2 groups of data - same mean AND same standard deviation

Question

Hi,

I have a study comparing the difference between unconscious thought and conscious thought in lie detection accuracy. I have just looked at the descriptives for both conditions in relation to accuracy scores and both groups have the same mean and the same standard deviation (once rounded). Have I done something wrong here, as usually one group has higher/lower numbers for each...

Answer 1

I would need more information about your study to give you a more specific answer. What are your operational definitions for unconscious and conscious thought? What was your study's design? What is your independent variable? This sounds like an experiment, so what exactly were your interventions?

The most important thing I am wondering is how in the world you operationalized unconscious thought. The problem with psychodynamic theory is that their constructs are not directly inaccessible, so how unconscious thought was operationalized and and how you did a manipulation related to "unconscious thought" and "conscious thought" are of particular importance to me. I think your problem might lie here. It is possible that your manipulations in the 2 conditions were doing the same thing. If we assumed that your manipulations did, in fact, manipulate the exact constructs intended, and there were no confounds or extraneous variables, then it is certainly possible that there truly is no difference between accuracy scores in the conditions, or it might be simply by chance that your samples were not different from one another.

Finding no significant differences does not necessarily mean that there was an error somewhere; however, it is also possible that there was something flawed in the operationalization, manipulation, implementation of the manipulation, or elsewhere in conducting the study (confounding or extraneous variables) that attenuated differences.