Table 1

Helping Students Understand the Article

Section

 Tips, Comments, and Problem Areas

Title

Incidental: accidental, chance, unimportant

Compliance: going along with a request

Abstract

Heuristic processing: using a simple rule to make a decision so that little effort is spent on thinking about the request; superficial thinking (opposite of thoughtful, systematic information processing); mostly used when a person does not care about the issue/request or when a person does not have the opportunity to devote time and energy to thinking about the issue/request.

Unit relationship: perceived connection between two people; a person can refer to self and the other as “we” (they are a unit); often caused by having something in common.  

Positive affect: good feelings; good mood; feeling good

Introduction

1^st paragraph

Encountering: running into

Cognitively efficient approach: strategy that does not require much conscious thought

scripts: simple, structured, sequence of events (e.g., saying “I do not have any money on me,” then walking away).

Heuristic: general rules; simple strategies; for example, agreeing to requests from friends, not agreeing to requests from strangers (the authors provide more examples of heuristics in the next paragraph [paragraph 2 of the introduction]).

2^nd paragraph

salient: obvious; very noticeable; attention-capturing

3^rd paragraph

fleeting: short-lasting; short-lived; temporary; momentary

5^th paragraph

situational causes: events in the environment; opposite of being caused by a person’s personality

ego-defensive attribution: explanation for a behavior or result that protects one’s self-esteem; excuses and rationalizations are ego-defensive attributions.

6^th paragraph

affective: emotional

Study 1

Method

Surreptitiously: without being detected; sneakily

Note that it would seem difficult for the confederate to really be blind about the hypothesis throughout the course of the study.

Results and Discussion:

Each participant’s behavior was categorized as either (a) complying or (b) not complying. In other words, rather than participants varying in the quantity (amount) of behavior they did, participants varied in the quality (type) of behavior they did: (a) complied or (b) resisted complying With such categorical (qualitative) data, researchers would not use a t test or ANOVA. Instead, they would use a test suitable for qualitative data: the chi square (c2 ) test (for more on the chi-square test, see pages 211, 528-529, and 537-539 of Research design explained). The phi (F) coefficient gives us an indication of effect size. In this case, the correlation—as measured by the phi (F) coefficient—between experimental condition and agreeing to the request, was .28 (for more on phi and its relationship to r, see pages 162 and 529-530 of Research design explained; for more on the Chi-Square test, see pages 211, 539, 530, 537, and 539 of Research design explained).

Study 2

Replicate: repeat

Method

Participants

Credibility: degree to which something is believable; inspiring confidence that something is true

Procedure

The three groups are (a) a group in which the person asking for money has—according to her nametag—the same first name as the participant, (b) a group in which the person asking for money shows a photograph of a child—and the child is identified as having the same first name as the participant, and (c) a control group in which neither the person asking for money nor the picture of the child has the same name as the participant.

Results and Discussion

A priori t tests: these are planned comparisons (discussed on page 314 of Research design explained). The one-way ANOVA told the researchers that the groups were not all the same; the t tests told them which groups differed from each other. Because the researchers predicted in advance (“a priori”) which groups would differ from each other, they did not have to use after-the-fact (“post hoc”) tests.

d: a measure of effect size; for more on d, see page 275 of Research design explained.

Suppressed: reduced; lowered

Study 3

Results and discussion

To understand why the authors used a chi-square test, see our comments for the Results and Discussion section of Study 1.
 

c2 (2, N=88) = 7.75, p = .02, F = .30: c2 is an abbreviation for chi-square. The numbers in parentheses next to the chi-square indicate two things. First, the “2” indicates that the chi-square had 2 degrees of freedom. (Degrees of freedom are the result of going to the chi-square table  (like the 2 X 2 chi-square on page 529 of Research design explained), and multiplying one fewer than the number of rows times one fewer than the number of columns. In the case of Study 3, the two degrees of freedom were the result of having three rows [one for each of the three groups] and two columns [one representing complying, the second representing not complying]. Thus, (rows –1) * (columns –1) = (3-1)* (2-1) = 2 * 1 = 2)). Second, “N = 88” indicates that the researchers had 88 observations (in this case, 88 participants). The value of the chi-square (c2) statistic was 7.75—a value that is unlikely if there is no difference between the groups. To be more specific, there is only a  .02 (2%) chance of getting a chi-square this big or bigger if there is no difference between the groups. Finally, the phi (F) coefficient gives us an indication of effect size. In this case, the correlation, as measured by the phi (F) coefficient, between what group a participant was in and the participant’s willingness to agree to the request, was .30.

p =. 80: not statistically significant; there is little reason to believe that the difference is due to anything other than chance; if the manipulation had the same effect on both groups, we could expect to observe differences between groups this large (or smaller) 80% of the time. (Note that the 0.06 is the value of chi-square statistic, not the probability  [“p”] value.)

Study 4

Elusive: hard to find

Priming: bringing to the surface; preparing; stimulating

Results and Discussion

a = .89: a refers to Cronbach’s alpha, an index (that can range from 0 to 1) of the degree to which there is consistency between how participants answer one question on the measure with how the participant will answer other questions on the measure. A high alpha (above .80) indicates that the subtest is internally consistent: people agreeing with one item on a subtest item tend to agree with other items on that same subtest. For more on alpha (a), see page 104 of Research design explained.

Tukey’s HSD test: a common post hoc test used to determine which pairs of means are significantly different from each other. Tukey’s HSD test is used instead of multiple t tests because, as explained on page 314 of Research design explained, with multiple t tests, the stated p values will be different than the actual p values. That is, unlike doing multiple uncorrected  t tests, Tukey’s HSD test gives you valid  p values. To stress that Tukey’s test doesn’t give you lower p values than the data deserve (resulting in “dishonestly” obtained  significant differences between groups), Tukey named his test Tukey’s Honestly Significant Difference (HSD) test. To learn how to conduct Tukey’s HSD test, see pages 546-548 of Research design explained.

General Discussion

Overt: involving intentional behavior

Dubbed: called; labeled

Implicit partisanship: unstated, but strongly felt, support for a group

Mere exposure: liking something merely because you have seen it many times; can occur even if you are not aware that you were exposed to the stimulus. For example, if a picture of a piece of art appears and disappears on your computer screen so quickly that you are not consciously aware of seeing that piece of art, you will probably like that piece of art more than you did before those pictures were subliminally flashed across your screen.