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Amy Zhang, Week 3

During the past week, many people in my lab were preparing for their presentations and posters on their
projects. At the end of the week, all students that participated in VIP, a summer research program for
psychology majors at Duke, presented their projects to their PIs, peers, and parents. It was intriguing to
hear about a variety of topics even though they are all psychology-related. Among the different projects,
one that left a deep impression on me was a project about how the race of students’ roommates would
affect their willingness to think about questions related to diversity.


While I finished working on my first project, I started working on my other projects. For the one that I work
with Vivian, a Senior Theses Student at Tomasello Lab, we’ll be learning about whether young children
perceive the rules made by themselves and those they make with others differently. Since this project
just started, we had to see if the designed experiment would actually work. The experiment is divided
into individual and group condition, both of which make child participant design a game rule using bean
bag and rubbish can either individually or with puppets and then determine whether the child protests
when experimenter plays the game differently and proposes different rules. Therefore, Vivian and I
played the role of two experimenters, while my PI played the role of the child participant. Meanwhile,
Dr. Susanne who conducted similar studies previously was on the other side of Skype and provided
suggestions while we acted the scripts out. It was interesting to see how even one single word could
affect the outcomes of experiment. For instance, since it may sound authoritative when asking the child
"Can I play the game like this?", it would be better to word it as "is it okay if I play the game like this?".
While using the word "can", the child participant may be more likely to conform to the authority figure,
which is experimenter in this case.

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Comments

  1. UnknownJuly 22, 2018 at 5:22 PM

    Since my background is chemistry, I find your topic fascinating and also very relevant to teaching Peddie's youngest group of students! I can't wait to hear more about your results from the rules experiments in the fall!

    ReplyDelete

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