Psychology

COUNTERFACTUAL THINKING: APPOINTING BLAME 1

4

COUNTERFACTUAL THINKING: APPOINTING BLAME

10

Comment by Ryan Winter: The 7th edition of the APA standards does not require a Running Head for student papers anymore. However, if you include one, make sure it is in all CAPS. The running head should either be identical to the paper’s title, or a shortened form of the title that conveys the same idea. However, running heads should not exceed 50 characters (including spaces and punctuation). This title page also starts on page one, and the page number is flush to the right while the running head is flush to the left Comment by Ryan Winter: Do you know how to enter a header? Click on the “Insert” menu at the top of word, click on “Header”, and then type in the header whatever you want. There is even a box that you can check that allows you to have a different header on the first page than subsequent pages.

Instructions for Paper III: Study One Literature Review Instructions

Ryan J. Winter

Florida International University

PSY3215

Dr. Anabelle Andon

Due date

Methods Comment by Ryan Winter: The word Methods here is centered and bolded, as is recommended by the APA

Participants Comment by Ryan Winter: Participant (also bolded) is flush left

One hundred and twenty six students from Florida International University participated in our study. Of these 126 participants, 37% ( N = 47) were male and 63% ( N = 79) were female. Ages ranged from a minimum of 17 to a maximum of 58 with an average of 22.32 years ( SD = 6.30). Our sample population consisted of 68.3% Hispanic Americans ( N = 86), 8.7% African Americans ( N = 11), 19% Caucasians ( N = 24), 1.6% Asians ( N = 2), and 2.4% who did not specify their ethnicity ( N = 3). Comment by Ryan Winter: When a number starts a sentence, spell out the number Comment by Anabelle Andon: Please pay attention to the demographics of your sample. Your participants may or may not be all FIU students. Comment by Anabelle Andon: Notice the student did not state that participants were randomly selected. They were not. They were randomly assigned to condition, which is different. Comment by Ryan Winter: Note the mean and standard deviation here, which is helpful for knowing about the makeup of the sample. The mean, of course, is the average Comment by Anabelle Andon: Make sure to provide your demographics charts here and in your appendix. I expect to see one for gender, one for age, and one for ethnicity.

Materials and Procedure Comment by Ryan Winter: Also bolded and flush left.

In accordance with the standardized guidelines for informed consent, prospective participants were notified of the potential risks and benefits of participating in the study before being introduced to the research material. If the student verbally agreed to participate, he or she was randomly assigned to one of three different documents, each of which consisted of four parts or sections. In part one of the study, the participant read a short scenario concerning a paraplegic couple, Tina and Eugene, who requested a taxi for a night out with friends. Each of the three documents depicted the same initial situation with alternate conditions (“changeable”, “unchangeable”, or “neutral”) that ultimately led to different outcomes of events. Comment by Anabelle Andon: Make sure you tell the reader that we used random assignment. This will signal to them that we have strong internal validity. Comment by Ryan Winter: Noting the IV helps a lot. You can tell the author knows what his IV is. There is only one, with three levels

In the changeable condition, the taxi driver arrived to pick up the couple, only to promptly decline their fare upon seeing that they were both paraplegic. Without enough time to call for another taxi, Tina and Eugene decided to take Tina’s car, which was handicap equipped. In order to reach their destination, they had to cross a bridge that had been weakened the night before due to a severe storm. The damaged bridge collapsed mere minutes before the couple reached it. Unable to see the missing portion of the bridge in the night, Tina and Eugene drove off the road, into the river below, and drowned. The taxi driver, who had left 15 minutes earlier, managed to make it safely across, before the collapse. In the unchangeable condition, the situation remained mostly the same with the exception that the taxi driver arrived at the bridge after it had collapsed and plummeted into the water as well. He managed to make it out of the car and swim to safety, but Tina and Eugene drowned. In the neutral condition, the taxi arrived to pick up the couple but promptly refused their fare as soon as he realized that they were both paraplegic. In this condition, the taxi driver did eventually agree to take Tina and Eugene to their destination downtown, albeit after much argument. Due to the recently collapsed bridge, the taxi driver drove his passengers and himself off the road and into the river below. He barely managed to make it out of the car before drowning. Tina and Eugene’s outcome remained the same. Comment by Ryan Winter: Notice how thorough the description of the scenario is here. If you wanted to replicate this study, you would know exactly what to do because the author tells you exactly what she did. Make sure the description of your IV is equally clear.

