Psychology Quiz Review

Question

One of the videos we watched in class documents a research study that finds that people are less likely to help others when they complete a word association task about money than when they are given a similar task that doesn’t ask about money. This study demonstrates the powerful effect of ________.

a. attitudes b. priming c. attributions d.stereotype threats

Answer 1

To start, let's consider the difference between the two trials. They both involve a word association task, and after doing the task, their willingness to help others is studied. What is the one factor that was manipulated (in other words, the independent variable)? Money! In one trial, the word association task is about money- the words are probably all money related. In the second, no money words are included in the word association task. Also, more people are willing to help others after the trial that did not include money words. In the trial with money involved, less people wanted to help others after. So what?

We are measuring people's willingness to help others (this is the dependent variable), by manipulating the IV (task being associated with money). So, we can imagine that the creators of the study thought there was a connection between reading words related to money and helping, or not helping, others. Thinking about money before being asked to help someone would make me think about money during, and after the task. I might consider if I am being paid or not to help someone. Let's consider another example of talking about a subject before being asked to do something.

Try to remember what it was like learning new words in elementary school. Perhaps a science teacher is starting a unit on erosion. None of the kids know this word yet, or what it means, or anything about it. How can the teacher make the students learning process a bit easier? How can they start with zero knowledge and become skilled in the subject? They can't. Well- they could, but it would be very difficult for young children to understand this topic with no prior knowledge. The teacher plans a lesson for the day before introducing erosion. The lesson is all about the beach. Students talk about going to the beach, they draw pictures of the sand and ocean, they write poems about the feeling of sand between their toes and sun on their skin.

The teacher is doing the same thing the word association list about money did: it got the participants (or students) brains ready to experience something in a certain way. The teacher's goal is to make learning erosion easier, so he primes the student's brains by activating memories of sand and the beach, where we see erosion happening. The word association list gets the participants to think about money, money is at the top of their mind. When they are asked to help someone, with money being at the top of their mind, what do we think will happen? They will ask if they are getting paid to help, how much money will they make for helping, or they will simply say no, they will not help if they are not getting money in exchange for helping.

This is what we call priming. Priming sets the mind up to experience something in a certain way. For instance, we can paint our bedroom in calm colors so that we prime our brains to associate our bedroom with calmness, and have better sleeps in our bedrooms. Priming influences how you see the world, how we learn, and it can even have a big impact on our behavior. Marketing strategies use priming all the time to have an affect on consumer behavior, aka to get the consumer to purchase their product. Priming is very powerful.

Even if you do not understand the concept, you can use elimination to come to the best answer. Get rid of answers you haven't heard in your psych class. For instance, I have never heard a psych professor talk about the powerful effects of attributes- I learned about attribution theories, not powerful effects of attributes. We talk about attitude a bit in psychology, depending what psychology course we are in, but attitude isn't a psychological phenomenon, attitude is a characteristic of personality. Then, we have priming and stereotype threats left. Word association lists about money don't ring any bells for me for stereotypes. I can't think of any stereotype about money and helping people, either. So, I go with priming. Process of elimination is an excellent test taking strategy for the questions we have no idea how to answer.

Hope this is helpful, is you need more help with priming or other psychology topics, check out my profile, I'd love to help you more!