

I bet you and Ant are showing the same IP and it's checking via IP.

Some of these questions seem a little biased?

Done...totally baffled, in a good way, about what the project might be, but done

Done - interested in the results ....

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done.

(Can you start a thread where we can talk about it? It seems interesting, whatever it is).

ahoy-hoy

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Thanks everyone. I'll leave it running until this evening, at which point I'll take it down and explain.

I'll be interested. Because from my relatively in-depth experience with surveying in college, this thing has so many flaws... :)

There ya go.

Done

This survey has inspired me to visualize Peyton Manning retiring.

dnoe

Odd, but done.

Done, oddly fascinated...and curious where the trout option was.

Ok, this was preliminary research for an experiment that I am considering running with my valuable allotment of unpaid participants (freshman psych students, mostly); I wanted some evidence that I could achieve significant results before with this particular hypothesis so as not to potentially waste that resource on an experiment that completely fails.

As for the experiment itself: “magical thinking” and related phenomena have been a rather trendy research topic of late for social and cognitive psychologists (as well as sociologists). These experiments usually adhere to a common structure. The experimenters tell the participants that they are conducting an experiment to test whether a particular phenomenon (generally considered “paranormal” or “magical”) actually exists. Then the experimenters cleverly manipulate evidence, using various techniques, with the goal of shifting the participants’ beliefs toward the paranormal. There is always a third element introduced which is purported to explain the shift. One particular example (and the model for one of my questions) is Pronin et al’s recent study, Everyday Magical Powers: The Role of Apparent Mental Causation in Overestimation of Personal Influence.

These studies always start with the premise that “magical” beliefs are somehow formed in a fundamentally different manner from “normal” beliefs, and are therefore rely on different mechanisms. What the experimenter’s neglect to consider, however, is that perhaps their results are not a product of the mechanism which they have attempted to isolate, but are rather the product of standard reasoning processes based on empirical evidence—processes which only appear unreasonable due to the systematic manipulation of the evidence. That is: these experiments don’t shift the participants’ beliefs nearer to the magical but, rather, shift the phenomenon nearer to the rational.

My hypothesis, then, is that similar results can be achieved by simply presenting a participant with fraudulent evidence. If true, this would suggest that the mechanisms postulated by researchers in this area are unnecessary to explain their results.

The survey you took was randomly selected from one of four surveys. Each was composed of both a “magical” theory and a “scientific” theory. The magical theory was based directly on one of the experiments described in the article I mentioned earlier; I simply invented the scientific theory. Each question was buttressed with either “associative” evidence (a simple statement that X University researchers are currently studying…) or “empirical” evidence on top of the associative evidence. So you got magical + empirical & scientific + associative OR scientific + empirical & magical + associative. The two theory and evidence conditions were designed so as to be structurally and logically identical. The two additional surveys simply reversed the order of the questions and swapped the university names to control for any confounding effects those two variables might have.

As for the results, I haven’t analyzed them for statistical significance yet and haven’t even looked at covariations with prior knowledge, but at a glance the data look promising enough to go ahead with the whole mess.

Cool - I had a feeling it was something along those lines (which unfortunately might have skewed my answers obviously ;) ) ...

As indicated before I'm interested in how this ends up ...

Done

Oh yeah, forgot about that.

FWIW, there was no "I have no idea" answer. That's what I would have guessed for the "scientific" one. Instead, I guessed the answer in the middle.

I put "totally unlikely" for the magical one. I didn't even occur to me that the "evidence" put forth was real.

dola--

Not that you care about my specific thought process, but I do wonder if a "I don't know" answer would be a useful addition to the test.

The the evidence statement and the question itself ("Do you think...") were directly modeled on the particular experiment I mentioned, as was the seven point scale(right down to the labels: "not at all", "somewhat", "Very much").

You don't see something like "I don't know" as an available response in these sorts of experiments (in a broad sense, including all sorts of decision making stuff) because the content is very often intentionally selected so as to be foreign or ambiguous to the participant. Sometimes the necessity of this is obvious, as in Kahneman's work on judgment under uncertainty; other times the value of this method may be suspect.

Also, the experimenets are always scored by a scale so as to detect minor shifts--and the shifts are almost always minor. Just from memory, in the actual Pronin experiment I believe the mean went from about 1.6 in the control condition(visualizing the shooter engaged in an irrelevant act) to 2.3 in the experimental condition(visualizing the shooter hitting the shot, essentially--though they actually had more precise instructions). The validity of these sorts of scale measurements (especially when measuring beliefs) is an interesting question, though, and something that I have considered.

ack, just got called to a meeting...more on this later.