After reading one of the scenarios described above, the participant continued on to the remainder of the study, which was composed of a series of open, partially open, and close-ended questions. In part two, the student participating in the study was asked to procure as many “If Only” statements as possible, meaning that they had to list all the factors they could think of that could have possibly changed the outcome of the event. In part three, the participant was presented with a series of questions about their thoughts regarding the specific situation they read about. After reading each question, the participant was asked to record his or her response in a scale of one to nine. These questions included questions such as how avoidable they thought the accident was (“1” = “not at all avoidable”, “9” = “very avoidable”), the causal role of the taxi driver in the couple’s death (“1” = “not at all causal”, “9” = “the most important cause”), their thoughts on how much control the taxi driver had (“1” = “no control”, “9” = “complete control”), and the negligence of the taxi driver (“1” = “not at all negligent”, “9” = “completely negligent”), among others (see Appendix X for a full list of dependent variables). The last question of part three was a “yes” or “no” question that asked the participant whether the taxi driver agreed to drive the couple or not. This final question served as an attention check, which informed us if the participant was actually attentive to the study and allowed us to exclude potentially misrepresentative responses form our data. Part four asked for the participant’s demographic information, including gender, age, ethnicity, their first language, and whether they were a student at Florida International University. Concluding the study, the participant was debriefed on his or her contribution to the study as well as our insights on counterfactual thinking and our main hypothesis. Comment by Anabelle Andon: Use quotation marks around linguistic examples rather than highlighting these examples with italics. For example, one might write that a computer user should press the “F” key, rather than press the F key. Similarly, one might write about study participants who have to choose between the choices “agree,” “disagree,” and “other,” rather than the choices agree, disagree, and other. Comment by Ryan Winter: You know exactly what the DVs are here, and you know the range for each scale. This is VERY important. If you tell me the scale was 1 to 9 but that is it, I won’t know if 1 is a good score or a bad score. Does 9 mean they could avoid it or they could not avoid it? I need to see both the scale AND the labels for the DV to make sense. Also note that the scales and labels of the variables are enclosed in quotation marks. Comment by Anabelle Andon: Please note that if all your DVs use the same scale you do not need to list the scale next to each DV. As well, if your DVs more or less measure the same construct, do not list them all. Provide a few to give as examples. Comment by Anabelle Andon: You can include the survey we used in an Appendix and refer the reader to it. Comment by Anabelle Andon: Notice how the author does not forget to provide the manipulation check question or to explain it! This is very important. Comment by Anabelle Andon: Your description of the demographics does not have to be long. Comment by Anabelle Andon: Finally, the author closes with a brief discussion of the debriefing. Make sure you do the same. Comment by Ryan Winter: You can see her procedure, right! Very clear, very step-by-step

Although we had several dependent variables, our primary focus involved the perceived blameworthiness of the taxi driver, the number of “If Only” statements the participants could create, and the manipulation check regarding whether the driver agreed to take the couple. We hypothesized that participants would find the taxi driver more blameworthy for the couple’s death in the changeable condition, since he refused to drive Tina and Eugene while safely passing over the bridge himself. We also predicted that the participants in the changeable condition would generate more counterfactual (“If Only”) statements than in the unchangeable or neutral conditions. Comment by Anabelle Andon: Here the author ensures to spotlight the DVs that they analyzed. This makes it very clear to the reader.

Results Comment by Ryan Winter: Results is centered and bold. The results section comes right after the methods – there is no page break

Using survey condition (changeable vs. unchangeable vs. neutral) as our independent variable and whether participants recalled whether the taxi driver picked up the paraplegic couple as the dependent variable, we ran a manipulation check in which we saw a significant effect, X2(2) = 93.95, p < .001. Participants in the changeable and unchangeable conditions correctly said the taxi did not pick up the couple (95.2% and 90.5%, respectively) while few participants in the neutral condition said the driver picked up the couple (4.8%). Phi showed a large effect. This indicates that participants did pay attention to whether the taxi driver picked up the couple. Comment by Ryan Winter: The chi square here is useful for data that is nominal in nature (that is, there is no numerical difference between factors). Here, they either read about a taxi picking up the couple or they didn’t. We cannot look at a mean or average value here (what is the average between yes and no?), so the chi square looks at the number of people who say yes and the number who say no. Here, we want the participants in some conditions to say yes (if the taxi picked up the couple) and no (if he didn’t pick them up)

