JUS 301
Dr. Menjívar
Your assignment is to design a laboratory experiment that would test the following hypothesis using the classical experimental design. Answer each of the questions below. Your narrative should not exceed three pages (typed, double-spaced, one inch margins, font 12), but it could, of course, be fewer than the three pages. This is simply a maximum number of pages.
Men who work with women who excel at problem solving will have a higher regard for women’s intellectual ability.
Note: This experiment only involves men as subjects. The women are simply “confederates” or research assistants (they are there to help test the hypothesis, but their behavior is not being studied).
1. Describe the experimental and control groups appropriate for this experiment. Describe how you would select the men for the study. Describe how you would assign them to the control and to the experimental groups.
2. Describe a problem-solving task that might be appropriate for this experiment. That is, develop a problem-solving task that would offer the male subjects the experience of seeing women do better than themselves (the experimental group).
3. Describe how you would test the attitudes of men regarding women’s analytical abilities (in general, not necessarily as applied to the women in the experiment) prior to the experiment (pretest of attitudes). Provide 2 sample items.
4. Describe how you would make sure that the confederate women would be clearly more effective in solving the problem than men.
5. Describe how you would test the attitudes of men regarding women’s analytical abilities after the problem-solving exercises (posttest of attitudes). Provide 2 sample items.
6. Make up some “results” that you might get in such an experiment and try to interpret them. Do your results confirm or disconfirm the hypothesis? Can your results be generalizable? Why? Why not?