PLEASE ANSWER QUESTIONS ON SOCIAL PSY FINAL ATTACHMENT CREATE A SLIDE SHOW GUIDE YOURSELF BY INFO ON ALL OTHER ATTACHMENTS

Running head: SOCIAL INFLUENCE 0

Veronica Casado

John Jay College

11-13-2020

Note-Taking

QUESTIONS:

• In very general terms, what is the study about? Read through the abstract and title several times. Underline the key terms that allow you to figure this out, write a general idea next to them. Now without looking at the article, write your answer here.

The study is about the influence of valence information on morals, liking, and consequence-of-behavior among pre-school children. This was accomplished through studying certain scenarios including positive valence, negative valence, behavior valence, as well as disposition valence, and how they could influence the decisions made by the children.

• What is the specific question that the study is trying to answer, i.e., the goal of the study?

Research Question: The specific research question that the study aimed to investigate was how social influence affected the behavior of pre-school students by studying the influence of valence of character disposition and social behavior on the moral judgments and social evaluations of character among pre-school children.

• In very general terms, how did the researchers carry out the study? Read the abstract and introduction focus on the words that say what they did. You can add more details later – but you want to be able to describe the general idea of what the participants had to do.

The researchers carried out research using interviews. They interviewed the children by asking them questions about the character after the children were allowed to view pictures and had listened to the stories about the characters. The children used judgment scenarios, illustrations, and rating scales when answering the questions.

• What are the major hypotheses (predictions) of the study? Read the introduction carefully and look for words like hypothesize, predict, and expect. These are often at the end of the Introduction. Underline and mark the article as hypotheses. Write them here (but use your own words)

The major hypothesis that was made by the authors during the study was that information about the valence of character disposition and behavior can influence the moral, liking, as well as the consequence-of-behavior among pre-school children.

• Who are the participants in the study? Read the Participants section carefully in the Method and answer the following questions. Make sure you underline the relevant information in the article.

The participants in the study were children attending private pre-schools in an urban metropolitan area (Jones et al., 2009). Forty-seven (47) children participated in the study. The participants were not divided into specific groups. However, the European Americans comprised 60 percent of the sample, the African Americans comprising of 34 percent, while the remaining 6 percent was composed of 1 Asian American, 1 Latin American, and 1 biracial child. The participants consisted of 23 girls and 24 boys. The ages ranged between the ages of four years four months to five years eleven months. The children came from middle-income families as well as the working class.

• Add more details about what the participants had to do. (Note studies with human subjects typically involve consenting - but this is common to all research studies and so does not need to be reported in your notes or summary). Read the Methods section several times, but bear in mind these can be hard to understand as professional researchers often use jargon. Look up terms you don’t understand. Underline the measures that are important for testing the researchers’ predictions.

Some of the measures used to test the predictions of the researcher included the use of rating scales, illustrations, and judgment scenarios. A 7-point Likert-type rating scale was used to assess the liking, moral, and consequence-of-behavior rating of the subjects. Since the study involved human subjects, consent was sought from their parents as well as from the children themselves.

• What are the main important independent variables (IVs) and dependent variables (DVs) that are used to test the hypotheses? Write these down on the next page.

IVs (experimental manipulation - "cause" of behavior) e.g., the effect of drug, stimulus condition, an intervention designed to reduce depression

List these here

The independent variables (IV’s) included:

• The age of the children

• Race/ethnicity

• Gender of the children

DVs – How did the researchers measure the participants' thoughts/feelings/behavior? If this includes answers to questionnaires, make sure to write down the name of the questionnaire and what it measures. Are there other DVs? These might include reaction time, guilty verdicts, depressive symptoms, activity in particular areas of the brain? Look under Materials in the Methods section and list these here

The researchers measured the thoughts/feelings/behavior of the participants through the use of questionnaires and the Multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA). The other dependent variables (DV’s) that helped to assess the reaction of the subjects included:

• Share scenario

• Help scenario

• Verbal-insult scenario

• Physical-aggression scenario

• What were the main results? Look first at the Discussion section. Report on the results that help to test the main hypotheses. Let the abstract guide you as to which are most important. Then take a look at the Results section (especially at any graphs or tables) but be aware that the stats in this section will probably not be easy for you to understand yet. So most of your information will come from the Discussion.

The main results indicated that there were significant findings for the positive –behavior valence scenarios. The moral judgment of the children was correlated with their liking ratings. This meant that the pre-school children had the ability to differentiate characters as a function of the judgment of the valence cues (Jones et al., 2009). For example, the characters who engaged in negative behavior were likely to be judged less favorably compared to those who engaged in positive behavior and thus obtained better ratings from the students. The pre-school children also rated nice characters well compared to characters who seemed mean.

• What did the authors conclude? Look carefully in the Discussion Section, were their hypotheses supported?

Make sure to say which were supported and which were not. Mark this in the article too. What other major conclusions did the authors make? Why is the study important?

The authors concluded that the pre-school children found both sources of information to be important factors upon which to differentiate the judgment of the characters from both sources. The authors also concluded that the valence of the disposition of the character also became less relevant to be used as a basis for differentiating judgments because it resulted in intentional negative behavior.

The findings of the study supported the argument that had been raised about the moral and social judgment of the children being more complex and more contextualized than it had been thought of previously. The study supported the argument that the mean disposition with physical aggression was a very critical contextual factor that warranted unfavorable liking and moral judgment from the characters.

The study did not support a broader scope of research and thus recommended the broadening of the scope to address the moral and social judgments of the children towards others and to address the socio-moral events as well.

This study is very important because it can be used to support the hypothesis that social influence affects behavior. The study also points out the missing gaps and thus other researchers towards an area that should be covered, specifically to help the other age groups as the study only addressed the pre-school age groups between 4 and 5 years.

Jones, E. F., Tobias, M., Pauley, D., Thomson, N. R., & Johnson, S. L. (2009). Character disposition and behavior type: Influences of valence on preschool children's social judgments. The Journal of genetic psychology, 170(4), 310-325.