<p>How many of you have done research projects or studies for class? </p>
<p>An example would be presenting children with pictures of people from various ethnicities and asking them to point to “who’s pretty” or “who’s nice.”</p>
<p>If you’ve done a study or experiment, what was it? Did you feel like you earned some genuine insight on the subject studied?</p>
<p>Me!</p>
<p>I asked people to read a short biography of a woman. There were two conditions, in each of which one of the adjectives in the biography was either ‘warm’ or ‘cold’. I then investigated how changing this adjective affected the participants’ opinion of the woman by asking them to rate several personal qualities (e.g. friendliness, sense of humor…).</p>
<p>I think doing the study gave me a lot more insight into how studies are done, which makes me think a lot more critically when evaluating studies done by professional researchers. Other than that, it was just another piece of work that counts towards my final grade.</p>