Results for our first One-Way ANOVA, which tested the three scenario conditions (“changeable”, “unchangeable”, or “neutral”) as the independent variable and perceived blameworthiness of the taxi driver as the dependent variable, were significant F(2, 122) = 3.55, p = .032. A subsequent Tukey post hoc test supported our hypothesis by demonstrating that participants were more likely to blame the taxi driver in the changeable condition ( M = 4.51, SD = 2.06) than in the unchangeable condition ( M = 3.38, SD = 2.14).. However, there were no significant difference for perceived blame between the neutral condition ( M = 4.36, SD = 2.11) and either the changeable or unchangeable conditions. These results indicate that in situations where the outcome is perceived as mutable (changeable), individuals are more likely to assign blame to the actor who could have acted differently (unchangeable). Comment by Ryan Winter: A One Way ANOVA is appropriate here since there are three levels to the single IV and the DV is on an interval scale (it ranges from 1 to 9) Comment by Ryan Winter: The student here provided an exact p value. This is acceptable, though you can also use p < .05, p > .05, or p < .01 where appropriate Comment by Ryan Winter: As you can see, this student did find significance, so she ran post hoc tests on the ANOVA using Tukey. But what if there was no significance,? If it is not significant, you do not need post-hoc tests, but should still provide means and SDs for all conditions. Comment by Anabelle Andon: For these tables, include the descriptives, ANOVA, and post hoc tables from SPSS, both here and in the Appendix.

Discussion Comment by Ryan Winter: Your discussion does not need to be extensive, but I do want you to remind the reader of the hypothesis, note whether it was supported and provide some possible reasons for your findings. You can make some educated guesses about what might be going on, but make them reasonable!

We predicted that participants would place more blame on an actor whose behavior led to an undesirable outcome (death) when that actor could have acted differently primarily because these participants would generate more “If Only” counterfactual statements that would lead them to see the outcome could have been avoided. Conversely, we predicted that participants who read about an undesirable outcome that could not have been avoided would assign less blame to the actor and would think of fewer counterfactual “If Only” statements. Results partially supported these predictions, as we did find more blame for in the changeable condition compared to the unchangeable (though neither differed from the neutral condition). However, the number of counterfactual statements that participants generated did not differ among our three conditions. It could be that participants were unfamiliar with the counterfactual task, which requires some deep thinking, though on a more unconscious level they could have seen the changeable condition as evidencing more elements of blame. This begs the question: what if participants were forced to think deeper? This is the focus of our second study. Comment by Ryan Winter: This question here is actually a lead-in to the student’s next study. Your own methods, results, and discussion paper can end here, but keep in mind that Paper III, IV, and V will help design a follow-up study to your first study, so as you write this paper try to think about what you would do differently and what you might add in a follow-up study.

Appendix A – Demographics – Study One Comment by Ryan Winter: Don’t forget to add your appendices to the paper. I need to see one for each analysis (demographics, the chi square, your DV ANOVA). Make sure they are properly labeled and that the numbers in your tables align with the numbers in your results section Also note that normally you would not submit SPSS tables to a journal. You can submit tables and figures, but not SPSS tables. For this class, though, I want to make sure you did the interpretation correctly and looked at the right tables, so I want you to include the actual SPSS output in a series of appendices. Comment by Ryan Winter: To add these charts, simply go into your SPSS output. You can right-click on the table and then copy it as an image. Then just paste it as an image into your appendix! Alternatively, you can use the “Snipping tool” function available on most computers. (Do a search for it!). This allows you to draw a virtual box around text and then copy it like a picture. Then just paste the picture into the appendix Finally, your last option is to do the work by hand. Insert a table with rows and columns and transfer over the information. This is the hard way, though. Both of the options above took me less than a minute. Recreating a table manually will take a much longer time!

Appendix B – Crosstabs and Chi Square – Study One

Appendix C – ANOVA Blame – Study One

Appendix D – Survey Instrument Comment by Anabelle Andon: Here is where you could include the survey we used as an Appendix for reference to your reader.